I love rules. Languages, systems, models. I make my own, I pick up ones I find lying around, twiddle, adapt, iterate.
I think it says something (probably a bit too much) about how my brain works. But I'm always looking for ways of framing things in these terms. There are obvious ways in which this manifests -- I write and design games, which in one way or another are a representation of something else through rules -- but it's also a big reason I love writing more generally.
There are sets of rules, models, tools, and heuristics that form the craft at every level. You have technical minutiae like grammar or punctuation. There are shortcuts and mental filters you can apply at the level of the scene, in fiction, to assess and elevate the drama. Rhetorical devices to make your point land better.
It's a nexus of interlocking rulesets, each serving a purpose and linking to one another. A lex scriptandi of rules and tools. All can be bent or discarded, but understanding the system as a whole is what gives me the confidence to actually do anything. This is not intended as a prescription, but the practice of making the implicit (because the system is there whether we perceive it or not) explicit, and then internalising that explicitness as informed intuition, is a kind of euphoria for me.
This bleeds through into 'real life' as well. I mentioned last week several connected lens on explicit understanding in conversation. It's why books like Thanks for the Feedback resonate so much with me -- they render explicit the hidden rules of parts of life (or: they form a rendering of them). And when we understand something explicitly, we are far better equipped to deal with it.