Monopoly vs. RPGs, rule evolution, and the social contract

[rafial]

And that is exactly my point.  One set of "rules" produces many games that play in slightly different ways, because rules make no sense except as they are interpreted through a culture.

I disagree.  If this were so, the utility of rules would be severely diminished.

Agreement on a body of rules in most cases is only necessary within a local community of players.  When I sit down to play Hearts with a group of people I've never played with before, the first thing I have to do is a little social negotiation of "what exactly are the rules we are using, here, today?"

I have several chess variants, but none of them claims to be "chess only done right".

Chess is rather of a red herring in this discussion, being as it is one of the few games that has actually been able to cling to relatively standardized play over more than a few decades.

Its definitely the case that chess evolved from prior similar games, but chess is then its OWN game, perhaps in a sequence, but not a variant of a prior game.

Consider that if you read in a medieval book about somebody playing "chess", they may have been playing a strategic game similar to, but not quite the same as the one that became standard chess (some of the pieces may have had different moves), or they may have been playing a dice game that involved the same board and pieces, but very different rules.  At some point, a version of the game chess became subject to standarization, but this standard chess was simply a selection among the variants extant at the time, and was in no way a "new game".

Do you have any examples of smoothish evolution of game rules to contradict this?  Because it seems to me this claim to gradual local evolution is more precisely an apologia for the confused state of rules use and abuse in RPG.

David Parlett's excellent books, the Oxford History of Card Games, and the more recent Oxford History of Board Games both provide multitudinous examples.  (links to Parlett's website provided above).  Parlett's basic point is that existance of "canon rules" and the suppression of local variations is an anomoly, and is often ultimately overwhelmed by the pressure of local variation.  Only a few games, like Chess and Bridge have really withstood the pressure of variation for a notable length of time, and even then, as another poster pointed out, the standardized games do get changed from time to time, often with much accompanying furor.

Much more common is the existance of common gaming equipment (boards, cards, dice, makers) and a plethora of locally agreed upon ways to use them, rarely written down.

That RPGs are subject to the same dynamics of culture as other forms of gaming should be of no surprise to us.