It was a humid Tokyo afternoon in August, 2007. My friend Anton met up with me in the air-conditioned second story of a Starbucks in downtown Shibuya, to seek protection from the heat and play out the finals for a very casual Magic: The Gathering sealed league I’d organized, mainly for the other University of Tokyo research students who lived in my residence. Unlike most of the other players, he’d played the game before he came to Japan, and thus he had a strong edge. We met, gossiped briefly, then whipped out our unsleeved decks to play what turned out to be one of the most important matches of my life – not because of the very minimal prize that was on the line, but because of the deep questions that arose from it regarding the nature of games and their implications for relationships.

Echo Cost: One Friendship

As I recall, Anton and I were tied at two games each in a best-of-five finals match. In the fifth match, I was dead on board next turn against another attack from his [card]Uktabi Drake[/card], as none of my creatures could block it, and I could not deal enough damage to him to win on my turn. My only chance to win was to attack with everything I could, then sit back and hope that he would forget to pay the Drake’s echo cost during his upkeep, after which I could crack back for lethal. “Well, looks like you got me, but let’s play it out…” I said, slumping in my chair. Excited by the prospect of the win, Anton absent-mindedly drew his card for the turn and, just as I had hoped, forgot to pay his echo cost. I quickly sat up again, and reminded him of the game-state: “Uhhh… aren’t you forgetting something? You have to sacrifice your Drake.” After swearing profusely, Anton asked me for the opportunity to rewind the game back a step and pay the cost, which he had obviously intended to do. I refused his request. He was furious with me.

“You won that game solely on cheap rules enforcement.” – Anton

Although we remained acquaintances, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that that one game singlehandedly killed our friendship, or at least damaged it significantly. But why? And how? The question of whether Anton’s anger was justified is one that has stayed with me since 2007, and it will be our topic today.

Did I cynically exploit the rules for the sake of a win? Or did I uphold the sanctity of the rules against an unfair request? There are at least two sides to this argument. Let’s go over what we might consider the premises which underpin both of these positions.

Position 1: “Those Are the Rules!”

In chess, the most well-known and most-often played game on the planet, there is a convention which is upheld (even in the most casual games, or at least those not expressly for the purposes of training a new player) to separate a player’s private deliberations from a player’s actual moves. If the player removes her hand from a chess piece, the move is considered irrevocable (unless, of course, the move itself was illegal). There are no take-backs, even if after the fact the player reconsiders the situation and wishes that she hadn’t made it. This is the manner in which I was taught to play the game, and while it might have led to hurt feelings in my early childhood (I don’t recall), I certainly don’t carry any emotional remainder from it into my adulthood; it has never compromised any relationships on my side.

To be fair, Magic doesn’t quite have the following that chess does, although its popularity is significantly rising with each passing year. Still, it has an elaborate system of universal rules that its regular players ought to know well, and ignorance of these rules is no defense in the case of a dispute. One of the rules of Magic is that when an optional trigger is not acknowledged by the active player, and that phase of the turn ends, then for all intents and purposes it is understood that the player did not want to activate that trigger (or that even if they did, it’s too late at that point to do a take-back).

Against this point, one could say that acts are different than omissions. Whereas a player must act to move a piece in chess, thereby directly affirming their intention, in Magic not acting is also considered to be a valid expression of player intention (in sharp contrast to the issue of sexual consent, wherein silence and inaction can be a much more ambiguous matter). This is because, in each phase of each player’s turns, each player could be doing something, and if one does not, the other player is not generally obligated to make inquiries or suggestions about the inactive player’s options. This is Magic 101, basic stuff. Despite the fact that much of the game revolves around implicit omissions, this does not imply that sloppy play deserves sympathy or reward. An easy way to understand the issue is this: if a player misses a trigger in the game, we should feel no more remorse for him than we do for a boxer who takes a swing and fails to hit his opponent. No boxer would be taken seriously if he asked his opponent to stick his jaw out again, so that he could land his punch properly this time. Nor should we indulge this request in its card game analog.

The most philosophically satisfying way to defend the ‘Those Are the Rules’ position would be to say that the rules of games make certain types of activity possible; they provide the structure that generates experiences of a specific type. If there were no ruleset, there would be no corresponding activity, and thus no experience of that variety would be produced. In short, without the rules, there would be no game. Thus, upholding the rules is the most important thing to do when playing a game (assuming that the experience of playing that game is something you value).
If I asked you to come to my apartment for a game of chess, and when you arrived I did nothing but flap my arms up and down like a chicken, you would surely be confused and/or disappointed. True fact. But why? Precisely because you were expecting a certain type of aesthetic experience, consistent with and conforming to the ruleset of chess, and you did not get that experience in the end. I was similarly derailed by Anton’s demand of a take-back, when I thought we were both on the same page of what constituted mutually-acceptable behavior in the context of a game of Magic.

Position 2: “It’s Only a Game!”

This is the last thing Anton said to me before he left the café. Now obviously, he’s not co-writing this article with me here today, so I’ll have to try to put myself in his position the best I can and try to look at the situation from his perspective. Here’s a list of the things I think he may have meant:

1. The point of a game is to socialize and have fun.
2. If a game isn’t fun, there’s no reason to play it (it’s purely intrinsic activity; as opposed to work).
3. If the rules get in the way of the fun, the rules should be bent or changed.
4. If the game puts a strain on the socialization that motivated it, the game should be jettisoned.

#1 seems right to me, although it is an incomplete list… improving your skills, proving yourself to others, and accomplishing in-game goals could be added. For the same reason, #2 is flawed as well: it fails to take into consideration alternate reasons to finish a game, e.g. being polite to your opponent, or playing kingmaker to spite another player, which are both ‘un-fun’ reasons to complete a game. While having fun is obviously an important feature of game-playing, I don’t believe it to be a trump card over all other possible sites of motivation.

#3 reads like the variant-maker’s creed, and I have no issue with it in principle; assuming that all affected players subscribe to the proposed alterations to the rules. Herein lies the real conflict between Anton and I – he wanted to bend the rules mid-game, while I had no interest in doing so. For me, it was like we had both already signed a contract, and now he was proposing an amendment to the document that would negatively impact my end of the agreement: no rational person agree to such a thing. Why would they?

For Anton, the short answer to this rhetorical question is #4. Anton wanted me to place a value on our relationship that was greater than my attachment to the rules of the game, and went all-in on a gambit that I would fold my hand if he asked me: “Pretty please with a cherry on top?” When I didn’t comply, he got insulted, and his wounded pride would not allow him to retreat from his attitude of having taken offense. From my perspective, a friend should understand that what happens inside the game should not be taken so personally that the friendship outside the game is endangered. But evidently not everyone is as easily able to compartmentalize as I am.

I suppose it wouldn’t have been much of a spoiler alert to tell you earlier on in the article that I still don’t agree with Anton’s position. I think that the conceptual necessity of the rules, combined with my sense that players shouldn’t be arbitrarily required to sacrifice any advantages gained by their opponents’ sloppiness, is more important than bending the rules and playing irrationally simply to please the people you’re playing with. That’s part of the reason that the casual Commander format of Magic isn’t my favorite way to play the game; with many playgroups I’ve encountered, there are too many inane politics involved, and due to information overload there’s not enough attention to tight plays or adherence to the rules for my liking. But at least, in analyzing this dispute, I feel like I’ve learned something today.

Conclusion: “You Don’t Really Know a Man until You Play Cards with Him”

Boardwalk Empire‘s Arnold Rothstein character said it best in ‘All In’, s04 e04 of the series. Rothstein, the consummate gamesman, knew that different aspects of an individual’s personality come to the fore when playing a game, as opposed to when they are attending to their routine business. It may be the relative freedom one experiences when immersed in a game that allows them to betray their true characteristics in an atypical fashion, or it may be the simulated conflict which tests their capacity for rational thought under less-than-ideal conditions. Perhaps it’s both, or something else altogether, like the fact that most people have developed a protective mask for their mundane selves that they abandon or let slip when they create or reveal their game-selves. Whatever the speculative cause for this phenomenon is, its effect is undeniable, and generally desirable.

In ‘All In’, Rothstein will not enter into a big business deal with Nucky Thompson unless Nucky first plays against him at the poker table. Presumably, his rationale is that if they are unable to come to some understanding of each other via the medium of the game, then their business partnership would inevitably be doomed to failure, and that he can calculate the odds of this eventuality while doing something he enjoys regardless: playing. In essence, Rothstein intends to use the game to haze and screen his prospective partner; the game itself serves as a protracted method of interview.

While I certainly didn’t share Rothstein’s motives when I sat down to play Anton that afternoon in Shibuya in 2007, I believe that this is exactly what happened. Anton’s game-self and my game-self could not come to an understanding, and we couldn’t help but let our mutual disgust for each other’s views bleed into and poison our preexisting relationship outside of the game. If he doesn’t somehow come to read this article, I have no doubt that he will forever view me as some mixture of venal opportunist and unbending rules-lawyer, and similarly I cannot help but still see him as one of the worst sore losers I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing.

Happily, the majority of the discoveries that I’ve made in my gaming career regarding the characters of other players have not ended up in personal disputes. That has been the exception rather than the rule, but every population has its criminal element and/or lunatic fringe there to be encountered, including the gamer population. What is important to realize here is that a game is simply another means of interpersonal communication, and that understanding and subscribing to the game’s rules merely serves to make you a competent user of that medium. JUST LIKE YOU WOULDN’T WRITE AN EMAIL IN ALL CAPS if you knew anything about electronic media, neither would any self-respecting gamer ask for a take-back in any game of importance (Magic or otherwise) once they clearly grasped the illogic of their request. Since the act of playing a game minimally requires obeying its ruleset, making a demand to ignore a single rule is equivalent to making a request to end the game, and your opponent is under no obligation to conclude it in your favor.