# Fair games have legible rules For now I’m going to define a ‘fair game’ as one where two people of equal ability have the same chance of winning. What, intuitively, makes a game *unfair?* Imagine a game where where you don’t know the rules when you start playing. Experienced players can take advantage of corner cases that other players didn’t even realize existed. Illegible rules seem to be at the heart of most unfair games. Legible rules seem necessary but not sufficient for a game to be fair. However, the other components of fair games seem much less … legible, which encourages people to focus on legible rules when they want to make a game more fair. What do legibility increasing actions look like? * Removing discretion on the part of gatekeepers * Standardized testing * Clear entry criteria * Certifications * Explicit Regulations * Clear metrics * Turning implicit rules into explicit rules * Systematization of the game Looking at the list, many of those ‘legibility increasing actions’ have to do with inputs, or the game you need to win to play the game in the first place. [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]. Intuitively, making games more fair is a good thing. However, [[Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides]], [[The more legible the rules of the game, the more straightforward it is to optimize for the game]], and [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]]. ### Related * [[Kumar Types of Games Tweet]] * [[“have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]] * [[Having more separate games is good for society]] * [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]] * [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]] * [[Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Fair+games+have+legible+rules) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Fair+games+have+legible+rules)