I find it interesting how various fiction/rules configurations are central to our establishing of genre categories, as Jesper also argues in his dissertation. The attempt to ‘fictionalise’ the three lives in Sands of Time (which btw, admittedly, is a bit more than just a straight ‘conversion’ the traditional mechanic) seems to emerge as much from deep-rooted generic constraints as from a designer’s clever and ‘anomalous’ idea of fictional coherence? Should we place SoT in the platformer/Mario genre along with the original PoP, or does it – considered as fiction – have more in common with Gran Turisimo? I think there are good reasons to consider both alternatives. Even if the time-reverse of SoT appears as an anomaly in the context of its direct predecessors, it seems to me that a straightforward three lives solution would significantly weaken the generic coherence of the game.

Matt, I think it’s OK to use an offhand “we” to discuss game conventions – but the talk did discuss player variations. One of the best examples is a game like Age of Empires, where an RTS-savvy player would probably see it as an RTS game, but a gamer new to the genre would pick it up via his/her conception of historical battles. Eh, we agree I guess.

You’re basically talking about how syncronized the rules and fiction are. The more the fiction can explain the rules, the less potential for rule/fiction dissonace. However, there’s also the issue of genre and medium literacy. What causes dissonance for some players may not cause dissoance for others and vice versa. That’s why, for me, the issue of the inclusive “we” becomes central. I don’t think there is a “we” when it comes to how players construct in their own minds the relationship between fiction and rules. There are trends we can identify, and maybe many common elements across different player groups. But in my experience “we” do not experience dissonance in the same way at all. Players literate in a one style of rule/fiction dynamics may find another style incomprehensible, and thus, from their perspective, broken, resulting in dissonance. But others literate in that style may not. This is why you can have some people scream bloody murder about the 4th wall breaking in Metal Gear Solid (“Put down the controller and step away from the console, Snake!”) while others find it even more immersive than so-called “realistic” games… precisely because it is bringing the rules and the fiction together in a very literal way.