"On the Nature of Rules" Topic

Just read an interview about Lorraine Daston's Rules: a Short History of What We Live By, and I think I may need to pick up a copy.
link

The distinction she makes between "thin" and "thick" rules--note, not rule BOOKS, but rules--may well be worth the purchase price.

Has anyone read it yet?

Interesting for students of sociology maybe, but very little to do with wargaming, or wargames rules design.

Have you read it, Something? I'm only in the preliminaries, but her description of when "thin" rules were applicable and when "thick" rules were necessary struck me as highly pertinent. It's a distinction we might do well to adopt.

It's gone on my reading list, thanks Robert.

No, but it was interesting enough to research and take a look at it.
I used it as an entry in the list in the What are you reading? TMP thread and wrote a few sentences about my first impression.

There is an interview with the author in which she tells a funny anecdote about how she came up with the idea for the book:

"Lorraine Daston: The book began I think on a beach on the Baltic Sea in northern Germany where I noticed that every entrance to the beach not only had its neat address, a certain number, but a set of rules as to which people and indeed animals were allowed on this part of the beach. So there were parts of the beach for humans and parts of the beach for humans with their dogs. There were parts of the beach for people wearing bathing suits and there were parts of the beach for people without bathing suits. There were parts of the beach for people who just wanted to lie on the sand and parts of the beach for people who wanted to take part in sports like beach volleyball. And quite aside from the whimsicality of this neatly divided stretch of beach into these various addresses, I was struck by the fact that most people obeyed the rules."

Some Germans, sigh…
I had actually planned to vacation in the region she probably mentions next year, but reading this I think I'll reconsider…

Hi Arjuna,
Keep an open mind regarding the German psyche. With all truthfulness, I have massively enjoyed my many (15-20 trips) visits to Germany (principally Bavaria in the region of Munich). A visit to beer halls at the Munich Oktoberfest festival grounds will rapidly disabuse any notions of German "social stiffness".

Another interesting experience – A German friend and I once visited a nice little lakeside resort restaurant near Munich for an outdoor Sunday brunch. It was a very enjoyable meal, but one which I was forced to consume while keeping a close eye upon two lovely young things sunbathing topless on the lawn about six feet from me – true story.

Go before they run out of energy resources and have to shut down the country ….. ;-)

B

@Blutarski

Easy for you to say, I've dealt with them almost every day my entire life…
Germans in general, not just the topless.
Vastly more often the clueless.
I also prefer the former, but to be honest, I've never stumbled across them at breakfast. I should probably take a vacation in Munich.
On the other hand in the English Garden in Munich, of course, some sights are rather bottomless.
It might not be so bad to have separate areas for this, as the author describes above.
At least for aesthetic reasons.

But I'm glad you liked it here.
;-)

Well yes, Blutarski--but Munich after all. Bavarians. As Bismark said "the missing link between Austrians and humanity." (And even in Bavaria, in three years I never saw a sober cheerful German.)

And it was in Rothenburg ob der Tauber that the owner of a book and uniform plate shop called me out for trying to buy uniform plates which were out of my period. Germans have fewer rules about sex than America had in my early manhood. But Germans take rules seriously.

'Germans take rules seriously', not always in my experience. They seem however more systematic and less haphazard than some others, but I spent most of my time in Westphalia/Hannover and I was told that neither Prussians nor Bavarians were 'like us'.

Finished the Daston book. (Yes, there were others in the interval: many others.) I'm afraid I can't recommend it for the wargaming value alone, though her distinctions of "thin" rules, "thick" rules and "rigid" rules have some applicability.

What may be more useful is her "third meaning" of rules--now seldom or never used in English--of rule as an example or paradigm. I've seen a lot of material--and even written some--on rules of scenario design, which discuss board sizes, number of turns, number of points per foot of contact area and such. We might do better to include a few examples of well-written scenarios for a particular set of rules and leave it at that.

Pity I didn't think of that twenty years ago.

Rules design is critical if you want people to adopt them. After a lot of trial and error I create three versions of the same rules, a one column, two column and three column. The one column rules are good for notes, and the two or three column are good as a reference during a game. 80 page single column rules and turn into a 16 page three column set of rules. Perhaps this can be also defined as thin and thick.
youtu.be/cKpnZDvMNEk