Rules for interaction with the environment

What this element is

These are the rules governing what players can do with the non-sentient parts of your game world — objects, vehicles, terrain, physics, equipment — and how those interactions are incentivised or blocked. Flanagan and Nissenbaum define them as the interactions a game allows "between players and non-sentient aspects of the game world".

Why it carries values

When you set the rules for the inanimate world, you determine what kind of learning happens, what the learner should care about, and what kind of agency is possible or impossible. These rules encode beliefs about safety, autonomy, authenticity, clinical rigour and inclusion — and they coach the player into those beliefs through practice, not instruction. Nobody reads a values statement; everybody feels what the world lets them do.

Patterns from practice

User experience and onboarding

Some designers use environmental rules to ease players in before asking anything of them. The medical VR developer found that people need about half an hour to an hour of VR play before they feel at home in the world, so the environment is designed to let learners gradually get used to grabbing, teleporting and interacting — adapting to the technology before they have to demonstrate clinical skill. That's a care decision: don't assess someone who is still fighting the medium.

Other projects use rules to lock attention onto the task. The learner-driver game will not let you do anything it does not want you to do, and only rewards good driving. Break the rules and you fail immediately and go back to the start of the task — a deliberate design that forces concentration and puts safety above freedom.

Authenticity

Authenticity here is not visual fidelity — it is how immersed the interaction makes players feel. The learner-driver developer found participants "felt like they were in the car" (P4) even without a visible avatar body; leaving the body out and letting the player's own body do the interacting produced more immersion, not less.

The space game went the other way for the same reason. Players wear a rigid virtual space suit that collides with the environment, so lowering yourself through an airlock becomes an exercise in managing your entire body in zero-G. The rules foster an appreciation of the "so many little things to manage any one of which can really come and absolutely get you in space" (P6) — a value commitment to the authentic lived experience of astronauts, chosen over ease or convenience.

Learning outcomes

Most environmental rules in serious games are built backwards from the learning outcome. In the learner-driver game, hazards can be hit — but it is a momentary setback with an instant fail screen, so mistakes never ruin the game and the learner immediately understands the error and adjusts.

The mining safety designer described creating an "illusion of choice" (P5): behind the scenes the system is rigged to move most people in the right direction and stop them meandering, because encountering the specific hazards tied to the training requirements matters more than free-form exploration. Many designers expressed frustration at cutting player choice under time, money and stakeholder pressure — engagement, challenge and replayability are routinely traded away just to get the player through the game.

The extreme end is clinical. In the early childhood assessment games, "what a player could do in the game was very much prescribed, and limited" (P9), because any unnecessary interaction could introduce variability and corrupt the clinical analysis. The clinical lead conceded these games could be seen as a digitised replacement for pen-and-paper methods rather than an experience using the real power of narrative, ownership and meaningful choice. When your rules strip out agency entirely, you may be measuring accurately — but you're no longer using what the medium does best.

Questions to ask your team

1. How long does a new player need before they're comfortable with the medium itself — and does our design give them that time before we start assessing?
2. What are we not letting players do, and why? Is each restriction serving the learner, or serving our schedule and budget?
3. When a player makes a mistake, what happens? Is failure a quick, legible teaching moment or a punishment that derails the session?
4. Are we building genuine choice, an honest "illusion of choice", or a corridor? Would we be comfortable telling players which one it is?
5. Where does our physics or simulation fidelity actually matter to the learning outcome, and where is it decoration?
6. If measurement or clinical rigour demands we prescribe every interaction, what is left of the game — and is a game still the right tool?
7. Which environmental rules would a player point to as evidence of what we care about?