Eric Zimmerman on Why Rules Make Play Possible

Zimmerman opens by saying he is a game designer who makes video games and board games, and that he works with architect Nathalie Pozzi on large-scale museum installations.

He also writes books on game design and teaches at NYU Game Center in the Tisch School of the Arts, where games are treated as an art form and as a deep form of literacy.

Board games are sold as a box of cards, dice and small pieces, yet buyers are in fact paying for the rules. Zimmerman calls rules the essence of a game because they say what to do each turn and how to win.

He illustrates with baseball. If a tree is declared second base, a runner can exploit the ambiguity by running to a distant branch, gets tagged out, and an argument starts over where the base actually is.

Play, Zimmerman says, never happens on its own: it is always played through some kind of system, even something as ordinary as walking. Walking as transport is the logical, efficient system of getting from point A to point B.

When a child walks playfully, jumping, wandering, crawling, or limping, the child bends space, time, gravity, and the social norms of the sidewalk. He describes play as a collaborative parasite that adds joy rather than draining life.

That is why play is the source of creativity: study a structure's key points, then tinker with them to invent something new.

Two volunteers, Mila and Ida, are called up to the stage so that Zimmerman can show how designers build a game out of constraints, starting with a simple word game. The rule is simple: take turns saying any word and never repeat one already said.

In the second round Zimmerman keeps the earlier rule and restricts words to food and drink. He says the restriction makes the game different, not necessarily worse.

In the third round each word must start with the last letter of the previous speaker's word. The audience starts leaning in and calling out suggestions.

Zimmerman says that third version changed the room: the two volunteers concentrated more, and the crowd started to lean forward. The game ends with a creative final move, Shirley Temple, which he suggests players would not have reached without the constraints.

Zimmerman argues that playing a video game looks like total freedom, but designers actually work with constraints, and those constraints guide and focus creative activity.

He warns that too many constraints are a problem. Restricting words to seven letters, he jokes, would have got him kicked off stage. The craft is finding the right constraints to push players into a creative space.

Zimmerman gives a method for applying play to any project or organization. First, look at and understand the system: how it works and how it is structured.

Second, find the key points where players can start poking and playing, possibly in unexpected or even inappropriate ways. Third, when building the experience, do not fear constraints; use them to guide and focus audience behavior.

At a dinner, Zimmerman swapped the table name tags after the first course and redistributed them randomly, so guests had to meet new tables, and the whole room played along.

At St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, giant restroom signs lead to the same space through both entrances, surprising visitors and playing with gender binaries and bathroom etiquette.

Zimmerman says he has worked with Games for Change and Action for Democracy to treat democracy as a design problem.

This summer, he plans to convene game designers and policy experts to explore the structures of democracy through play, poking at those systems and perhaps moving them toward something new and better. He closes by asking the audience to keep playing.