This is my first research report written in English. Per PPGDesign by-laws, a doctoral thesis may be written in English. Thus, I have decided to write in English as much of my research documents as is feasible. This will also help writing and submitting papers to foreign journals.
There are three main sections in this report. The Progress report describes what I have done since the previous report, and presents a plan for the coming weeks. The Literature review deals with reference findings and readings. The Drafts includes snippets for future documents, whether the thesis itself, or the qualification proposal, or any articles to be submitted. As such, it includes both text and references.
Progress report
My first report, from March 23, 2020, was discussed in our previous session, on April 20, 2020. In it, I presented an overview of the research, as I envision it. The Drafts section, in this and in future reports, is written according to your recommendation on adding more depth to the texts, and on adding the relevant references.
Nomic
Nomic is a game which is played by changing its rules (Suber, 1990). I am translating its rules to Portuguese, in order to organize a match using text-based communications through WhatsApp. I intend to invite six players: all of them will be keen, experimented players, with a broad ludic experience.
As part of the invitation, the players will be provided with pertinent information on the procedure, and they will be asked to consent in participate.
It is important to note that I will not submit my research to the Ethics Committee. I have discussed the legal reasoning behind this in a published paper (Duarte & Holanda, 2016). The Graduate Collegiate of PPGDesign has already signified agreement with this position, in 2014, when my request to be exempt from this requirement was granted.
I am quite curious to see how Nomic will be played. I have two expectations about it: that it will reveal quite clearly the adaptive nature of a game, and that it will showcase the relationship between players and rules. I have never played it, neither seen it being played. As such, I believe it is a good choice for the first iteration in my Grounded Theory cycle.
Interview
I am trying to interview a player from Brasília. She is the wife of one of my friends, and I was quite happy to find out that she also belongs to an established gaming group, with very definite rules about appropriate behaviour — both in game and in their social relationships. If she consents to be interviewed, I intend to explore these rules: which rules are in force, how and when they are amended, how they are enforced.
Literature review
Recently, I struck gold in the literature review! In Sociology, there is a whole field of research on Social Rules Theory. Quoting from Wikipedia (my emphasis):
“Social theory concepts such as norm, value, belief, role, social relationship, and institution as well as game were shown to be definable in a uniform way in terms of rules and rule complexes. Rules and rule configurations may be treated as mathematical objects (the mathematics is based on contemporary developments at the interface of mathematics, logic, and computer science).”^[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social\_rule\_system\_theory].
This ties nicely in with the general proposal of my research, as follows in the next section.
Draft
Key concepts
Stakeholders
Axiom: a game is an activity. It is not a game when it is not being played.
As such, all games have players. A player may be human, or it may be a computer. Some games are played by only one player (solitaire card games), others are played by two or more players. If all players have the same abilities, the game is said to be symmetric; or asymmetric in the opposite case.
However, in any given game there may be other people, beside the players, which have an interest in it. For instance, in a Football match, several people have varied degrees of interest in the outcome: spectators, fans, bookmakers, referees, coaches, managers, and so forth. Some of them may even affect the match itself.
It is important to note that there may also be people involved in a game which do not have an interest in it: for instance, the game designer. His effect on the game may be almost as significant as that of the players themselves.
In order to refer all people involved in a game, I have used the term stakeholder, well established in the context of organization analysis (Murdock, s.d.).
Presenting the research
All cultures use rules to create meaning in the actions of their people.
“Taking people as agents acting together jointly and intentionally to accomplish all kinds of common tasks presupposes that norms and conventions play a leading role in the management of action. Correctness and incorrectness,propriety and impropriety of actions as accomplishing acts, is a fundamental distinction in all cultures. […] Rules and narrative conventions are not causes of human action, not even formal causes. They are amongst the tools or means that people use to create and maintain order in their joint productions” (Harré, 1979).
Hypothesis: there are characteristics of game rules which distinguish them from general rules
Research question: what are the characteristics of game rules?
Main goal: help game designers create better rules