it will be 0% a surprise to any of you that i'm fascinated by the way that the very limits of acceptable conduct in a game are defined. because it's not "the rules", there are all kinds of things we accept as part of a game that are against the rules. imagine picking up a hockey video game for any console newer than like, the ps1, and realizing that the players never fought. that'd be weird, fighting is a part of hockey! it's against the rules, the players are punished for it, the game "proper" is paused to handle it, but those facts don't make it not hockey. they're inseperable

similarly i'm really interested in tilt sensors in pinball, that kill your ball if you jostle the table too much. my understanding is that, at least at the time those sensors started being added, jostling the table intentionally was against the rules. they added those sensors to stop you from doing it because arcade owners were worried about players breaking the machines. but once you have some automated mechanism that tells you exactly where the line you can't cross is, everything before that line is de facto permissible. there's not really any sense in which jostling a pinball table is "against the rules" anymore, i don't think, unless you push it too far and get your ball killed. and, since i think i actually do really like this as a test for this kind of thing: it'd be weird to play a pinball video game that didn't let you bump the table for an advantage. it's part of pinball

maybe some pinball players are going to tell me i'm full of shit, which would be fair, this is 100% inferred from very little information. but i think it's interesting in the abstract, at least