Unofficial Systems

The most important thing one learns in college isn't about your studies. It isn't about alcohol and drugs. And despite what the movies tell you, it isn't about love. It's that in any given bureaucracy, there is an official way of doing something, and an unofficial way. The official way is always long, tedious, and scripted. The unofficial way, however, is the way you Get Things Done (Tm).

For example, at my Alma Mater, students who wanted to take more than 18 units had to apply with the dean to do so. The dean was swamped with work, and hardly gave any weight to this particular duty, making acceptance rates low and available meeting times far in the future.

Hence, if you needed to take more classes, you just spoke to one of the nice people behind the desk at the registrar's office. It was quick, it freed up the dean to do more important things, and it never said no. Now, if you failed out of any classes during that time period, you would be put on academic probation, but that was just their way of telling you not to screw up again.

And this is how college, and life, goes. If you wait for the official set of circumstances, things will never happen. You've got to take the risk to get anywhere.

Video games are particularly bad about unofficial systems. Because of the intense scripting requirements (and the uniquely human nature of unofficial systems) games frequently fail to see beyond the bureaucratic way of doing something.

More examples of official vs unofficial systems:

Official system: Earn enough money, pay for a hotel room.

Unofficial system: Make friends in the target city, then look for a couch to crash on. If you can't do that, sleep in the van.

Official system: majors in the school of the sciences are forbidden from taking classes in the arts.

Unofficial system: walk in, ask the art professors directly if they mind you taking their class, then join.

It is ironic that games are so poor at these natural shortcuts, as players are thorough in looking for them. If you give them objects with attached physics, they will stack everything in the world together and attempt to climb over every wall. If you give them an ocean, they'll swim to the ends of it. But if you have a character that you need to buy a map from, you can't just ask to look at it.

Sorry if I've lead you to believe otherwise, but I have no idea what to do to better integrate unofficial systems into main gameplay, nor am I sure about the circumstances which these would be desirable. Deus Ex got close to exploring such mechanics, but remained tied to the special case scripting monster. It seems like this area is a section of gaming that is both in need of exploring and potentially likely to bear fruit.