Thinking about this in terms of "rule design", I wonder if people's psychological hardware is configured to default to certain templates of what a "rule" looks like. It certainly seems like most people's initial take on rules design is usually a "don't do X" or "always do Y" kind of thing, while intentional game design can sometimes look at things from different directions or use different abstractions. I'm reminded a little bit of the "moral dumbfounding" that Jon Haidt talks about where people can seemingly spontaneously generate rationalized rules that people have broken when they have the intuition that something wrong has been done. Maybe our moral hardware or software is optimized to expect rules to look like specific enumerations of allowed or disallowed activities since (that tends to be the kind of thing that children need to be good at absorbing) so people might default to that sort of starting point for game rules as well.