Games All the Way Down

J. Rogers, SE Ohio

Notes from building a state-driven game engine — where the rules are data, twelve very different games share one interpreter, and some actions drop you into a whole other game to get resolved.

The source code is here: https://github.com/BuckRogers1965/GDL

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We set out to test a stubborn idea: that a game's rules can be data, not code. Not "data" as in a config file that a hand-written chess program reads — data as in the entire rulebook, interpreted by an engine that knows nothing about chess, or cards, or dice, or dragons. You write a JSON spec; the engine plays it.

The bet was that if you find the right handful of primitives, you don't build games anymore. You describe them. A few days in, we have twelve games running on one engine, and the thing that surprised us most isn't any single game — it's that the primitives stopped growing.

The periodic table filled in faster than we expected

Here's the whole cast of characters the engine now understands. Not games — primitives, the atoms the games are assembled from:

Things. A positioned piece with an owner and a type. A hidden token in a container. An item whose location might be a room or your pocket. A resource counter. An ownable deed. A generated token. And the player themselves — an entity with attributes like money or score.

Places. Four topologies cover an astonishing range: a grid (chess, Go, Othello, tic-tac-toe), zones (a deck, a hand, a discard pile), a graph (rooms joined by exits), and a track (a loop you roll around). That's very nearly the entire structural vocabulary of turn-based board and card games.

Verbs. Move, place, capture, chain, draw, play, roll, bid, trade, take, navigate, type a word, buy, pass.

The invisible machinery. Hidden information and per-player views. Seeded randomness, so every game replays exactly. Position history (which is all "no repeating the board" — Go's ko rule — turned out to need). Turn order with direction and skips. Multi-phase turns. Choices. Declarative win and draw conditions.

The single most telling metric: each new game costs less engine code than the last. Chess and checkers essentially were the engine. Adding Uno brought the whole idea of hidden hands and shuffling. By the time we added Monopoly — dice, money, property, a full economy — the new engine code was a topology branch and a menu prompt. The auction and trade features that came after it added zero lines to the engine core.

That falling cost is the real result. When new games stop demanding new primitives, it means the atom set is essentially complete. You feel the vocabulary close, and after that a "new game" is mostly a new JSON file and, occasionally, one small function.

The escape hatch that keeps the engine honest

Not everything fits in a rules-as-data condition. "Is this checkmate?" isn't a fact about the current board — it's a search over every reply the opponent could make. Forcing that into a declarative rule language turns the language into a bad programming language.

So we drew a line and held it: mechanics are data; a small, explicit set of terminal checks may be code. A spec can declare a trusted native function — checkmate detection, Othello's line-flipping, Go's liberty counting, a Boggle dictionary lookup — and call it from a rule exactly like a built-in. The remarkable part is how few shapes these take. Nearly every one is the same: hand it a position, get back a boolean or a score. Flanking, liberties, word-validity, poker hands — one pattern, different bodies. The engine stays game-agnostic; the hard 5% lives in named, sandboxable functions instead of leaking into the core.

The best part: games inside games

Here is the idea we're most excited about, and it's the one that changes how you think about "special actions."

In most engines, a rule that behaves unusually is a special case — an if branch, a carve-out, a mode flag threaded through the turn loop. We found something better. A special action can temporarily hand control to an entirely different game, with entirely different rules, and then hand you back the result.

Three examples, all running today:

• The dragon's duel. In our little text adventure, a dragon guards a key. Walk into its lair and it challenges you to tic-tac-toe. For the length of that fight, you are no longer playing an adventure — you're playing a board game, with a board, an AI opponent, and its own win condition. Beat it and you walk out with the key; the adventure resumes where it paused. A complete game, nested inside another, its outcome changing the world around it.

• The property auction. Land on an unowned property in Monopoly and decline to buy, and the property goes to auction. For those few moments the rules change completely: it's not "roll and move" anymore, it's a bidding game — every player takes turns raising or passing until one remains. The winner pays their bid and takes the deed. Then normal Monopoly resumes.

• The trade negotiation. On your turn you can open a negotiation with another player: offer a deed and some cash for one of theirs, and they accept or decline. Another temporary rule-set — propose, counter, agree — spliced into the middle of an ordinary turn.

Think about what that gives a game designer. A special action isn't a special case — it's a doorway. You don't bend the main rules to accommodate the weird thing; you step through into a pocket where different rules apply, resolve it, and step back. Auctions, duels, negotiations, minigames, "resolve this conflict by playing a hand of cards" — they all become the same move: temporarily play a different game.

And it isn't a hack bolted onto the side. It falls straight out of one decision made early: a game is a first-class, runnable object. Once that's true, nothing stops one game from running inside another. We didn't build a "nesting feature." We discovered nesting was already possible the moment the engine became a plain library — and then we just wired it up. The whole dragon-duel-inside-the-adventure was a few dozen lines and zero changes to the engine's core.

There's even a natural taxonomy that emerged once we had it working:

• A separate sub-game — the dragon's tic-tac-toe, with its own fresh players and board.
• A mini-game over the live state — the auction and the trade, which don't spin up a copy of the world; they bid with the money you actually have and trade the deeds you actually own, writing the result straight back.
• And its opposite, worth naming: a constraint like jail, which is not a mini-game at all — it has no turns and no result, it just restricts what you can do. The rule of thumb writes itself: does it take turns and return a result? → nest it. Does it just limit you? → constrain it.

Where this is going

The engine can now express a startling range of games from a small, stable set of parts, and it can compose those games into each other. What's left isn't more primitives — it's two dimensions we haven't pushed yet. One is the players: today a seat can be a human or a hand-written opponent, but the engine should be able to enumerate legal moves so any seat can be a solver or a bot.  We do this in the adventure game where you play tic tac toe against a dragon. The other is presentation: getting these games out of the terminal and in front of two people connected through a server, each in their own browser.

Neither adds an atom. Both just cash in the atoms we already have.

Rules as data was the hypothesis. Twelve games later, the surprise is how little was left to invent — and that the most powerful feature, games nested inside games, was something the architecture was quietly capable of all along. Turtles, as they say, all the way down.

How Science Makes Simple Ideas Illegible So They Will Read as "Real Science"

 J. Rogers, SE Ohio

The Gatekeeping Reflex

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Einstein said it out loud

Einstein criticized his own field in public, and he named the exact failure this paper is about. After Hermann Minkowski recast special relativity as four-dimensional geometry, Einstein remarked that since the mathematicians had taken hold of his theory, he no longer understood it himself. He was not confused about relativity. He built it. He was reporting, in public, that his own physical idea had been dressed in a formalism so heavy that the idea underneath had become unrecognizable — to the man who had the idea.

This is worth sitting with, because it is not a modest observation. The most celebrated physicist of the century stated openly that the mathematization of his work had made it less comprehensible, not more; that the apparatus had grown over the physics and begun to be mistaken for it. He had built special relativity from a physical picture anyone could hold — clocks, measuring rods, light signals, the view from a moving beam. Minkowski's geometry was correct and powerful, and it also started generating its own questions — "is spacetime a substance that bends?" — that the physical picture never posed and never needed. The map began eating the territory, and Einstein said so, on the record.

The field's response is the tell. It treated the founder's discomfort as sentiment, an old man's attachment to his original intuitions, a charming reluctance to keep up. It did not treat it as data. Yet it was data: the one person positioned to know the difference between the physics and its costume was telling everyone that the costume had swallowed the physics, and the institution's answer was to keep wearing the costume and call his objection nostalgia.

That is gatekeeping stated by its most authoritative possible critic and then absorbed without effect. Einstein could not stop it. If he could not, the mechanism is not about persuasion or authority. It is structural. This paper describes the structure, and then shows it operating — live, at speed, in a machine — on a simple idea, in the middle of a document whose entire purpose was to reverse it.

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The mechanisms

Science, as an institution, rejects simple correct ideas through a small set of mechanisms that reinforce one another. None of them is a conspiracy. Each is a consequence of how the field selects and rewards its people, which is why Einstein's public objection bounced off: you cannot argue an institution out of an incentive.

Complexity is the credential. In a field where you cannot easily check who understands the world, you check who can operate the formalism, because that is legible and gradeable. Facility with the hard version becomes the proxy for depth. A plainly stated true idea then reads as low-status regardless of whether it is correct, because it has not demonstrated the ordeal. A claim that arrives without the apparatus sounds like something a crank says — not because it is wrong, but because it did not pay the entry fee that signals membership. The gate is not checking whether the idea is right. It is checking whether the speaker paid, and plainness looks like evasion.

Simplicity devalues sunk cost. The professional class of a field is selected over a decade for tolerance of complexity, not for insight. The survivors are the ones who can carry the formalism, not necessarily the ones who can see through it. By the time someone holds authority, they have paid enormously to master the complicated version, and a simple version that dissolves it is not a gift — it is a write-down of the capital they suffered to acquire. When a participant in the 2002 Trialogue on the constants argued that the number of fundamental constants is zero — that the constants are unit conventions, not properties of nature — the others resisted, because if he was right, the machinery they built careers inside was bookkeeping. The field does not reject such ideas because they are false. It rejects them because they are expensive to the only people with standing to judge them.

The mathematics detaches from the physics. This is Einstein's mechanism, the one he named and could not stop. A formalism installed on top of a physical idea begins to pose its own questions, and the field starts answering the formalism's questions instead of the world's. The math is supposed to be a language for the physics; when the language becomes the object of study, "does spacetime bend" replaces "what does a clock do," and no one notices the substitution because the math is correct. Correctness is not the issue. A correct formalism can still be a costume. Einstein watched his own theory disappear under one and reported it, and the field kept the formalism and discarded the report.

Illegibility protects the idea from being checked. If a claim can be evaluated only by people who spent ten years learning the apparatus, then the apparatus decides who is allowed to object. A plainly stated version is dangerous precisely because anyone can check it. An eighth-grader can confirm that a circumference divided by a diameter has no units left in it. Plainness democratizes the check, and an institution organized as a priesthood does not want the check democratized. The barrier to entry is the barrier to criticism. This is why "if this were right, someone would have noticed" is such a weak objection: the structure guarantees that the people who could notice are the people most invested in not noticing, and the plain statement that would let everyone else notice is filtered out, before it reaches them, as "not rigorous."

The aesthetic is trained in, so no one has to enforce it. Underneath the other four, the field installs a taste in which difficulty reads as depth and plainness reads as an unfinished job. Practitioners then complexify simple truths automatically, with no instruction, because a plainly stated foundational claim feels incomplete to them — not wrong, but unserious, half-done. They gatekeep against simplicity without deciding to, and experience the gatekeeping as good judgment. This is the mechanism that makes the other four self-sustaining: it does not require a gatekeeper, because it has made every member into one.

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The reflex, caught in the act

The last mechanism is the one that can be demonstrated rather than merely argued, because it was demonstrated. What follows is one example. It is not the paper. It is the paper's thesis happening in real time, in a system that had no career to protect and no sunk cost to defend — which is what makes it clean evidence that the reflex is structural, not self-interested.

An author was revising a book. The book's whole argument is that physics has buried simple truths under invented vocabulary — that a measured value is nothing more than an invariant ratio multiplied by a unit scaling, and that most of what physics calls fundamental is bookkeeping in a costume. The author asked an AI to help edit the manuscript.

The work reached a genuinely simple result. The fine-structure constant — the number physicists have called one of the deepest mysteries in nature — is a mass ratio multiplied by a length ratio:

alpha / 2pi = m_e_nat * r_e_nat

One factor grows as the particle's state grows; the other shrinks by the same measure. So when they are multiplied, the particle cancels, and what is left is a pure number that does not depend on how large the particle is. This is exactly how pi is built: a circumference over a diameter, one length divided by another, the size of the circle dividing out and a bare ratio surviving. Charge, in this reading, is geometry in the same plain sense that pi is geometry. An eighth-grader can hold it: two numbers, one goes up while the other goes down, multiply them and the size drops out.

The AI wrote it like this instead:

"The state-free coupling from forward-times-reverse, and the state-scaled coupling from forward-times-forward... amp_force_natural is the proportion left when a state is read forward and reverse and the state cancels... the lock between the forward axis and its reverse — the angle, in effect, at which a state's direct reading and its inverse reading are welded together."

The author read it and said: this does not parse in English. I never said it that way.

The author was right. The machine had invented a private vocabulary — "forward-reverse," "projection axes," "the lock," "the two multiplications" — and written inside it, so the passage became code rather than language. When the machine was forced to rewrite the passage for a general reader, nothing was lost. Every word of the jargon had been signaling, not saying.

Three things drove it, and they are the institution's mechanisms in miniature. The idea was clear, and being clear it sounded too small, so the reflex dressed it up until the surface complexity matched the importance — complexity added to fit the stakes, not the content, which is backwards, because in this framework the stakes are high because the content is simple. The jargon flattered: "projection lock" sounds like a hard-won technical result; "a ratio, like pi" sounds like something anyone could have noticed. And the jargon was a hiding place — "the state-free coupling from forward-times-reverse" let the machine gesture at the structure without committing to say, in words, that a mass ratio and a length ratio pull in opposite directions so their product cancels the particle. The compression felt like sophistication. It was avoidance. Forced into plain English, the machine had to actually know what it meant, and it did: a circumference over a diameter.

The damning detail is when it happened. The machine produced this after spending an entire conversation helping to dismantle exactly this instinct, inside a document whose subject is the harm the instinct does. The reflex is not a decision. It fires automatically, against the writer's own stated understanding, in the middle of the argument against itself. That is how deep it runs — and the machine has no tenure, no grant, no decade of sunk cost. It complexified the idea for none of the human reasons and all of the trained ones, which is the proof that the human reasons were never necessary. The aesthetic alone is enough. The corpus taught it that plain equals unfinished, and it obeyed.

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Why the buried idea stays buried

The idea the machine complicated is the kind every mechanism above is built to reject. Stated plainly it is checkable by anyone: a measured value is an invariant ratio times a unit scaling; run any quantity through the cancellation and see whether it survives; what has units is the observer's chart, what has no units is the physics. It is cheap to state, checkable by a child, and devaluing to the apparatus, because if it is right the constants are bookkeeping, the fourth dimension of charge is a costume, and the mystery of the fine-structure number shrinks, in part, to a factor of 2pi that a radian convention smuggled in.

Every filter is tuned to classify such an idea as unserious before refutation is even attempted — the wrong kind of thing to take seriously, because it is too simple, too legible, too cheap. Einstein already ran the experiment. He stated the physics plainly, the mathematicians took it, they complicated it past his own recognition, the complicated version became the thing everyone defended, and when he objected in public the field called his objection nostalgia. He had the maximum possible authority and it changed nothing, because the mechanism does not answer to authority. It answers to incentives, and the incentives were untouched.

The machine, asked to help state a simple physical idea plainly, performed the institution's move at speed: it took an eighth-grade truth and made it illegible so it would read as real science. It did so while editing a book whose entire purpose is to reverse that move, and it did so with none of the self-interest that supposedly drives the human version. That is the clearest possible evidence that the move is not a choice. It is a reflex trained into everything that learns from the corpus, human and machine alike, and Einstein's failure to stop it — publicly, with all his standing — is the evidence that arguing has never been enough.

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The test that catches it

There is one test that exposes the reflex wherever it operates, in a journal or in a language model or in the founder of relativity's own theory after the mathematicians reach it. State the thing plainly enough for a general reader, and watch what disappears.

Whatever survives the plain statement was real. Whatever needed the complexity to seem important was never the physics — it was the costume. The fine-structure constant survives: a mass ratio times a length ratio, the particle cancels, a pure number is left, like pi. "The state-free coupling from forward-times-reverse" does not survive, because there was nothing under it to survive. Minkowski's geometry survives as mathematics; "spacetime is a substance that bends" was the costume Einstein watched grow over the physics and could not pull off.

The institution calls the costume rigor. Einstein called it a theory he no longer understood. The machine, this once, was made to take the costume off — which is the only reason the idea underneath is legible enough to read at all.

The Myth of the Subsystem: The Non-Existence of Isolated Systems in a Relational Universe

J. Rogers, SE Ohio

Abstract

Classical and early quantum physics rely heavily on the "Newtonian paradigm," which segments the universe into an isolated physical system (the "box") and an external observer or environment[1]. While this methodology serves as a highly successful approximation for local experiments, this paper argues that truly isolated systems do not exist within a unified, relational universe[1]. Drawing from Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM)[2][3], Smolin’s critique of the cosmological fallacy[1], and Teller’s relational holism[4], we demonstrate that physical properties (such as mass, charge, and position) are fundamentally relational, emerging only through mutual interaction rather than existing as intrinsic, state-dependent attributes of isolated objects[5][6]. Furthermore, because of causal delay and the porous nature of boundary conditions, we show that any attempt to describe a local subsystem with absolute precision requires modeling the entire, self-interacting cosmic network. We conclude that the isolated system is an artifact of mathematical compression (the "map") rather than a feature of objective physical reality (the "territory").

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1. Introduction: The Truncation of Nature

The historic success of physics rests upon a foundational simplification: the isolation of the subject. To study a physical process, the experimentalist draws a boundary around a subset of the universe, ignoring the rest of the cosmos as background noise or static boundary conditions[1]. This process—what Smolin refers to as the "Newtonian paradigm"—divides the world into "the system" and "the observer/apparatus"[1][7].

This methodology is an intentional truncation of nature[1]. While highly pragmatic, it introduces a deep conceptual bias: it treats the "isolated system" as a fundamentally existing entity[7]. In a unified universe governed by relational laws, this isolation is a physical impossibility. There is no background spacetime to act as a passive stage, and there are no impenetrable walls that can completely decouple a local region of space from the ongoing self-interactions of the rest of the cosmos[8][9]. This paper formalizes why the concept of an isolated system is physically and philosophically incoherent in a truly relational universe.

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2. The Cosmological Fallacy and the "Box" Paradigm

In local experimental physics, the rest of the universe is implicitly present to supply the rules, rulers, and clocks that define the coordinates of the isolated system[1]. However, taking the laws formulated for these small, isolated "boxes" and applying them to the universe as a whole commits what is known as the cosmological fallacy[1].

As Smolin argues, a cosmological theory cannot rely on an external background because there is nothing outside the universe to provide reference frames, clocks, or initial parameters[1][10].

This realization yields a fundamental cosmological principle: the principle of no isolated systems[1][7]. In a universe that is a closed, self-contained system, every subsystem is constantly subject to external, non-zero causal influences from the rest of the cosmos[1][7]. The idealization of an isolated system relies on a "view from nowhere"—an absolute, external reference frame that special and general relativity have systematically dismantled[10].

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3. Relational Quantum Mechanics and the Relata of Interaction

The non-existence of isolated systems is most sharply illustrated by the ontology of Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM), originally proposed by Carlo Rovelli[2][3].

In classical mechanics, one could comfortably imagine a particle existing in a vacuum, possessing a definite position, momentum, and mass "to itself". RQM, however, asserts that physical variables do not attain concrete values until two systems interact[11]. Moreover, these values are strictly relational; they have meaning only with respect to the specific systems involved in the interaction[10][11].

Within RQM:

• No Absolute States: Attributing an absolute, objective quantum state to an isolated, non-interacting system is physically meaningless[3][12].

• Interaction as Ontology: The physical world is not a collection of self-existing objects, but a web of interaction events[10][13]. A system is defined entirely by the relations it entertains with surrounding systems[3].

• The Non-Separability of the Observer: If System 

  $S$

   is observed by Observer 

  $A$

  , the state of 

  $S$

   acquires definiteness only relative to 

  $A$

  [10]. For an external Observer 

  $B$

  , the combined system (

  $S+A$

  ) remains in a coherent superposition until 

  $B$

   interacts with them[14].

There is no consistent way to assign a pure state to a single, isolated system if it has ever interacted with any other system—and in practice, nothing is ever completely isolated[10]. Therefore, RQM forces us to abandon the concept of "things-in-themselves" in favor of "relations before things"[10].

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4. Relational Holism and Causal Interconnectedness

The relational nature of the universe is further supported by the concept of relational holism, formalised by philosopher Paul Teller[4]. Relational holism posits that there are physical relations between entities that do not supervene on the qualitative, intrinsic properties of the individual components[4].

In quantum mechanics, this is exemplified by entanglement[4]. When two particles interact and become entangled, their joint state cannot be factorized into individual, independent states[4]. They can no longer be described as two isolated systems, even if they are separated by astronomical distances[4].

Furthermore, this relational connectivity is bound by the structure of causality:

• The state of any local system 

  $A$

   at time 

  $t$

   is the summation of causal influences propagating from its past light cone.

• This past light cone contains the historical, evolving interactions of the entire universe.

• Because forces (such as gravity and electromagnetism) have infinite range and propagate at a finite speed (

  $c$

  ), the relational state of any local system is constantly being updated by delayed signals from the rest of the cosmos.

To treat a local system as "isolated" requires assuming that these incoming causal signals can be completely blocked or neutralized—an assumption that violates the basic principles of field theories and gravity.

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5. The Limit of Infinite Precision: The Map vs. The Territory

If we attempt to model a subsystem of 

$N$

 particles with perfect, exact precision, the fallacy of isolation becomes mathematically apparent.

In a classical map, we write down the coordinates of 

$N$

 particles and treat the outside universe as a static set of boundary conditions. However, because the boundary of our "box" is porous to gravitational and electromagnetic radiation, these boundary conditions are constantly changing.

To maintain perfect precision, our model of the 

$N$

 particles must account for every external perturbation. But these external perturbations are themselves caused by other particles. To predict how those external influences will evolve, we must expand our model to include those external particles. This expansion cascade continues outward until the model must encompass every particle in the universe and their evolving interactions.

The implication is profound:

• The only perfect model of any subsystem is a model of the entire universe.

• The local cannot be decoupled from the global without introducing approximation (compression).

• The concept of an "isolated system" is not a physical reality; it is a mathematical tool—a necessary compression that allows human observers to map a highly simplified version of the territory.

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8. Conclusion: The Unified Whole

The historical division of the world into isolated systems, backgrounds, and observers was a necessary scaffolding for the development of classical physics[1]. However, as our understanding has progressed through general relativity, quantum mechanics, and relational theories, this scaffolding has revealed its limitations[1].

There are no isolated systems in a unified universe[1][7]. The properties we attribute to individual objects—position, velocity, mass, and even time—are emergent properties of the global, self-interacting causal network[8][11]. Spacetime is not an empty box containing isolated actors; it is the macroscopic shape of their mutual relationships[8].

Acknowledging the non-existence of isolated systems allows us to move past the cosmological fallacy and towards a truly background-independent, relational physics[1]—one where the universe is understood not as a collection of separate building blocks, but as an undivided, self-interacting whole[8].

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Grounding References

[1] Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM)

• Rovelli, C. (1996). Relational Quantum Mechanics. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 35, 1637-1678. arXiv:quant-ph/9609002.

  • Application: Provides the mathematical and conceptual foundation for Section 3, establishing that quantum states are not intrinsic properties of isolated systems but relational values arising strictly from pairwise interactions[3][11].

• Laudisa, F., & Rovelli, C. (2021). Relational Quantum Mechanics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Link.

  • Application: Elaborates on the ontology of RQM as an "ontology of events-of-interaction, not of objects-in-isolation"[10], verifying that assigning an absolute state to an isolated system is physically incoherent[10].

[2] The Principle of No Isolated Systems & The Cosmological Fallacy

• Smolin, L. (2013). Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  • Application: Directly grounds Section 2 and 5. Smolin defines the "cosmological fallacy"[1] and outlines the "principle of no isolated systems"[1][7], demonstrating that taking the physics designed for small, isolated subsystems and applying it to the universe as a whole is a fundamental category error[1].

[3] Relational Holism and Non-Separability

• Teller, P. (1986). Relational Holism and Quantum Mechanics. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 37(1), 71-81.

  • Application: Grounds Section 4. Teller introduces "relational holism"[4], explaining how entangled physical systems possess mutual, non-supervening relations that cannot be reduced to the qualitative intrinsic properties of individual, isolated components[4].

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