"Social Contract" and Player Expectations

I've been doing a lot of reading at The Forge and at the IGDA forums.

In the IGDA Game Design forum, there are a lot of people talking about making deeper, more "expressive" games with artistic merit. One point that keeps cropping up is that in making a game about how useless it is to fight Fate, the game will need to make player choices useless. When this point is made, the poster argues that this is not a bad design decision, it's just part of how to illustrate the premise. My feeling is that you should at least warn the player before they play the game that it will be this way.

Which brings me to the term "Social Contract" as used at The Forge. The Forge provisional glossary defines the term as:

All interactions and relationships among the role-playing group, including emotional connections, logistic arrangements, and expectations. All role-playing is a subset of the Social Contract.

In other words, the social contract is what goes on with the role-playing group itself. Determining the social contract involves deciding who to play with, what game to play, what roles people should play (e.g., who's the GM), and what kind of behavior is acceptable (e.g. Are players allowed to question GM decisions? Is the GM's word law, or is the rulebook's word law?). For most role-playing groups, this is usually handled implicitly and not discussed. This can obviously create problems when two people have different ideas of what the social contract allows...

I think that games, especially the experimental ones that push the boundaries of gaming, need some sort of social contract. The games need to let the players know what they're in for, and also what kind of behavior the game expects from the players. The first requirement is partly handled by advertising copy and game box text, but I think a more detailed description of the designer's goals would be helpful. The second requirement is a rather touchy subject; most developers strive to give the player at least the illusion of complete freedom. But I think that in a way, it's part of the first requirement. It means saying "This game is meant to be played like this. You can play it another way, but you might not enjoy it as much. If you don't want to play this way at all, go find another game." Most games now fall into well-defined genres, so most players know what to expect from the game, just like most readers know what to expect from genre books. But when pushing the boundaries, it's a courtesy to tell the player where you're going.