free rocks, free books, and how expectations become rules

I think about game design pretty much constantly. Have you seen the thing where people are painting and hiding rocks for kids to find? It started a while back, but it's pretty much exploded everywhere over the past six or eight weeks. Following the local group for it on Facebook and watching it grow has me thinking a lot about how, in the course of human events, unstated expectations become rules.

So, the core activity is people get rocks and paint them and hide them in public spaces for others to find. Beyond that it's fairly universal for someone who's participating to have created a facebook group for the rock activity in their community, and common for folks painting rocks to put text like "Springfield Rocks facebook" on the bottoms of them in hopes rock finders will share photos and stuff in the group.

It's in following the facebook groups that you start perceiving people's assumptions. Is the whole thing all about creating experiences for kids? Lots of folks clearly think so. Rarely does an adult post a photo saying, "Found this cool rock. Love it. Made my day." The majority of posts are photos of kids with rocks they've found, photos of painted rocks taken before someone goes out to hide them, and photos of kids painting rocks or families painting rocks together.

Are you allowed to keep the rocks you find? Or are you expected to rehide them? Some of them? All of them? In the facebook groups there's a clear expectation that most rocks should be rehidden. You can keep a few favorites, but you should rehide the rest, either around the location you found them, or elsewhere in some other public place.

Related to that, how many rocks are you allowed to find at a location before you should stop and leave the rest that might be there to be found by someone else?

I can say with some confidence that the rehiding expectation isn't particularly manifest in people's actions. I take my kiddo to lots of parks and branch libraries and school playgrounds in the city where we live. I've seen people arrive with a basket and hide twenty-five rocks in a park. I've seen people post photos of thirty or forty painted rocks before going out to hide them in a specific place. Yet me and the kiddo have never found more than five or six rocks at a park, even after an hour and a half of looking. If people were truly rehiding most of the rocks they find there'd be hundreds of rocks hidden on the playscapes and by the trees and lampposts and picnic tables of the parks.

My kiddo loves finding rocks more than seriously hunting for them. He loses energy and patience quickly for going from tree to tree in a large park, hunting their nooks and crannies. He'll hunt pretty eagerly until he finds one, or maybe two, and then he's satisfied. He has something new to show to me, or his mama, or to other kids who might be around, and now would rather play with other kids than hunt for rocks. If he finds more rocks by accident, he wants to keep and take them home to show mama, but we've never taken more than five rocks from any one place. But kids are people and people are different. I've seen photos of kids with hauls of twenty-five or more rocks they've taken from one location. For them there's a thrill of finding rock after rock after rock. And I've seen griping in the facebook group about "people" taking too many rocks and not leaving some for others to find, and about how it's bad parenting to have allowed it.

The biggest dust-up from clashing expectations I've seen was when a woman had hidden a big lot of thirty or more rocks she'd painted with various kids' names on them in very appealing and expert lettering. It was the second time she'd done a big batch with kids' names. A few hours later another woman posted separately a photo of her daughter with almost twenty of the name rocks spread out on the family coffee table and the shit hit the fan. People reshared a screenshot of the six year old girl with all the name rocks. People called out the mom publicly. People sent her nasty outraged messages. So, what's the expectation? You can only keep a rock if it has your specific name on it? You can't take so many rocks? Name rocks are different and you shouldn't take them and rehide them in other parks because then kids looking for their name won't know where to go?

Soon then the two moderators of the facebook group posted asking for better behavior and "don't make us make a rule about how many rocks you can take". And wow, how ever would they roll out a rule like that? How would they even think they could?

Yet somehow that's what we do when our faith in others is challenged.

Have you seen the LittleFreeLibrary project? Individuals and groups and organizations and lots of community libraries build and put up outside these cute little roofed shelves of books encouraging people to take and share books.

Here's a sticker inside a book my kiddo took from a LittleFreeLibrary in a neighboring town:

Seriously? With the rocks it's not uncommon to find them from other towns in your local park. You can tell from what people have painted on the underside. This reads like, "Don't let our books get out into the wider LittleFreeLibrary supply."

So that's what I'm thinking about a lot lately--how unspoken expectations and challenges to our faith in others, how actual disappointments in the conduct of others or abiding lack of faith, lead us to create rules. I'm vaguely thinking about a possible roleplaying or storytelling game in which new rules get created during play as a process from player expectations and faith and disappointments.