Combinatorics

In my paper “From Governance to Planning,”¹ I draw on Jean Baudrillard’s description of hyperreality as “produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” in order to attempt an articulation of a post-representational real, the real without double.² This articulation leads to a model of “combinatorial planetarity” that is, in Baudrillard’s words, “programmatic, metastable, [and] perfectly descriptive.”³ There is no longer a need for a syntax of the real, a philosophical representation of what is, but only for a “science of appearances,” an “intimate combinatorics” that performs the “labour of analyzing, designing, enumerating, graphing, grouping, and ordering” without reference to an outside.⁴

This “intimate combinatorial science” I also present as a “ludology.”⁵ I take up this ludological science of the real once again in my Fear of Play,⁶ in which I invoke Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction⁷—specifically the chapter “The Passion for Rules”—wherein he presents the following dichotomy:

The Rule plays on an immanent sequence of arbitrary signs, while the Law is based on a transcendent sequence of necessary signs. The one concerns cycles, the recurrence of conventional procedures, while the other is an instance based in an irreversible continuity. The one involves obligations, the other constraints and prohibitions. Because the Law establishes a line, it can and must be transgressed. By contrast, it makes no sense to “transgress” a game’s rules; within a cycle’s recurrence, there is no line one can jump (instead, one simply leaves the game). Because the Law—whether that of the signifier, castration, or a social interdiction—claims to be the discursive sign of a legal instance and hidden truth, it results in repression and prohibitions, and thus the division into a manifest and a latent discourse. Given that the rule is conventional and arbitrary, and has no hidden truth, it knows neither repression nor the distinction between the manifest and the latent. It does not carry any meaning, it does not lead anywhere; by contrast, the Law has a determinate finality. The endless, reversible cycle of the Rule is opposed to the linear, finalized progression of the Law.⁸

It is the seduction of rules that Baudrillard proposes at the end of his Simulacra and Simulation as the next step beyond the nihilistic acceptance and analysis of our hyperreal existence. And it is the seduction of rules that drives me to continue in my imbrication of philosophy and play—not as the elaboration of a new syntax on the basis of yet another transcendental signifier (capital p Play), but as the performance of the “purest of pure expressions,” the expression of the “nothingness of original contingency.”⁹ Play is a combinatorics of nothingness.¹⁰

In tabletop roleplaying, this expression of nothingness is known as “Rule Zero,” the “idea that a gamemaster has the discretion to alter or discard published rules.”¹¹ Jon Peterson traces this rule back at least as far as the free kriegsspiel wargames used by the Prussian military to train their officers in the 1800s, and cites its explicit codification as the “Gamer’s First Law” in the tabletop rpg scene by Ed Simbalist in 1978.¹² Peterson attributes the rise of Rule Zero as the term of choice (over the Gamer’s First Law) to discussion around Carl Henderson’s SPYCHASER: Fantasy in 1994.¹³ But, regardless of origin, Rule Zero is simply the localized expression of the ontological contingency that the rule signifies.

When representation collapses, so too does the Law. All that remains is the operational immanence of the rule, the combinatorics of play.¹⁴

Notes