The Systems of Chrono Trigger

This article is a companion piece to the Gamification and Law series. It’s meant to give a very specific example of one way a video game can communicate the idea of system to a person.

Chrono Trigger is unique among JRPGs because of its focus on place instead of story. Incorporating time travel into the game puts certain limitations on the narrative while also opening up unique storytelling opportunities. What makes the game so special is that when you start focusing on place instead of linear narrative in a game you begin to talk about the interconnected relationship between things. The why and how of events in the game is the central focus of the story, which are the very questions that drive our own relationship with systems.

Chrono Trigger’s cast, while charming in a Dragonball Z sort of way, are static with the exception of Magus. Chrono is your basic silent protagonist while Marle stays in love with him and generally happy throughout. Frog is always the dutiful soldier, Lucca loves science, Ayla talks like Yoda, etc. This is not to say the characters do not have backstories or that they are bad characters, but compared to FF3 there is a notable lack of change in their dispositions. They overcome obstacles, usually in their past, but it does not change their outlook on the future.

The reason for this is because if your game is about time travel and you allow people to muddle in the past then you have to figure out a way to keep characters consistent. You can write tons of dialog to cover all the different scenarios. Or, more realistically, you can just keep everyone as one-note as possible. Lucca can go back in time and save her mother from the accident, but either way she resolves to dedicate her life to science. Frog can put Cyrus’s spirit to rest but it only increases his resolve, it does not particularly change him personally. This is important to note because it demonstrates that the characters are not affected by the world around them. They are beyond it.

The game is about slowly piecing together the timeline of Chrono Trigger’s world and figuring out what happened. After a brief introductory adventure, we travel to 2300 AD and discover the inevitable Armageddon of 1999 because of Lavos. Then we deduce it must have been Magus in the year 600, only to discover Lavos actually arrived millions of years ago when dinosaurs still roamed the planet. The arrival of Lavos brings about an Ice Age and ultimately causes the distortions in time that allow the protagonists to succeed in the end.



This is a systems narrative. The game is about observing the various stages of a system, putting together the causes and effects, becoming empowered by that knowledge and then moving to correct the problem. In systems thinking the individual never totally understands what’s going on because of the limitations in feedback. Sometimes it can take years or decades for the consequences of your actions to play out. By then it is too late to change anything. The same is true for the issues one is currently facing: the causes have already happened and the relationship between the event and the feedback is not always clear. Uncertainty is always present for those working with systems in real life. Chrono Trigger, as a story about time travel, is about the unique chance to understand a system as it spans over thousands of years.

These ideas are outlined in Donella H. Meadows’ excellent book Thinking in Systems. Meadows defines a system as, “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.” She explains that everything we think we know about the world is actually a model of it. There’s no way for a person to fully understand the past because they aren’t there and they can’t know the future for the same reason. So we build a mental model based on our observations and use it the best we can to make decisions. She calls this ‘bounded rationality’ or the fact that people don’t always have perfect information when they are making choices.

Almost all video games are composed of systems that ultimately make a kind of limited model of reality. Ian Bogost referred to this as the simulation gap, but technically in systems thinking there’s never really such a thing that doesn’t have a gap. It’s impossible to know all the data to create a 100% accurate model and you just accept it. The difference between a game and a system in real life is that it is a closed system. It’s conceivably possible to fully comprehend a closed system because you can observe all of its connections. Or at least the outer edges of those connections, they can rapidly generate so much complexity that it’s too much for the human mind to follow. Game designers who would assert otherwise are either delusional or making extremely linear games.

So how do you study a system when you acknowledge right from the start that you can’t know everything about it? What you’re looking for are levers and places where your input can affect other parts of the system. How long should you wait before deciding how much inventory you’ll need for the next month in your shop? How much money can you spend on that new car, even though anything could happen to it later on? Should you get dental insurance, even though the premium will cost more than just out of pocket expenses most of the time? These issues are not systems themselves but rather the questions they generate, which in turn can become the story of one’s own life. What should I do with my life to accomplish my goals?



Chrono Trigger is the story of a closed system and a group of heroes who study its various levers and bring about change. While most games can easily tell a story about cause and effect Chrono Trigger is more concerned with those specific relationships rather than discussing consequences. The entire game is about fighting destiny. Lavos, as a being that can control time, has crafted a timeline that always ends with its victory and the destruction of the planet. On the Black Omen the player discovers it is even repairing the timeline with clones of the protagonists to replace them to ensure continuity. Before the last battle each character opines that Lavos has been controlling their entire species, guiding their evolution with its own DNA to maintain power. Such perceptions echo the ones you encounter when studying similarly large and frightening systems, a sense of powerlessness as larger forces control and bind your future.

This complex relationship between actions, consequences and trying to control them is depicted throughout the game. The trial sequence involves several possible acts the player can take and their interpretation as to Chrono’s guilt, no matter what the player intended. Even if you play through the sequence perfectly Chrono still goes to jail because of the Chancellor’s corruption. The newgame plus option is all about encouraging the player to explore and see what happens when you do things differently.

This idea of systems is probably best represented in the Fiona’s Forest mission where you transform a desert into a forest. First you have to realize the desert is not just there, it was caused by something 400 years ago. Then you have to undo that cause. Afterwards Robo volunteers to help plant a forest and revitalize the area. Feedback is observed in the form of a desert, a lever is detected, pressure is applied, then corrective action is taken. All of this is uniquely possible because of the time travel mechanic and the fact that you, the player, are observing the system as a whole. Compare that to your original perspective of the desert when you walk through it in the year 1000. It’s just there. Nothing you can do will change its status as a desert because it’s too late. Only by travelling in time do you become aware of the underlying feedback and lever, the relationship, which created the desert.



Narratively the game involves one of the inherent flaws that systems thinking notes about understanding the system: you can never fully control a system because it becomes static when you do. Lavos is a being that tried to be in total control of the world, its reach going so far as to even predict and attempt to counter the heroes seeking to destroy it. Yet once that happens the static nature allows a person to step outside of the system and change it. Or put another way despite how much Lavos was overwhelmingly in control of the timeline in the game, it still didn’t have the power to stop its own death.

It’s not my goal to claim the creators of the game were thinking about systems theory when they made Chrono Trigger, rather to point out that time travel games are invariably about systems. You could cite Majora’s Mask or Day of the Tentacle and build a similar argument easily. It’s another example of the point I made in the Gamification and Law series about how games are uniquely suited for communicating the concept of systems and form to people. Since you can’t really start by trying to communicate something concrete to the person, games are handy because you can get them to picture how a series of relationships can be used to craft anything, be it a JRPG or a dynamic legal system. Like the desert puzzle in the game, I’m not really talking about the desert but rather a series of relationships that culminated in the desert.

As Robo considers his reflections after 400 years of turning a desert into a forest, he argues that something much larger than any of the heroes is involved in the time gates. That something wants them to see these various moments. When pressed on the issue he concludes that it is simply, “something beyond our comprehension.” That truth, more than any other, is the first step towards understanding systems, design and form.

Army of Darkness Defense Review

Army of Darkness Defense is the first game that ever convinced me to buy in-game money. Not Farmville, not Team Fortress 2, but rather a defense game about fending off never-ending waves of enemies. It pulls you in with easy gameplay and movie quotes then yanks the rug out with a brick wall difficulty curve.

You play as Ash defending the Necronomicon. Each level begins with a sound bite from Army of Darkness then you move Ash up and down the level to fight skeletons. Your iron stash slowly fills as you play and that gets spent on troops. Enemies drop money, which buys upgrades, and you can probably guess the rest. Every troop is a reference to somebody in the movie and you re-enact the final battle over and over with steadily increasing number of enemies per fight.

What’s interesting about this game is that it’s an example of how microtransactions affect the way the game flows. I don’t think I died in the game until Wave 30 or so, and then I just had to start being more careful. There’s a bunch of different attacks, troops and defenses you can dump your money into while this is going on but I got by just spamming swordsmen and Ash’s special attacks. This is all taking place in a 2-D plane so really there isn’t much strategy to it.

All that changes on Wave 50 when the difficulty curve spikes right into your face. You get to keep the money you make even if you die in a level, so you can keep playing even when you’re stuck like this. You scrape money together and buy upgrades, but Wave 50 was so much harder that the spam tactics I’d been using couldn’t even put a dent in it. All the troops I’d been neglecting had to be upgraded and all the defenses needed to be at Max.

Stuck in an airport, obsessed with this little defense game, I realized I’d have to keep grinding for hours to get up to speed. And for just five bucks I could save myself an hour of grinding and finally beat this last boss. Army of Darkness Defense was so good I was willing to pay money to have it end.

Gamification and Law - 3

The goal of this post is to discuss the potential changes in perception that come with a society who is accustomed to playing video games.

Game academic James Paul Gee called the growing understanding of video games in modern society the semiotic domain or “modalities used to communicate distinctive types of messages." The more people who play games, the more familiar they will become with their conventions, which will in turn allow for that means of communication to cover more topics in society. This is one of the most common selling points for gamification when explaining why it would be so effective with marketing. An entire generation of people who grew up with and continue to play games today is just beginning to hit their 30’s. One can assume that a growing semiotic domain implies that those people are at least playing several different games, more likely dozens. Each of those games is an independent system with similarities and differences. Learning to detect those features and differentiate them is one of the first steps in developing the critical skills needed to think about systems on a larger scale. This, in turn, is the key towards creating an informed population about how a legal system works.

The chief critical skill for systems is learning to think in terms of the whole rather than the individual. An excellent Youtube series by Dr. Russell Ackoff introduces the basic ideas but he begins by pointing out that most people in America are taught to analyze things individually. That is, the answer to how something works or why it came about can be found by examining what’s inside the system. You see this idea in liberal arts most often, such as looking at a painting and analyzing what it means through various critical lenses based on politics or method. Systems thinking is the idea that the explanations always lie outside the system, never inside. You look at the thing and try to understand its relationship to the rest of the whole.



Every system is contained in a larger system. An essential property of a system is that it cannot be divided into individual parts. Ackoff uses the example of a car and deciding the value of the vehicle based on how well the fuel regulator works. You don’t base the value on just that, you want to know how well all the parts work together as a whole to become a car. Analysis is incompatible with this approach because it’s inherently taking things apart. You break down each component and isolate their function. This often leads to bad decisions on how to improve or repair a system because it over-emphasizes a single function without gauging the effects on the whole. A system is never the sum of its parts, it is the product of its interactions.

This line of thinking is best developed by multiplayer games. In an MMO players learn about superior builds for their characters by studying how they handle combat with other characters. The conflicts are what allows a person to grasp how a system works. These occur much less often in single-player games because of the lack of competing interests.

Barbara Cosen explains that most past legal scholarship focuses on isolating legal mechanisms and explaining how they work. She compares this to someone performing an experiment in an isolated lab then presuming it will be applicable to the real world. The truth is that there are hundreds of other factors going on in a legal system that all influence the outcome of a conflict. It is never down to one component or exchange.



A great example of the dangers of using analysis on a system is an article on police foot patrols in The Atlantic. Crime statistics and victimization surveys measure individual losses, but they do not measure communal losses. The article explores the impact of foot patrols in Newark, NJ and explains that while it did not lower the actual number of crimes, it did increase the overall community satisfaction. The reason is that the foot patrols break up drunks, disorderly youths and identify strangers in the community. They theorize that these factors tend to act like a broken window in a house: it attracts more crime the same way a broken window attracts vandalism. People believe they can get away with it after seeing that someone else got away with a different crime. With the cops walking the neighborhoods people felt safer and happier despite the lack of change in other statistics.

The article explains that studies of police behavior ceased, by and large, to be accounts of the order-maintenance function and became, instead, efforts to propose and test ways whereby the police could solve more crimes, make more arrests, and gather better evidence. If these things could be done, social scientists assumed, citizens would be less fearful. The law defines my rights, punishes his behavior and is applied by that officer because of this harm. It’s a basic analytic approach and solution: we fix things for the individual and then everything will resolve itself. What the experiment in Newark, NJ discovered is that this approach often misses the mark when dealing with truly complex issues. Or as Ackoff explains we are improving the performance of the part while worsening the performance of the whole.

Why does playing games help with teaching systems thinking instead of analysis? Because the more systems a person engages with, the more familiar they are with the concept of form. While it’s easy to make grand statements about recognizing the forest for the trees, it’s conceptually harder to do this with insubstantial systems like laws or games. Ancient legal systems such as the Roman Empire’s, for example, have a noted tendency to only deal with the physical. This is my property, that is your property and here is what I can or cannot do in regards to this property. Insubstantial concepts like free speech, freedom, racism or other modern legal ideas are more difficult to grasp because they are so abstract. Most people understand what freedom is and they believe they have a right to it, but they also simultaneously recognize that there are limitations on that right if one wants to co-exist with others. I’m not free to go over to your house and make a sandwich, for example.



This problem when making laws for abstract forms like freedom or equality is that by its nature there is no specific thing I can say to identify it because it’s not a thing. It's a series of exchanges and interactions that culminate into that state. One of the best essays on legal formalism is by Ernest J. Weinrib entitled Legal Formalism: On the Immanent Rationality of Law. Weinrib argues that form is content and content is form because the ensemble of characteristics that we consider to be the form represents what the content really is and, equivalently, when what we consider to be the content adequately expresses the thing’s form. The thing is a single entity comprised of the set of characteristics that define it, and it has the unity of an articulated whole that is not reducible to – is therefore greater than – the sum of its parts. Or put more simply, not all tables are alike, but they all share similar properties that designates them each as a table.

Gamers don’t explain it like this and hopefully they don’t bore their friends by debating our inability to articulate inherently abstract limitations, but the basic principle is still there. The idea is explained by Wittgenstein when he was discussing the relationship between various games. What does a board-game have in common with a card-game or ball-game? Certain things are present like amusement but features like the cards or math drop away. The criss-crossing of conflicts and features creates a ‘family resemblance’ by which we categorize rule systems without limiting those categories to any one specific thing. This is why a legal form is considered a kind of pure abstraction: you defeat the purpose of it when you start limiting it by content considerations.

Gamers do this all the time. Portal 2 is an FPS even though it’s a puzzle game. Fallout 3 is an RPG even though it could conceivably be played as an FPS. They are accustomed to loose definitions of systems that are based on numerous factors compromising a whole. The various components of a system are observed and based on that the system is categorized. This method of thinking is often difficult to communicate with a person because they are so accustomed to emphasizing the individual. This approach has its place and advantages, but when dealing with something as large as gamifying society it requires a different approach. If gamification is correct about gamers, then there should be large number of people who are significantly more capable of thinking about legal systems entering the populace.



There’s not really any quantifiable way to measure whether or not the populace has an enhanced sixth sense for changes in the systems that govern their lives. Ideally they would be more capable of discussing issues from the big picture perspective rather than focusing on individual parties or agendas. The intangible nature of a legal form means that it does not have any specific moment of understanding, just acceptance. Some legal scholars resort to comparing this idea of legal forms to an artistic sensibility, others denounce the idea as nonsense used to defend bureaucratic injustice. I don’t expect anyone’s Xbox 360 will be resolving these questions. The development of a greater sense of legal forms will allow people to adopt systems thinking more clearly. This should allow people to understand that designing a better legal system with gamification at its core means recognizing that those designs go beyond their immediate consequences.

Legal scholars, gamers, pundits, activists, politicians, game critics, hack lawyers…basically everyone still analyzes problems instead of using a system approach. There are moments where this is appropriate but the growing reality is that what is good for the individual is not always good for the group. Growing environmental pressures with food, land and energy will require a more dynamic society willing to adapt while at the same time finding a way to still retain its overall character. The question of what to do with gamification may find its answer with helping to usher in this new understanding of law and society.

Link to Part 4.

Gamification and Law - 2

In order for something like gamification and applied crowdsourcing to work in law, the designers have to understand the relationship between rules and standards. You can’t just walk up to someone and expect them to obey a rule because it works more efficiently. It has to fit within their social standards and their beliefs about how the world should work. Addressing this problem is a lot trickier than the initial task of designing more efficient laws.

Improving the design of a law requires understanding the difference between a game not working and a law not working. In a game rules aren’t really broken in the same manner because doing so disrupts play and the game itself. In a legal system people are allowed to break the rules because there are so many players that no rule system could ever accommodate all of them. More players means more unintended consequences. When those situations rise up, strict rule enforcement might cause something unfair or cruel to happen. There’s a strong sense of morality or virtue that enters the equation because the consequences are permanent. In the legal system this is called a ‘hard case’.

The term was coined by a legal philosopher named Ronald Dworkin in an essay by the same name and in it he discusses a potential hard case in a chess tournament. Let’s say you have a rule which says, “If you taunt another opponent, you immediately forfeit the game.” Seems innocent enough, right? Two players sit down and one smiles at the other. For cultural reasons, the opposing player is insulted by smiling and flips out. They demand that their opponent be forced to forfeit for taunting them. How do you call that? If the player is genuinely offended, then technically the other player broke the rule. Is it a fair outcome to let them win in this manner? What if they’re just abusing the rule?



One of the things Dworkin points out about resolving the chess tournament issue is that it’s comparatively easy to resolve. Everyone there has agreed to play chess. They like chess. People may bring different social backgrounds to the game but the two players in the above example are still there just to play chess. Obeying the rules of the game is included in that relationship. So all you really need is a Judge to tell them what the rules mean and they'll go back to playing. That’s one of the inspiring things about play and one of the unpleasant things about law. In the real world there are serious issues that people have very strong opinions about how to handle. When designing a legal system one must recognize that part of the challenge is getting people to agree to the rules at all.

There’s a couple of basic reasons a person might follow the rules of a society. A key distinction is one Judge H.L.A. Hart makes about the difference between a rule and an order. A law you absolutely have to obey is an order. It would be something along the lines of me pointing a gun at you and asking for your wallet. Not giving me the wallet will result in consequences involving the gun. In that situation your feelings about that exchange aren’t relevant. The way they do become important is when automatic enforcement stops being present. You’re not going to give me your wallet if I’m not standing there with the gun. Hart explains that there has to be a certain element of acceptance by a society for a law to be obeyed otherwise you have to enforce it.

Duncan Kennedy makes the point that the acceptance of a rule is a sign of its conformity with social standards. He explains, “Standards refer directly to the substantive values or purposes of the community… by contrast, formally realizable rules involve the finding of facts. Factfinding poses objective questions susceptible to rational discussion.” Put another way, rules are concrete and clear, standards are amorphous and ever-changing. The clarity of rules means it’s possible for something like a legislature to create them, the larger and nebulous nature of a standard means it has to come from the community while remaining undefined.

The dynamic between rules and standards is a necessary element of a healthy legal system. Rules, by their very nature, are imprecise. The broader you make a rule so it can apply to more people, the more over and under-inclusion that occurs. Standards are much more effective at covering broad types of behavior and they help narrow overly-broad rules. The social standard that hurting people is bad is more effective than having a rule listing off the millions of ways you can hurt someone. Standards are not very good at resolving specific disputes. A standard like free speech doesn’t really tell me how loud your car stereo can play before you become a nuisance. That’s what you need laws for: specifics.



Above is a diagram of what a utopian society would look like. The red circle represents the social standards. The purple square is the legal system. The laws are all well within what the society is willing to permit. It’s a depiction of a legal system as a possibility space, a style based on the magic circle principle of game design. The space inside the square represents all possible conduct that is legally permissible and socially acceptable. The space between the square and the circle is the gap between law and social standards. Conduct that occurs in that space represents something that is technically illegal but society is willing to accept. That’s where your hard cases are occurring. Anything outside the circle is offensive to this system and also illegal. Notice that the rules and social standards don’t perfectly conform. You can’t ever create a perfect legal system that will be able to totally avoid hard cases. People are too bizarre and dynamic for that to be possible.



Above is a graph of a more realistic depiction of a society. Each circle represents a different set of standards for a group of people. For some of those standards there is overlap and that represents where the groups agree on social values. In other parts they do not. The laws depicted reflect this reality by showing laws that go outside one group’s standards but are supported by another group’s. As noted above, laws outside a group’s social standards have to be enforced. They won’t do it voluntarily.

The potential for seemingly unfair legal resolutions is high in this situation and may lead one to rightfully question why anyone would accept laws outside their standards. Ronald Dworkin explains that people put up with hard cases because when people consent (assuming that they are consenting) to be in a legal system, they commit not just to a set of rules but to an enterprise that may be said to have a character of its own. Each of those social standards is engaging with the other and accepting the legal system for the larger purpose of a greater community.

It’s here that some of Jane McGonigal’s ideas are applicable. One of the points she stresses is that games can be used to build stronger communities. Initially this is just addressing the entire problem of people with differing social standards not communicating, but it also enables a way for them to participate in the governing process itself. The game designers going about fixing a legal system must be given specific goals for those designs to induce. Those goals must still be decided in a democratic manner. This process can be influenced with community games that specifically address what those goals should be.



A great example of this is a recent budgeting experiment in San Jose. A company called Innovation Games created a game called Buy a Feature. Community leaders from various backgrounds were paired into teams of eight and given a finite amount of virtual money. They could buy certain budget features but never all of them. Each group created their own budget which reflected a model for how the actual city should dispose of its funds. Writer Jeff Lopez explains, “The event seems deceptively simple but by bringing collaboration, feedback, and play into the equation, participants were able to build consensus in a very positive way. In a political world dominated by yelling between the Right and the Left, this type of collaboration provides a breath of fresh air…The quantitative results from the event can be found on the city’s website and the mayor’s proposed budget was released earlier this month. The results are in, and the official document explicitly cites the budget game: residents were reluctant to cut police and fire resources but were willing to look at efficiencies. The mayor’s office has decided to not cut safety patrols, and instead turned to increasing efficiency in pensions and benefits, as well as reduce funding of nonessential efforts that fell to the bottom of the game results, namely city health initiatives and public recreation events.”

In his book Newsgames, Ian Bogost (co-written with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer) explains, “Good community games produce meaningful discourse through trial and error rather than through opinion. Such discourse does not amount to the interpretive work that one might perform on a film, book, or play…instead, the discourse of community games involves the movement toward the solution to some specific problem.”

The goal of a game designed legal system is not to create a perfect legal system. It’s to create a legal system everyone can agree on.

You can find Part 3 here.

Gamification and Law - 1

Gamification is the idea of using game design to solve real world problems. The most tangible application for game design is crowdsourcing. Game designers are adept at testing a rule system, observing the consequences and improving the system in response. They do this by having players try a system out and then changing the rules to produce the intended effect. Fresh ideas like rewards or levels are included in this approach as new way to ensure the system is effective.

For the purposes of this essay though, we’ll focus on some smaller examples of where one could use crowdsourcing and gamification in the legal system. One of the easiest places to apply this skill would be improving the consistency of judges. To give you an idea of how fickle court rooms can be, a recent study by Shai Danziger compiled 1112 parole hearings to check for what effect the time of the day had. Parties were 65% more likely to get parole if the Judge had eaten lunch and taken a break. That’s unfair for someone whose hearing is scheduled right before lunch or at the end of the day.

To combat this issue some states use sentencing guidelines to make punishments mandatory. A committee creates a formula to calculate the punishment based on long term goals proposed by the government. These formulas are "evidence-based", which means they try to assess a criminal's risk of reoffending as an element in how long to send them to prison. These formulas are based on the statistics of people that have been through the system. An article on Missouri’s sentencing guidelines claims it has been effective at reducing the number of repeat offenders because it channels them into the best programs for rehabilitation. It also allows a state to implement goals into their prosecution system by taking a stance on being merciful to non-violent criminals and only being harsh on violent ones. The goal is to reduce prison populations, discrimination and insure consistency in the judicial system. The downside to this is that a lot of sentences that come out will seem shockingly low or high despite the nature of the crime. A game designer could improve the efficiency and productivity of this system just with their innate understanding of how to channel players towards various goals.



Another area that affects all members of society would be digital contracts. These are those voluminous contracts you’re asked to click “I Agree to the Terms” whenever you try to purchase software or services online. The problem is that nobody reads them. This is further exacerbated by some companies using unconscionable terms such as Blockbuster’s, “We reserve the right to change this contract with or without notice to the parties.”

This kind of environment is very similar to the one that led to the home mortgage crisis. Law Professor Lauren E. Willis, in an essay on predatory loaning, explains that one of the problems with deregulation is that every loan company was using their own loan agreement. These were progressively more confusing and resulted in consumers purchasing loans they did not understand and consequently couldn’t afford.

The solution is to create a standardized form throughout the industry that allows consumers to have a better understanding of what’s going on. Since these transactions are all happening online, it should be possible to apply playtesting to the problem. You could design a digital contract. Things like what portions are examined, for how long and how many people later have problems with the contract are all important for recognizing what the consumer understood. Imposing this concept by law is unattractive for many reasons, ultimately it’s in the best interest of corporations to do this voluntarily for improved stability and customer loyalty.



The application of crowd sourcing to greater social issues calls for a fundamental shift in how we evaluate ourselves as a society. All claims about the merits of someone’s position would be based on their effects rather than any intrinsic worth. We would no longer rely on the politician or the pundit proclaiming that a law will solve a problem. We, as a society, would have to start asking them to prove it. That will, in turn, require us to begin accepting those results even if they don’t always say what we want them to. If gamification is to have any lasting impact on society, it has to go beyond merely incentives and begin producing tangible results.

Go to Part 2.

Parchment, Paper, Pixels by Peter Tiersma

Peter Tiersma’s history book Parchment, Paper, Pixels is about the evolution of the legal profession. He frames this in the narrative of technological innovations for communicating rules via basic paper, the printing press and then computers. For the sake of brevity he focuses on areas of law that intrinsically revolve around paper like wills or contracts, but he broadens the scope by the end when he focuses on laws themselves. In the process he explains the intricacies of why a rule on parchment, printed paper or on a computer works differently.

With both written and oral rules the party is mainly focused on discovering the speaker’s meaning, what changes is that someone speaking orally doesn’t have to create nearly as complex of a rule. The speaker can rely on body language, tone and other subtle forms of communication to get across their point. Listeners, in turn, rarely focus on the precise statements of a person and instead focus on the general meaning. Clarification is also not really an issue because you can just ask the person what they meant by something, which allows the speaker to adapt that meaning to something appropriate to the context. For example, if the village elder declares that there will be weeaboo in the ritual hut, they can explain what that means should someone be confused.

You don’t have any of that with a written rule. The rule has to exist in a vacuum because someone with no access to the speaker is going to read it. They’re going to focus on what individual words mean and be more capable of recounting specific statements because they’ve got it right in front of them. Generally people remember the specifics of something that was written down way better than they do something said to them. As a consequence a written legal document has to devote a lot more time to explaining what something means so people don’t figure out some goofy way it might help them. It’s not to be obtuse, it’s to make there is only ONE way of interpreting a document. This is Tiersma’s explanation for why lawyers and judges began to begin writing in such a convoluted manner, going back to another history book he wrote called Legalese.



A big chunk of the book then focuses on the law governing contracts and wills. Contracts are a legal concept that existed long before writing so the paper contract is not always totally binding. This is for the practical reason that, as with an oral rule system, you can just ask the person what they meant in the contract. Conversely a will is slightly more tricky because the person you need to ask for clarification is usually dead. Thus the rules governing wills and paper came very early in history and are very strict. Today you need two witnesses to sign off on any changes to the will or even have it be binding in the first place. This is a big problem in law because a lot of people still think they can print something off at Kinko’s and leave it at that. Courts are required by law to chuck that will and distribute your estate based on a formula when that happens. Whether or not the will is legit, the issue is that if you allow those kinds of wills in then people will be able to sneak in fake ones.

Tiersma uses games to make the distinction between a written record of the rules and rules that people actually obey. The example is a kickball game where everyone orally consents to the rules. That’s generally going to represent what the group thinks and has agreed upon. If someone were to come along, observe the game and write down the rules they would not actually be the rules because it’s still an oral system. That is, the players don’t recognize the authority of the text. Once enough players get together that they feel the need to start writing crap down you then shift into where the paper rules govern. The groups all agree to follow what the paper says which then causes all those mechanical shifts as noted above.

Tiersma reinforces this point by comparing this process to our relationship with Christianity. A person interpreting the Bible who thinks it was beamed straight from God onto a book is going to limit their interpretation to what the book specifically has written down. A person who thinks it was created by a group of Romans a couple of centuries ago and has been heavily edited by various groups since then will take a broader approach. The person who believes the Bible is the word of God does not believe that the book is a representation of the law, they believe that it IS the law.



Appreciating why any of this matters in the big picture comes from recognizing that our culture, despite a brief flash of letter writing for a few centuries, is mostly oral. It doesn’t matter that I’m writing something down, what matters is where the authority is coming from. With e-mail, TV, Skype and all the other trappings of the internet we’re back to the same principles of an oral rule system: you just ask the person for clarification and focus on what they meant instead of what they said. People don’t write things that have to be self-explanatory, they just write as if they were talking. This is why cherry-picking quotes from forum conversations has always seemed a tad tacky to me. Forums are generally oral systems and it's imposing a written text technique that results in everyone talking like a stick was shoved up their ass.

There’s a lot of history that comes into play here about how rules were published and communicated, but the ultimate gist of it is that the American legal system is oriented around a text-centric approach. The volume of cases and rules are so massive that lawyers are now forced to search for specific phrases or words without any regard for the actual case. Law briefs and rulings tend to have short quotes and snippets from other rulings to justify their arguments without any regard to the larger context because there’s so much information involved. The problem is that ONLY lawyers, judges or particularly obnoxious academics communicate in this manner, the rest of society still operates on an oral method of communication. Which leads to fun things like people telling me I’m being an ass or not understanding what I’m saying when I talk about law. But I’ll admit Tiersma helped me get a better awareness of when and how to bridge that gulf with people.

At this point the law is going to remain in its textual state for the near future because there isn’t really any other way to communicate the complex concepts necessary with a graphic or video. Tiersma concludes with that you can have a legal system without writing, you cannot have one without language. In a vain attempt at dragging this back into being relevant to games I imagine the same is true: you don’t really have to communicate a rule system in any one particular fashion. But there does need to be a method of communication going on.

Passing the BAR review

Time to start blowing the dust off this blog and get it back underway. I'm going to shell out some old material I never got published and then get up to a regular routine soon. This is a review of an educational board game I wrote almost a year ago.



Each state in the U.S. requires all lawyers to take a multiple day exam called the BAR, which consists of essay questions and a 200 question multiple choice test called the MBE. It covers six bodies of law: Torts (think car wreck lawsuits), Property, Contracts, Constitutional, Criminal, and Evidence. This post won’t be going into any nitty gritty details but instead will discuss a board game designed to help study for this section called Passing the BAR. As someone who has taken the BAR twice and passed the MBE both times, I thought I’d offer my two cents on it.

Conceptually a multiple choice test works a bit like a roguelike. All you have to do is remove the dungeon and replace the stats with your actual abilities. Monsters in these kinds of games, like multiple choice questions, have more to do with knowing the correct reaction than blindly attacking. Turning this into a board game involves adding a lot of additional elements to this basic interaction. Passing the BAR is setup like a game of Trivial Pursuit with bits of Monopoly thrown in for good measure. You have to move across 35 spots on the board while rolling a dice that only goes up to 3. Each spot is a topic of law, when you land on a spot you have to answer a multiple-choice question. Choose wrong and on your next turn you have to keep trying until you get a question in that topic correct before you can roll. There are wild card spots that send you to the beginning or ask you a bit of legal trivia instead of a specific question. The other player reads the question to you and asks you to pick an answer.



Trying to make studying for the MBE fun is the game’s biggest problem since it tries to expand its appeal by including legal trivia and broader questions for people not taking the MBE. I have trouble imagining a player using this game as anything other than a compliment to regular studies. The MBE sucks and the only person you could get to willingly sit through this game is a corpse.

I played Passing the BAR with my classmate Laura and during the first game we overhauled most of the rules to maximize speed and efficiency. All of the Professional Responsibility questions were removed because that area isn’t covered on the BAR. The legal trivia might be a handy way to remember more obscure laws, but it ends up just distracting you from the crap you should be reviewing. Anytime we landed on a spot that called for trivia, Laura and I instead picked a topic we were having trouble with. The timer was also removed because it wasn’t really necessary, after about an hour we were ready to tear our eyes out anyway. While in Trivial Pursuit you eventually need to badger someone into giving up if they don’t know the answer, here you have four options to pick from. If anything, the biggest issue is picking an answer too soon for most players.

Another problem is that all the questions are read orally so that everyone playing can participate. Certain law question are easier to understand when read aloud than others. In Torts or Criminal Law there is usually only one or two parties with a few factors to juggle. In Property or Contracts there can be several and it often becomes too much to juggle in your head. To really handle an MBE question you need to be marking key words and ignoring irrelevant sections. Practicing reading this material and slashing things out with your pencil is an important skill because that’s how you should take the test. So you’ll be spending most of the game cutting the players off and telling them to just give you the card.

That point aside, the game is pretty useful in the early stages of BAR preparation because you’re still learning how the MBE questions work. Like many standardized tests, studying the questions is just as important as learning the material. Having to negotiate all that information orally meant I quickly learned how to categorize and spot the issue in a question in just one pass. It also helped me spot the subtle differences between similar answers because when read orally you have to recognize the wording immediately. It’s useful because while the task is almost impossible for the more complicated subjects, just trying means that when you go back to reading them it will be easier.



Overall, I spent half of the summer using the board game to study. I’d come home after studying, eat dinner, and whoever arrived that night would play for an hour before going to bed. We never once finished a game. As the summer shifted into studying the essay sections there just wasn’t enough time. You could get through about 22 to 25 questions per hour using Passing the BAR, which wasn’t fast enough when compared to the 30 you can do in less time. Laura pointed out that the nice thing about the game was that it wasn’t as demoralizing as doing problem sets. You don’t get slapped with a percentage telling you that you’re not passing at the end of the session, so there isn’t the same sense of impending doom that BAR materials usually induce. Each question also brought up its own conversation as we talked about how we’d gotten to the correct or incorrect answer, swapping memory tricks and ideas for how to dodge wrong answers.

The second time I took the MBE (I screwed up on the essay portion of banking law) I barely bothered with the thing. There was no one around to study with me and the game’s questions are, by themselves, not particularly good or bad. I’d say don’t buy it, but honestly everyone I know who has the game was given it by some deranged Uncle or Aunt.