 At any rate, this is how things go in the basic case. Sometimes the rules by which the maker of a metaphor is playing are so familiar and stereotyped that we can recover them without any prior effort to join in and play along, in which case we may not bother to do so. For that matter, sometimes the initiator of the game may merely go through the motions of playing it himself, failing to imagine the things he is nominally called on to imagine by make-believe signals he himself emits, in which case he merely alludes to a game that even he doesn’t bother to play.