The letter of the law.

Jesus once accused a group of 1st century Jewish religious leaders of obeying the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law.  According to their own law, they were fairly sinless.  They took special care not to walk over an 1/8th of a mile on the Sabbath, they cleaned out their house of yeast before Passover, they gave a tenth of their income to the temple. 

But Jesus absolutely blasts them on one point: according to their law, it was permissible for them to find a loophole in the system whereby they could avoid their filial responsibilities to take care of their parents.  Sure, it was legal.  But it completely denied the elderly of financial support.  And there was no social security to fall back on.  So, though they were righteous according to the letter of the law, they were guilty of violating the spirit in which it was written.

I was thinking about this concept as it relates to games the other day. 

When we play games, we essentially enter into a behavioral contract.  We agree that we will limit our behavior to a certain accepted norm.  By doing so, we hope to win the game (thereby achieving other goals – having fun, proving we’re better, alleviating boredom, etc…).  The whole process should be relatively simple, right?  Observe a group of children playing at recess and it’s incredibly apparent that it’s not.

I think the concept of “letter of the law” and “spirit of the law” has a place in a game environment and players’ behavior tends to fall toward one or the other. 

One group of players believes that the rules give us the bounds of acceptable game behavior.  They spell out for us, in Mafia/Werewolf/Witch Hunt, for example, that, when the narrator tells the townspeople to go to sleep, everyone closes their eyes.  In freeze tag, if we’re tagged, we stay still.  But these players believe that the rules only spell out the explicitly acceptable (or unacceptable) game behavior.  Anything else, as long as it is not outlawed by a particular rule, is fair game.  So, in Mafia, even though your eyes are closed, there’s nothing in the rules that says anything about moving around.  Or talking.  Or giving back rubs to other players in the middle of the night cycle.  In poker, if another player is being sloppy and somehow reveals their hand, they’ll do their best to leverage that information.  None of these actions is explicitly forbidden according to the game rules, so they are absolutely acceptable in-game actions.

The other group of players believes that rules are there to give them a starting point to extrapolate proper in-game behavior.  When they played freeze tag, they would scream for help.  Surely, the point of freezing was to remove them as an active helper of the team, right?  Moving their mouth doesn’t do anything to unfreeze anyone else, so it seems like appropriate behavior.  In Mafia, during the night cycle, these players actually close their eyes and sit still.  In poker, they purposely don’t look at other peoples’ hands, believing that most of the fun of the game comes from the speculation, playing of odds, and understanding bets and bluffing, not from taking advantage of another players’ stupidity.

Each of these, taken to their extremes, can ruin the fun of a game.  Spirit of the law gamers essentially end up adding tons of extra rules.  They might try to enforce the laws of physics into a D&D game, for example.  Letter of the law gamers tend towards exploiting a system.  I think the true extreme of this type is online griefers.  Repeatedly crouching over a corpse is not outlawed by the rules of Halo.  Neither are ten minute long, four letter word filled diatribes against teammates.  But both of these clearly violate the social rules of the game and the spirit of the law of multiplayer gaming. 

So what do you think?  Do gamers fall into these categories at all?  What are the circumstances under which you might be more of a letter gamer or spirit gamer?  Which is the more acceptable behavior?