what are rules?
In chess, there’s a niche rule with an untranslated name that amusingly befits its esotericism: en passant. Many casual chess playes are unaware of it. It seems to exist as an afterthought, scribbled in to prevent a pawn from escaping an oncoming enemy pawn by leaping two spaces. It is itself a consequence of another weird rule: pawns in their starting position can move forward two spaces in one move. Why? To speed up the game and relieve some pawn-pushing tedium, I’m guessing.
Chess rules are clean and simple other than the two exceptions above and a third: castling. Under the right conditions, the king can move sideways two spaces, double his usual quota, towards one of his rooks and, inexplicably, in the same move, the rook can leap over the king and nestle beside it. Huh? This move seems normal because of its ubiquity. Casual players usually know it. And yet they are baffled by en passant, even though it is a more modest deviation from the core rules.
Once we know the rules of a game, we accept and quit questioning them. We are naturally incentivized to do so since the better we internalize the rules the more easily we can abide by them and get to the business of playing the game. But games are full of weird rules. In basketball, there’s a limit of how long the attacking team can have posession in the other team’s end. Oh, okay. In hockey, players on the attacking team can’t cross into other team’s third of the rink unless the puck is already there. If you say so. In soccer, an attacker must not go beyond the second-to-last player on the defensive team if they want to be passed the ball. Unless they are in their own half, then it’s okay. Sorry?
Weird rules seem not so weird when you realize they’re added purposefully to facilitate certain behaviors and prevent others. This applies to laws and regulations, too. They are not corollaries of moral truth, but ways of incentivizing behavior in favor of particular goals. In happy cases, the goals are fairness and fun. But rulemakers are only trying to please the crowd when they themselves are incentivized to do so, by ticket sales, by votes, by social pressure. So next time you encounter a weird rule and you’re curious about its existence, ask yourself: who made this and what are they trying to make me do? And next time you write a rule, ask yourself: what new
exploitative behaviorwhat are rules? #2
How would you feel if you were so good at a game that the rules were changed to undermine your strategy? That’s exactly what happened to the curler Pat Ryan and his team. As told by the Netflix docuseries Losers, Pat Ryan’s innovative strategy was so effective that fans began booing his team for succeeding with it. Even though they were abiding by all the rules, they were, in the eyes of the fans, ruining the game. Eventually, a new rule called the free guard zone was implemented to make illegal the highly effective but boring strategy Ryan’s team had used to win multiple championships.
I suspect history is full of similar examples. For example, as told in the book Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics, various rules of modern soccer were put in place to prevent certain tactics. Goalies used to be allowed to use their hands anywhere on the field, a fact which a Sunderland keeper exploited to bounce the ball halfway up the field. The offside rule used to require attackers to stay in front of or in line with not just two but three defensive players. In fact, the offside rule used to apply to the whole field, not just the attacking half. Together, these two archaic rules used to make it very difficult for teams in a defensive position to break out into attack. These rules too were deemed problematic enough to revise, forever changing the way the game was played.
will I be incentivizing?