Games are a pre-text, not a pretext, but a proto-text which exists at a stage prior to text not unfinished like an experimental prototype but unfinished like a code prototype, like a precursor. It is as the object it is, finished. But it exists to be used in the creation of the finished text. Games are the food you eat to have the energy to run the marathon. Bananas are premarathonic; but where food has a great deal of impact on your ability to run a marathon, games have an enormous amount of control over the finished text you create incited by them. This incitement, and this control, is games. Congratulations, you are a machine which is used by memes symbiotically, and sometimes parasitically, to move into their next stage of life, which is typically where they engage in sexual reproduction for the purposes of varying the gene pool. Ideas are fucking in your head, right now! Can't wait till they spore.
Rules are False
This is presumptive and reductive, I'm certain counter examples exist but I'll say it for the universe is infinite and my time is infinite differently (derogatory), there are no games for which the rules are true. When we engage in game, we take the rules, and we accept them as if they were true to guide our experience; but that acceptance is contingent and voluntary, further it is adapted via our understanding of the text so we are unlikely to be accepting the literal rules of the text, but a precursor meme that we have constructed from the text.
Rules possess only the authority we grant them, and the rules we grant authority are not directly the rules of the game. Calling into question what even it is we mean when we say "rules" (proper noun). It is necessary and important that we keep an eye on the ideas we grant authority, because it can be so easy to forget we granted that authority, that they possess none such of their own, that we can retract it at a moment's notice. This is why despite being myriadly so obvious, safety tools are critical. We Forget.
Rules are fake?
But that doesn't mean that rules are valueless, that they are hollow. They are premeta, they exist for reasons and buried at the core of all reasons is communicating understanding.
Understanding is deeply complex, in the way that people are deeply complex, in the way that your skull contains you and yours but only by your fingers and your words can you be indicated outward into the world. I cannot touch you in there, I will never see the you inside your skull, and you will never understand the labyrinth of argument I have constructed as to why subtraction is an unnecessary mathematical operation, but this isn't Subtraction Is Fake, we're here about rules, we're here, to communicate.
I could never put into words any understanding I have, but I can put into words other things, let's call it data, information, and knowledge, in the grand tradition of database theory.
Data is facts, it is 68 degrees Fahrenheit, according to my thermostat. I can inform you that I like this temperature at this time, and this time of year it tends to be approximately 0C outside, so you can know from your understanding of homes that I have a source of heat which is operated by my thermostat; that is if you have ever lived somewhere where it is relevant that homes do not retain heat perfectly, such as the northern half of the united states. But what is the understanding, that it is 68 degrees, a temperature I like, which is maintained for me by a functioning heat source, despite the actions of nature? Myriad, endless, here lies the web of implication from which we derive our capacity to assume, the most important functionality Humans possess (along with many animals.)
You could assume via implications that I am home, because I wouldn't prefer to heat my home like this while I'm away. You could know, via these facts, that if you took my hand, you would feel warm to me as I feel cold to you, because we can only feel the difference, and the difference is symmetric; assuming you have an understanding of thermodynamics and thermoperception.
The rules exist to present you with data, information, and knowledge, such to induce you to produce an understanding, and with the hope that you will produce something similar to a specific understanding.
Rules are fake.
You have with certainty met someone who likes a thing you like, but has a completely different, perhaps even incompatible relationship with it. Maybe you like baseball for the athlete stories, and they like it for the statistics. One tree likes D&D for the high fantasy adventure, the next likes it for the calculations and analyzing the phase space to tease out ways of behaving that synergize with some interpretation of the rules. The thing about understanding is that the text leading you to produce it is not the whole of influence upon what you produce. We each contain multitudes and understanding is brewed within us.
That's not to say that the text is powerless. One could in fact judge if a text is well made by the selfsimilarity of understandings it creates in people -- if one could in fact access that understanding at all -- but it's also important to question whether any metric indicates a desired property. There is nothing at all wrong with a game where when the pre-text is ingested by many people, the internal text produced isn't similar between people.
While I can offhandedly say that D&D is bad at this, that D&D by inadequacies and carelessness produces a few statistical nodes of understanding which are not friends with each other; I can also say that I don't want to write games so sharp, so refined, so engineered, that the internal text is reliable. I want to write games that create in the reader something personal and special that I will never be able to access directly, because it's in their skull with them, where it can touch them in my stead.
All Chess Is Chess
The activity of Chess is constructing an understanding from a communal and cultural text to possess a singular shared knowledge of what the rules are, and develop a high functioning understanding of what the rules mean such that all players can engage correctly with the game, no cheating, no operative mistakes, and the only difference between players is their understanding's ability to process implications to make well judged assumptions, to arrive at victory against the other player's understanding.
If someone were to believe chess to be different than it is, then the play would be invalid by the shared rules. This is itself a rule of chess. This is contextual, and in recent years there has been a lot of talking about asymmetric games, where each player, or sets of players, play by different rules, play different games, together. But back to the beginning, the rules of chess are not true, you grant them authority, in this case you and the player you play with. We can take it as implicit that the rules of any game need to be accepted by the players to possess any form of validity at all; so if you and your friend decide that bishops and knights can share spaces because they're girlfriends, no force in the universe can stop you; though if you're playing in a tournament you may get disqualified.
All in all
Rules are a pre-text, a finished step in an unfinished process. It is within you to take the rules and understand them. We play games because we wish to understand. We write games because we wish to be understood. It can't be understated how important rules are, but it is likewise important to remember that we hold all the power.
Addenda
It's also important to remember that we are real, and in being real we are flawed. Like all flawed things our flaws can be exploited to alter how we are able to exercise power. This is not a choice, and if a text is abusing you, you are not at fault. Seek the help you can, and as you can, help your friends to seek the help they need.