Here is a tutorial level. See if you recognize it.

Say you’re given two characters and one objective: get up the hill and retrieve the water. No other explanation than that. No backstory, no lore drop, or other hints on why his well and what’s so special about that water since there is a babbling brook a short distance away. Your logical mind might argue that the well is not as positioned to provide adequate water, and you might need to strain to retrieve any of it given its relative position to the water.

You attempt the objective and fail spectacularly. No retry prompt is given—just a nasty failure message, all caps in red no less. The system is mocking you. When you try to make inquiries, the game reminds you that since you were four and it rhymed, you had to try.

Jack and Jill is twenty-five words long. In those 122 characters, you get more than an objective you get a quest, a co-op partner, and a fail state. As any game designer might tell you, this is an onboarding sequence.

The last part may have piqued your interest.

I’ve spent most of my life studying systems. Since the early days when I first learned of Jack and Jill, I have been fascinated by how a computer game would keep track of inventory, player status, and other world events. I found the order and fairness of that system a good measure of how well it worked.

As I sat down to design my last LitRPG project, I thought of these nursery rhymes as a good way to look at the systems that would be contained within a game and the clever way they install themselves into our minds. The rhyme and rhythm aren’t decoration; they’re compression. They are the reason a verse could survive centuries of oral transmission before someone thought to write them down. The earliest known publication was Tommy Thumb’s Song Book, 1744. The rhymes were old then. A French verse for remembering the days of the month was popular in the thirteenth century. These words persisted for hundreds of years in one place: our collective minds.

Some believe that certain nursery rhymes are related to catastrophic events. For example, Ring Around the Rosie is related to the plague; Humpty Dumpty is a cannon where every verse is coded with atrocity. Scholars have been debunking these for decades. Folklorists have pointed out that most rhymes were pop songs of their era. It’s a good story, which is why it spread so far and wide.

But I think that the debunkers stop short of one unsettling truth. The dark secret of nursery rhymes isn’t hidden in the text but in its delivery mechanism. They embed themselves in our minds long before we can read and stick with us for a lifetime.

A game tutorial teaches you its rules so you can play. A rhyme teaches you its rules and never tells you what the game is. What kind of system runs for hundreds of years?

That question is the reason the RHYMEWORKS series exists.