Let me start by saying I am not 100% sure it’s a good idea to transcribe the tacit rules people live by. And I am sensitive to the distinction between mirroring and modeling. You know I am incredibly interested in the creative and transformative potential of games and so I am not very interested in spoon-feeding a worldview baked into a software simulation. The idea I closed the talk with is half-formed, perhaps too much so. But the assumption behind it is that there is a need to play with the social rules we live by. And that by doing so mutual understanding and respect can be increased and suffering like that which we saw with the riots could be prevented or at least reduced.

When it comes to technological versus social innovation, I guess I am more focused on the latter than a lot of designers, But I wouldn’t separate them completely. After all, ultimately, design is about making, and for this, technology is a material. The social innovation goes hand-in-hand with the tech.

Doug Wilson tweeted, in response to my use of Joust as an example: “…for me it’s not game as metaphor, but game as performance.” I guess what I like about the game is that it puts technology at play and much of the rule making happens outside of the domain of hardware and software.

But as Alper points out, with the rise of networked publics, that distinction isn’t as tidy as it used to be. When I play Joust I am not just dealing with the rules enacted by the local play group, but also those that I have gleaned from videos and blog posts and tweets online. The networked performance of those rules, so to speak.

Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such they are simultaneously: 1. the space constructed through networked technologies and 2. the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology and practice.

It indeed shows that there has been a lot of thinking around this subject already. It may be time that game designers shine their light on how society’s rules can be retranscribed. That knowledge may be a welcome addition to how society works. I know a lot of people from society’s margins are already —out of necessity— experts at gaming systems however fragmentary their understanding of them.

It reminded me of Paul Romer’s “Theory of History, With Applications“, his argument being that human innovation consists of (a) technologies and (b) social rule sets, and that the time has come to shift invention to the latter part, pointing to Hongkong and the Chinese Special Economic Zones as successful examples for such “social rule innovation” sandboxes.

It also reminded me of the highly underappreciated book “Models and Mirrors” by anthropologist Don Handelman. He distinguishes two types of rituals: those that (re)present/mirror (i.e. show reality as it is or should be), and those that perform/model (i.e. take participants through a transformative experience resulting in a different reality). Ian’s procedural rhetorics are somewhere in-between, though leaning to the mirror events, your idea leans to the modeling events.

There is one potential point of debate, though: Making the implicit explicit, hard-coding rules that before were open to ambiguity, interpretation and renegotiation on the spot profoundly changes the nature of the interaction thus governed, and not necessarily for the better. (Along those lines, David Weinberger ones spoke in defense of the web’s “tacit governance“.)