Authority in Play
Disinvesting hierarchy in cooperative storytelling
Roleplaying games — as an artform, — is one of the few bastions of artistic stewardship and collaborative, shared endeavours that have not been neatly enclosured. Nevertheless, its resisting potential as silly art that defies psychopolitical1 expectations of the commodified individual makes it also a prime frontier for colonization of the last shared spaces, and its vulnerabilities need to be acknowledged. Even those that don’t worry about the development of a critical artistic framework and the production of the art, power imbalances and hierarchies are concerns of everyone involved in this art form. Uncritical reproduction serves nobody besides established interest.
As such, I came to believe that one cannot ignore the question of authority when devising a critical framework. I keep coming back at it as I do further work and research for Split/Party, so I think others may find some of my personal thoughts useful.
The Case Against The Game-Master
The original sin of authority in games; the role of GM is at the center of most interpretative discourses about authority. When you ask anyone about authority in roleplaying games, most people’s first and last thought will be the figure of the Game Master.
It is easy to see why the artform would chaff against this role; it is the perfect symbol for the contradictions tearing it at the seams. The current version of this artform owes much to postmodernity and its understanding of power, knowledge and social connections creating/describing the conditions for it to flourish; you cannot imagine roleplaying to become a thing in Modernity, as it cannot be used to teach artillery tables to ignorant nobility — and private-ownership absolutist society had had centuries squashing collaborative storytelling before that. In opposition to the emergence of ideas and schools of thoughts that allowed roleplaying to even become a thing, its inception in the 70s took in the worst of anti-social, humanist2, essentialist ontological and epistemological thought among its “creators” and made that ideology synonymous “the art of roleplaying games” — all assumptions baked in, still barely contested up to this day. As such, this contradiction must and will be constantly addressed, as many try to ignore or solve it: it is the beating heart of the beast.
The anti-social, essentialist nature of Dungeons and Dragons is self-evident to anyone willing to analyse its discursive apparatus. This is replicated and reproduced not only within its affiliated branding, but also in ideological revivalists and those that define themselves solely by their contrast with it/whatever the brand owner is doing at time. You don’t need me to tell you what, but the contrast that is also self-evident is that indulging in the art is resisting and fighting against this ideology; “fix it yourself” and so on have been applied to individual elements of the embedded nature of the Dragon game — if not to it in its entirety.
For this dance to happen, for the game to be more than a pre-packed toy, for you to do more than the baked in ideology, there is the need of a clearly defined hierarchy “at the table” — a composer, maestro, discipliner — in the role of the Dungeon/Game Master. This figure acts as a great filter, as the enabler of which interpretative discourses can be brought to the art and expressed through it.
As such, “what to do about Game-Masters” is how many approach this still-unsolved contradiction about what making the art is and requires to exist and what the original 3 idea of the art was. To remove hierarchy from the game, to flatten the vertical structure into an horizontal one, the role of the Game-Master has to change. Disinvest its powers; reduce the role of rulings with more prescriptive design; shared and delegated narrative control; more solo games; “GM-less” games, etc.
I don’t need to go into details why many artists in this form have found to be a logical and worthwhile to pursue4. Of course, you don’t get such an approach to ontologically assigned original notions of the artform without Reaction; and Reaction was soon to follow.
The Case Against The Designer
The Reaction against this contradiction-addressing approach is based in the ideas that, well, the “designer” — not used here as the designer, but as a stand in for any auteur artisté involved in the artform, if they even do any actual design work is immaterial5 — is actually the tyrant abusing their power and calcifying hierarchy. They accept authority is always going to be a part of the artform and that at best it must be properly managed — one may think of this as a “philosopher-king” approach to Game-Mastering if one is unkind, seasonal clown police if one wants to be precise — where chaos is invited in but the necessary order is enforced by the Game-Master. Or, as some scholars of the art put it when addressing prospective Game-Masters:
How you and your friends play games is not magically dictated by the opinions of others. No one gets to tell you and your players how to have fun. Find out what works for your table. I imagine that if someone says you’re doing things wrong, they mean well. They want to help you have the same kind of experiences that they find fun. But there are any number of hidden variables between their experience and yours. The principles are partially meant to help disambiguate what people mean by “OSR” and old school style play, and clarify the reasoning behind certain rules and methods.6
The contradiction remains, but at the same time, many are appeased as either idea is seen by different actors as solving the hierarchy problem. But of course, this is not a sustainable state, and the same solution that seems so obvious in the psychopolitical present — pinning the authority issue as a Game Master issue — is also very resistant to this Reaction of creating the Dessinateur Auteur as an effigy of authority to be sacrifice during the Winter solstice. Which, of course, only leads to rising Reaction from the against-the-GM thinkers, which feeds into harsher reaction from against-the-Design-thinkers, and so on and so on. It gets pretty ridiculous as such things tend to do.
Both sides then fail to learn from what is there to be said from the other, but their most impressive art expressions always come from tackling this contradiction at the core of the artform. There is much one can appreciate after cutting through stock phrases and memes shared for the purposes of ideological reproduction.
The case against designers raises extreme important points about the nature of authority, its role in games, the role of Game-Masters, and how to best manage this authority, how the rules and lore are indeed little tyrants, and power in the artform is not something that should be enforced from the outside — hierarchy, if there has to be some, has to be willing invested by peers, not hard-coded in a text. This critic, driving much of their ideas and imaginary, is precious and one ignores at risk to their own personal enrichment.
It fails to make progress, however, because it is too ontological obsessed with truths about “Game” and “Play”, which keeps them stuck reproducing the same anti-social and essentialist tendencies — while failing to get the language and flexibility of post-modernity that allows the artform to even be7, much less meeting people at the level they are at.
This is gonna do nothing about the contradictions about hierarchy of the art. We cannot stay here. We need to zoom out if we are to get something from these musings. Something besides Leviathan complaining about Behemoth and Behemoth saying that actually you should be inside its belly rather than Leviathan's.
Seeking Synthesis: How Do I Take Back The Authority I Granted To You?
So, we have two nodes through which the contradiction of the artform is seen, and both approaches have harsh limitations. Against-the-GM is “just vibes” and/or failed scientific models8, Against-The-Designer are too ideologically rigid and unable to address the issues they find in the contradiction; these are somewhat valid criticism that goes back and forth, in more circular and nastier words.
But what can we learn if we do discourse analysis to the way both arguments talk about the obvious contradiction? What do we do if we reject the confining language that the still-newborn artform uses to speak of itself and use wider-range language about social knowledge?
Authority Discourse
Authority is present as an assumption in roleplaying games. The way this artform works, it works better rejecting rigid hierarchy and authority.
Anti-GM
Hierarchy and authority can be removed from games.Local authorities are recognized or challenged. Systematic and higher tier social and material hierarchies are acknowledged and used to challenge local ones, and allow parity.GM is the main source of hierarchy and authority. This can be addressed through game design.The artform fails to meet where people are to because of its rigidity of what it can be, authority-wise and somanythings-wise.Thesis: The issue of authority can be addressed in a systemic matter, allowing a horizontal hierarchy between all artists, backed by social dynamics.
Anti-Designer
Hierarchy and authority cannot be removed from games. A GM answers locally, an auteur does not. Both are nodes of hierarchy and authority.Invested power and authority must be managed at the local level. This cannot address the problem of the “designer”.This artform fails to meet the people at the level they are because they fail to acknowledge the incompatibility of seeking ontological truths with how people actually engage in the production of the art. Anti-Thesis: The lack of authority is a false one, as power is the ability to discuss which and how social discourses are allowed to happen; systemic imperatives will limit which interpretative repertoires are allowed in the artform, calcifying a super hierarchy.
A pattern starts to emerge, and is becoming clear how we are failing to make any process — how much of the conversation refuses to acknowledge it is even about this relationship to authority? Now, I’m misleading you with the title of this section. I’m not gonna propose a synthesis; if you have been reading me for any amount of time, you know how much I resist prescriptive thought. But I will share some random-ass ideas that I’m bringing to the social process of synthesis.
Well, this is a problem of authority, is it not? I may or not be of a certain political bent that has been struggling with the issue of authority for centuries.
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. 9
Anarchists don’t avoid the question of authority; it has been always well accepted from both Modern and pre-Modern anarchism that the maintenance of equality without hierarchies requires, paradoxically, accepting authority1011. Authority is inescapable, and in fact, desired — bootmakers and boots. The problem is how authority is invested and how it is retracted; it cannot be allowed to become calcified in hierarchies and systems of power. Authority cannot be allowed to become hierarchy.
What does this view of authority looks like when applied to the art? Federico Sohn’s article of dice and other randomizers as stranger kings is a perfect example of how we already do this while performing this art. There is much benefit to approach the authority within the contradiction of the artform, such an important thing limiting its maturation and potentials, through the lens of anarchism — no matter which angle you approach it. Here follow some thoughts when I did this myself:
The idea that you can design yourself out of the authority issue, so common among against-GM, is not going to work, because it misidentifies and misaddresses the problem. Against-the-Designer ideology has correctly identified the problem with calcified, systemic authority and its potential for wide-reaching harm by conditioning and replicating dangerous/limiting cultures of art. We can see how this strong calcification can lead to issues in game like Alice is Missing or Ten Candles, and the conflict between overbearing design and consent, safety and comfort.
No matter the form of authority, it should be easier to retract and reject than it should be to invest in the first place.
There are good reasons to not want to invest authority within the community of artists engaging with the game. Authority emerges from three social/material points: power (violence and exclusion from it), knowledge (exclusive information that effectively changes material conditions), and charisma (being a little guy and it is your birthday)12; those gonna shape the investment process and how to be retracted; friends may not want to do this to friends, consciously or not. This is why a randomiser or a systemic arrangement can be favoured, as described by Federico.
With the caveat that design alone won’t save us, there are so many reasons to engage with design with the goal to manage authority. For starters, “design” is gonna happen — even just homegrown formalized procedures at the table can become a calcified super structure. So we only benefit from tackling it seriously, to be invested and desinvested as needed.
System design science has been dealing with the danger of calcified systems, authority, variability, steering and equality for longer than this art13. We may benefit when designing systems from looking into the science of those — especially how such systems are supposed to have an “expiration date” and waste away.
Thinking of examples of systems that design systems that take authority, and just as readily desinvest it and they themselves undergo autophagy; while I’m sure I will come up with more examples when I bring this lens as part of my critical arsenal, two different ways to tackle this have been Ironsworn (radical in how quickly it grants and withdraws authority across asymmetric yet horizontal peers) and nested systems like Voidheart Symphony (levels of recursive systems wither away, reemerge and establish themselves through whatever you decide is play).
If we concluded that “GM” is often used as a stand-in for authority, no game is really GMless. The best “GMless” games, like a good Belonging Outside Belonging name, have an engine that neatly allocates and withdraws authority, and neatly packages of authority in very narrow subjects that make sure any authority is single purposed. So, in terms of authority, GMless games are either: a) GMfull, authority is sharp and decisive but within multiple actors and for very specific frameworks and can and will be quickly withdraw; b) remote GM, where the text is itself an asynchronous/silic GM, ultimate calcified authority that you “can make it your own game” the same way you can make your own society without the capitalism and private property; c) lying and needs to have authority invested in some manner but is hiding this from you.
If I can muster a conclusion so far, is going back at the goal of meeting people at the level they are at, if we look at Pop/Trad Games, they offer people what they want by offering both local and systematic authority — there is clearly something there people benefit from this redundancy. We have done a lot about roles and replacing roles to prevent authority being invested in the first time; perhaps it is time we spend some effort on how to retract this authority as needed.
There is nothing wrong with having kings as long as one allows a healthy culture of regicide to bloom.
You may know this as you feel into your bones: “commodify your hobbies”, “never stop hustling“ and “I should start a podcast.”
Only in the human sense that individual human beings are the sole drivers of their thoughts and actions, in this context, that the player and player character form a thought/action duality that defines a “Human individual” — especially if said individual is an elf.
Original here pertains only to the Modern period, because as it befits the Modern ideologies, they don’t think highly of anything that preceded them as kinda of a requirement.
If I do, go on, I would like to point out that the solutions so far have been to invest that authority in a designer, so a GMless game is in fact a “Remote GM” game; GMful, where authority is shared and is quickly invested or desinvested or they just lied to you and the game works hoping you do stuff you do on other games anyway/get a de facto GM. I lied and I will do get getting into this later.
It is never about design. It is, and always has been, about authority and hierarchy.
David Perry by way of Principia Apocrypha
Not to go too much into this, but the contemporary collaborative storytelling requires rejecting ontological truths, embracing instead social knowledge and creation of “reality” through systems of discourses. You need to accept this to accept roleplaying games as they exist can play, even if you may reject it ideologically: a game and the play of the game is gonna be a system of discourses rather than a “real” thing and what even is a game is going to be in a flux by another array of systems.
I’m using a very strict definition here of a failed model: “model creates a paradigm that fails to accommodate challenges to its established paradigm and resists attempts to a new model and paradigm to emerge, eventually losing all scientific usefulness
Bakunin, Mikhail. Dieu et l'état (1871)
Graeber, David and Sahlins, Marshall. On Kings (2017)
Scott, James C. Seeing Like A State (1999)
Graeber and Wengrow, Dawn of Everything (2022)
Beer, Stafford. Designing Freedom (1974)