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Rules have an unfair reputation as an iron-fisted tyrant stifling human creativity. "You can't do that! It's against the rules!" is a common response to a player's inspired idea. It's universally understood, from tag to chess to poker: if it's not in the rules, it's forbidden. So it follows that rules have no place in creative endeavors, because there is no winning or losing in the creation of art.
But consider Dungeons & Dragons: outside of combat, you can try most anything. The rules say so. The limiting rules that do exist in the game exist to create something to struggle against. They make losing possible. It is not the fundamental nature of rules to limit all expression to a few narrow actions, as many board games and card games do. Rather, such rules raise activities like Dungeons & Dragons above ordinary conversation. It is the creative ways players keep failure at bay that allows them to show their ingenuity, relish their successes, or, lament their mistakes.
Fiction has rules. Books on the craft of writing are full of them. Writers of speculative fiction in particular are aware of their need. Without rules, magic and futuristic technology solve any character's problems before they actually become problems. Readers must learn "how magic works" or "proper behavior for a lady" so they can comprehend the limits and scope of characters' actions. Rules, whether physical, cultural, or self-imposed, are obstacles for characters to discover, circumvent, succumb, or destroy.
Fiction is about as indirect about its rules as games are explicit about them. A game's rules are very clearly laid out beforehand in the mother of all expository lumps, the rulebook. A player must get this information correct because he acts upon that information, and he doesn't like it when all his hard work is for naught due to a misunderstanding or omission. But a fiction slips its rules into the reader's head when he isn't looking. At least one rule or fact or consequent is allowed to escape the reader's notice, then suddenly take the spotlight during the climax or plot twist. The reader will review what he's learned in order to understand how the turnabout was possible, only to have the twist reveal itself to be, in retrospect, perfectly logical. It was there the whole time.
Many people write casually, and the casual reader will, upon reading such writing, pick up on many things that feel "off", that make little sense given what's passed before, or that they simply don't find believable. The writer has failed to follow some small rule of craft. He has lost... the reader. While breaking the rules is certainly a valid option for a writer, the wisdom goes, you must first know what the rules are -- and why they are -- before you break them. Because the only kind of fiction without rules is bad fiction.
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There are many _suggestions_ that apply to the craft of fiction writing, but most of them can, in the hands of a skilled writer, be violated. They're in a very different category from "the bishop moves diagonally." Your last paragraph makes this distinction clear, but it begs the question: If the writer can break the rules, are they actually rules in any meaningful sense of the word? No, they are not; they're recommendations. Different beast.
You make a very good point. I appreciate your peeling apart of in-world rules of a particular fictional work, and the out-of-world "meta-rules" (recommendations) of writing fiction in general.
Enrique I also appreciate you bringing up the point that there aren't any rules of game design either, even though the aspiring designer should know many techniques and recommendations, like the importance of rock-paper-scissors, in order to be a good designer. So far, we're in agreement that writers & designers both are well advised to learn a lot of stuff, yes?
Now let me pitch a couple of examples to you.
Let's say, for his game, a game designer restricts a set of PC actions as "unmaidenly behavior", for example. We then have a case of a little bit of the fiction's "in-world rules" affecting gameplay. Likewise, Space Invaders may open with an expository lump explaining the protagonist's motivations for shooting aliens. Again, the fiction explains a facet of gameplay. But that's as far as it goes -- little more than window-dressing.
So let's say we will have our pilot undergo character development, rejecting his role as fighter-pilot and merely dodging bullets until the aliens allow him other options. Let's say we'll have our maiden's society undergo development, loosening their restrictions on this particular class of people, in response to the PC's struggle. Nowadays, the writer and programmer work together to "hard-code" that into the game. The story *will* be about that, the gameplay *will* support it in particular ways.
Now let's say we desire *interactive* story. If we wish to allow our pilot or our maiden to really change their world their way (the player's way), they will be changing the "in-world rules" of their world. But since those rules are set-up to begin with according to "recommendations and suggestions", changing them during play so that both a satisfying game *and* a satisfying story result requires the computer to understand something of those recommendations as well.
If you hold that "rule" is too hard-nosed of a word for such things, well, OK. But I feel that's a matter of degree, not of existence. I open the article acknowledging that "rule" is a dirty word in some circles. Perhaps even "decision" would be better -- once made, abide by it. But I also wished to point out the parallels between the two fields using language and terminology that is at home in a third field: how software, including game software, is actually built.