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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, "The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games" (MIT Press, 2024)
Description: How games are built on the foundations of rules, and how rules—of which there are only five kinds—really work.Board games to sports, digital games to party games, gambling to role-playing games. They all share one thing in common: rules. Indeed, rules are the one and only thing game scholars agree is central to games. But what, in fact, are rules? In The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games (MIT Press, 2024), Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola explore how different kinds of rules work as building blocks of games. Rules are constraints placed on us while...