The Rules and the "Rules"

I'm sure all of us have accidentally blundered into an awkward situation because we accidentally committed a social faux pas that you had never heard of before. Maybe you were standing on the right side of a moving walkway and didn't realize convention was to stand on the left to let people walking pass on the right. Multiplayer games often feature similar unspoken rules that a player must learn. For example in Team Fortress Two (a class based shooter) if you actually try to complete the objective on Hightower (a map in the game) you may end up being vote-kicked. This is because many people play that game mode just to mess around and get kills, and don't want the game to end by someone capturing the objective. It ends up being that often a player must learn all the unspoken rules of a game to avoid the ire of other players. This falls under the purview of what Tony Manninen calls Normatively Regulated Actions.

It is interesting to me, as often these norms are not unanimously decided, instead we have two groups arguing over a certain contentious issue. Manninen mentions camping as a contentious issue that many groups choose to ban, but we also see this in many other situations. The Team Fortress Two example I gave earlier is very contentious in the community; it isn't hard to find Reddit posts arguing about whether it should exist or not. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/dyb8cr/end_the_no_capping_rule_on_hightower/ ) These arguments about what the norms should be Manninen calls Discursive Action. This establishment of what is and isn't acceptable can be found in any community surrounding a game. Much anger in the Smash Bros community is directed at players who crouch spam (called tea bagging in the community). The community surrounding the Blizzard CCG Hearthstone often labels certain decks as 'cancer' if they are powerful, aggressive, and a dominant percentage of the decks being played. There will then be some stigma associated with playing that deck. People will make fun of or even worse actively flame players who play the deck.

All of these examples of things not to do are not derived from the rules of the game, and often go counter to the rules and incentives of the game. Completing the objective is the mechanical endpoint of a match of Team Fortress Two, and there is no mechanical reason why a player would not want to play the deck with the best win-rate in Hearthstone. Thus the cultural norms surrounding a game are just as influential in player action as the game itself. This leads to a multiplayer community that is self-regulating to a certain extent. It is important as a procedural reading of a game cannot predict this sort of behavior. It is difficult to see only mechanically what players will find annoying and decide collectively to ban. This also isn't unique to multiplayer games only. Consider the Nuzlocke challenge in Pokemon games. A well known challenge in the Pokemon community with rules that people self impose on their own single player games. The rules were collectively decided, despite the fact that the challenge itself doesn't involve the game's multiplayer mechanics. These ways of playing a game are completely ignored by a procedural reading, and show the importance of playcentric readings.