D0: Meditations on 'the rules culture'

I don't need to tell you that Mornington Crescent is a very complicated game. We have rulebooks -- note the plurality -- and those aren't even all-inclusive, as every sanctioned bout draws from one or more organizations' floor rules to boot. The game has, to be quite honest, become more about restrictions than about free play ... and, to a point, this is to be expected. The expansion of the tube network has ceased almost entirely in the 21st century, and variants expanding Crescent to include larger swaths of geography fail almost unilaterally as the majority of standing rules are rather regionalized. You can't apply a rulebook that goes hand-in-hand with civil planning to the flats of middle-Africa. It doesn't work.

That being said, whether or not it's actually gotten out of hand is a point of contention. While I played on the actual circuit under my Crescent-Hoppers International registry, speaking either for or against this was of course verboten -- I have a bit more editorial freedom now, though, and I might as well flex it, yeah?

I dislike the rules culture. I dislike the fact that now, and even towards the tail end of my own career, the majority of any particular game was decided in a board room before the judge ever called starting-station. It's disingenuous that a game which originated as the "end-all" of games of wits and off-the-cuff thinking has become, instead, a puzzler rewarding meticulous deconstruction and poring over rulebooks. I mean, I'll be the first to admit that many of my latter victories only came to me because the rules culture was only finding its legs and as many now-untouchables (the aforementioned Senjutsu, before his retirement) were being infracted/demerited out of game, after game, after game. I won at least a dozen matches on the back of my opponents being overzealous and getting themselves disqualified.

The really chilling part? They were ahead of their time. If the judges hadn't ruled so conservatively -- if they had, instead, ruled according to modern precedent -- I wouldn't necessarily have won a lot of those games. The Bristol series? My world record shattering "A-Z" run? Those would all have been contested further, possibly to my loss, if modern judging protocol was applied. It's a bit hard to admit, but my legacy is in part built on unfairly-dismantled prodigies. It's not hard to see why so many of them have it out for me in this exhibition match; there's a pretty popular undercurrent of "Orthogonal doesn't even deserve her fame" not just here, but in the community at large. A topic for another day, I guess ...

But, halting the digression and getting back to the rules culture, this is something which is now absolutely embraced. This exhibition match promises to be fielding at least six dozen rules and all of their corollaries and subchapters -- this is more than double of my final match at Winslowe Court, and precisely eight times as many as in my inaugural bout in London proper. It's rules creep replacing power creep, and it's not just coming from the judges; it comes from the players just as much, which is what really incenses me.

Most of these modern regulations are the progeny of "creative solutions" yesterday, where the regulating board felt the best approach was to codify their approval/disapproval of that particular scenario. Nothing in Crescent is wide-ranging -- as I mentioned before, this problem is what's preventing adoption of larger geographies in competitive play. All of these rules indexes are narrow and specific; they don't grow, and they don't accommodate new problems. Accordingly!, even though the rulebook grows ever larger, the impetus for new rules and regulations only grows larger at an even more accelerated rate!

It's the very definition of exponentiality, and it's a rather ruddy shame. I'll be honest: I pine for those days of off-the-cuff thought, where we had ten solid regulations and everyone knew them, and they were still a hazard because it was required to think on-the-spot and you might forgot one in the heat of the moment. There no longer is a heat of the moment. We've entered the era of a prevailing rules culture, where it doesn't even matter that most of the gameplay occurs before starting-station is called because every combination of plays is known anyhow. The actual starting-station is irrelevant -- no one will have an off-the-cuff response, but instead the formulaic "best" play or one that instead breaks the rules wide open if that one motion is unavailable.

Everyone but Emily "Orthogonal," of course. I earned my name for being straight-forward in an era where it was still a game of straight-shooters -- in this current climate, I doubt anyone will even threaten to run nearly parallel to me. I expect a field of curves, and they're probably entirely unprepared for how straightforward I am going to take this as I hoist them by their own petards,

and then drive them, per my namesake, straight into the ground.

Not to win, though -- but to prove that point. We don't need this rules culture, and I do not need to follow the "best" strategy, nor anyone else's strategy at all, to remain in the game and remain a competitive player. This might sound a bit schizophrenic in light of my statement-of-intent, but the two goals drive together here, in shining parallel; by demonstrating that Crescent can be won on the merit of a heart and a passion, maybe I can put the fear of God back into people again, both on the court and off it.

Stop using your rules as crutches, people! Open up to the world, and show your own face to it. The world needs the kind of humans it found and welcomed at its onset -- those who made a chaos into a system for good, not those who willingly subvert it to feed their own goals. You return order to chaos under the guise of law. You are a despicable people.