Modeling the World

In this post I’m going to make two arguments. I only really care about the second one, but if we don’t agree about the first then the second isn’t going to be very interesting. So you’ll have to bear with me slightly.

The first argument is that tabletop roleplaying games consist of creating and manipulating a shared, imagined space as a model of a fictive reality. One of the functions of a game text is to provide abstractions for that model. You can think of it like pieces for a model city in miniature: a game where we play subway inspectors has very different pieces to build our model city than a game where we play as helicopter pilots. Game texts have other functions (one of their most important being “get players excited for a game”) but I will argue that this modeling is the primary function of rules.

Once you’re on board with my rules-as-models thesis, I’ll talk about

We can view a tabletop roleplaying game as