In case you didn’t already know this, I am a nerd. One of my favorite ways to relax is to create little games and let them play themselves, with me as the hardware. Example: given a board game which accurately simulates the American Revolution, how can I modify the rules (and of course the gameboard) to recreate the Thirty Years’ War, or the fall of the Han Dynasty?

Now that I’ve actually typed that out and read it, it sounds pretty pathetic — but it works for me. Quite unexpectedly, though, I’ve learned something grand from the many, many, MANY failed attempts to make good rulesets, and it is this I would like to share with you.

In every sufficiently interesting game, the rules of play combine with decisions by players to create completely unexpected, indeed unforeseeable circumstances (you could argue this is what makes certain games dull and others sufficiently interesting). Any fan of chess or bridge can attest that certain situations are downright beautiful — not because the pieces or cards look pretty in a certain arrangement, but rather since a particular course of action leads to something intangibly wonderful, something more than just another move.

Tic-tac-toe, in contrast, is boring because the first player can always avoid losing and the second player can always force a draw. That fact, I shall point out, is nowhere to be found in the rules of play. Yet it is true – and defines the quality of the game – just the same. Once the flaw is discovered, the rules themselves are a failed attempt at fun.

Whenever I attempt to create a good new set of rules, it takes about 12 tries. There are lots of ways to fail. Most of them are absolutely impossible to foresee. You just have to play the game and see if it does what you want it to do, based on the rules you created. Fix the flaw, only to create another one. That sort of thing.

“Okay, scrub,” bellows the ethereal inner heckler, “have fun playing your pointless little games. Meanwhile, real life called and wants to know if you’re available later.” I love my inner heckler. He thinks he’s so smart. But he’s the perfect setup man.

Everything is a game, isn’t it? Twelve notes and 600,000 words; those are your rules for songwriting. Calories, nutrients, muscles — just a ruleset for physical fitness. Dollars and cents: well, if that ain’t the most popular game of them all (though I’ve personally never found it that entertaining). Our entire culture, really, is nothing more or less than an attempt to play a silly game whose rules are ill-defined and always in flux … but still there.

Some games are more important than others. And some are more widely applicable. Take as your ground rules the building blocks of mathematics – nothing more complicated than counting, really – and not only do you inexorably arrive at beautiful theorems, not only would a five-headed supergenius alien 30,000 years from now arrive at the same theorems, but some of these consequences of skillful play (and, let us not forget, the rules!) happen to describe the very universe in which all games we’ve thus far discussed are embedded.

A funny thing, the universe: viewed from afar, it is just another game with rather simple, seemingly dry rules. We call these the laws of physics. I’m talking the really basic ones here — four forces, a pocketful of particles, nothing fancy. Based on everything I’ve been able to learn, it is precisely those rules – and nothing remotely approaching “best play,” but 16 billion years of random – which lead to us.

That in and of itself is pretty cool and, once you study it for a spell, utterly plausible. But now spin it another way: suppose you were a super-smart thing and you wanted to build, oh, say World War II from scratch — from basic physical laws. Could you do it?

Hell no you couldn’t. Had you the power to create a universe and fill it with hydrogen atoms and laws of physics of your choosing, you couldn’t even recreate human beings — you’d be lucky to get as far as DNA. What I’m getting at is this: we don’t know why the laws of physics are what they are, but if they were set in place by God, or if this universe is a simulation – if they were set in place at all – we were not part of the plan. In all likelihood no brain can be that smart, but it doesn’t matter: no brain needs to be.

It is well within the capability of a sufficiently educated human to formulate a ruleset about as complicated as the laws of physics; in fact, we routinely make up games whose axioms are much more complicated (ever read the Constitution?). It stands to reason, then, that a somewhat less intelligent being could have made all this up quite by accident in a simpler universe. In turn, that parent plane of existence could have been conceived by a true idiot. I imagine after only two or three Inception-style leaps backward, we arrive at the simplest game: 0, 1, and a whole lot of empty time and space. I, for one, am willing to stipulate such a realm as requiring no prime mover, no creator whatsoever.

Every good game has this in common with every other good game: the rules allow for complex, unforeseeable, indeed unavoidable consequences, especially with good decision-making on the part of the players, but sometimes without any conscious decision-making at all. Why should The Big Game be any different?

I guess the takeaway is that all of this – all the symphonies and novels, the slaughter and the splendor – could well owe its existence to semi-intelligent design. The key is that the designer doesn’t have to have any special powers, or even appreciable talent. Just the one-‘verse-up equivalent of Minecraft and an aptitude to tinker.