Toys vs. Rules

I've been fascinated by toys lately. I have a deck of magic cards (my Pistols At Dawn Battlebox) that I carry around with me everywhere; I call it my toy. Lately I've been thinking of "toy making" as an important part of my creative process, on par or even higher than my game design. But what is a toy? How do toys relate to games? What is it about toys that has so fully fascinated me?

Here's a definition for a toy: a toy is a physical object. The properties of a toy are dictated by its physical qualities, and that physicality grants affordances to those who interact with it. For example, a basketball is a toy. It will bounce when you dribble it, and if you poke a hole in it, it will deflate. The limits of a basketball are dictated by the limits of reality — it is very hard to dye a basketball green, and it is impossible to magically duplicate a basketball. 

A rule is a culturally-imposed limit on how you engage with a toy. There may be the rule "don't poke a hole in the basketball" — it's something you physically could do, but you're choosing not to. A toy may contain or propose its own rules (like how a bop-it will tell you what to do with it, and by extension, what not to do) but these rules may also emerge from a broader cultural context, supplementary material, other players, or basically anywhere else. 

A video game developer is principally a creator of toys. Super Mario Bros. is a toy. The rules that surround the game are culturally specific and localized, but the way we engage with the game is defined by its physical affordances. If you want Mario to have a gun, you must physically modify the toy (which will be difficult and require modding skill) . 

A tabletop RPG designer is principally a creator of rules. These rules are restrictive, limiting how you engage with the toys available. Sometimes for a game operating in the theater of the mind, the toy is a shared imagined world. Rules limit what we do within this world, but we could break them at any time. This might feel odd, but there are many games which can be played using our shared imagination as a toy, with chess being the most classic example. 

The difference between an imagined toy and a physical toy is that an imagined toy lacks physical limitations. I could mentally visualize ten million queens on a mental chessboard, but I cannot place ten million queens on a physical chessboard (yet). Therefore the chess board is dominated by a set of special rules we've invented to preserve the physical affordances of the "true" chessboard. We also preserve the social rules of Chess, even if cheating is a physically plausible action.

Tabletop RPGs move one step further in this simulacra, by creating an imagined board for a toy that has no physical referent. However, we still expect this modeled world to obey certain rules around our social expectations and physical reality. If we're playing The One Ring, and you create a Batman character, this may be a violation of the social rule of our Lord of the Rings world, but it may not be. The only way you could stop me from imagining myself as Batman is through social pressure and social rules; which of course I may disregard.

I think I like it most when TTRPGs also have physical toys. 

Thanks to the Dice Exploder Discord for helping me come to these conclusions and refine my claims.