While the infrastructural rules of games are certainly authored, there is a vast range of very interesting critical investigations possible in the interplay between the authored rules and the accepted rules of the game. The latter are audience-specific, rather than being trancendently applicable to all instances of the game, but the places where communities form their own rules out of the raw material of the game are where some of the most affective interactions take place.

For example, when players over-write the authored rules of the game with their own rules, as in gamers setting their own goals that occur in the same space as the authored goals but are not bound by them, new systems of play emerge. In social games, such as MMO games, where communities form and enforce their own rules, there is a great deal to be done in analysing how these rules come into being and how their status becomes a fertile field for competition of values. In some instances, the authored rules of the game are only a point of departure for a confrontation with the experience of operating within rules-based environments.

While there is nothing wrong, per se, with your formulation that all rules are authored, the experience of play may end up being much more about the subject’s interaction with the defined rule-space, including modifying it, than it is about the intended experience defined by the formal ruleset. This intersubjectivity is, in my opinion, part of the fundamental driving experience of gameplay, part of what makes it distinct from other forms in which the authority of the Author is more absolute.

But, that may just be me.

Best,
Eyejinx.

P.S. While I personally love Calvino’s work, and am somewhat tickled to find you calling it out, I doubt that it has much to offer students of games. I’ll save any further comments for your full post on the subject, but again, I’ll point to the limited interaction with the text that I discuss above as an indication of my full thoughts on the topic.