GCG

"semplicemente era mia intenzione (mi scuso se non abbastanza palese) identificare alcuni giocatori come "coloro che giocano per il senso di potere dato dall'aspetto aleatorio" e "gli altri"

[cite] vertigo:[/cite]
anche qui non facevo riferimento a nessun "glossario specifico nato in seno ad alcuna status wars" semplicemente era mia intenzione (mi scuso se non abbastanza palese) identificare alcuni giocatori come "coloro che giocano per il senso di potere dato dall'aspetto aleatorio" e "gli altri" .

non attribuire alle mie parole significati che non hanno, nel dubbio chiedi.

[cite] Gugliandalf:[/cite]
La fine di un mito!

uno sviluppo che non gradivo.

Ho quindi creato la città e i personaggi senza seguire il verbo di Baker.

Lo Steward, la moglie, la ragazzina, lo scagnozzo li ho creati collegandoli in una maniera ambigua, di modo che la storia potesse cambiare secondo le mosse dei PC (esempio se i Cani non avessero sospettato della moglie lo scagnozzo non sarebbe intervenuto).

Detto questo, non essendo sicuro di quanto i giocatori necessitassero di spazio ho perciò preso un attimo il controllo in alcune situazioni.

Inoltre sono ricorso poche volte ai Conflitti soprattutto per esigenza di tempo

Questo era soltanto un one shot e vorrei presto iniziare la cronaca. Perciò mi scuso per non aver seguito le regole come pure Michele consigliava ma la questione e che volevo testare il sistema (che ha risposto alla grande) e i limiti del GM.

[cite] Fabio "Shia" :[/cite]Quindi addirittura ancora più facile (e sai mai.....) di come me la ero pensata: il giocatore chiede come vuole la scena di massima (obiettivo, setting, argomento) ed io GM gliela "confeziono".

[cite] khana:[/cite]
Il Contratto Sociale non ha accezioni ulteriori alla tacita condivisione di regole. Ed è lo stesso ambito per il quale viene usato nel Big Model; quali siano queste "regole" non fa parte del significato.

tanto per concludere i due paragoni, "autorithy" dovrebbe essere di pertinenza "social contract"... nel senso che è implicita anche l'assegnazione di autorità verso un "governo" in cambio di "ordini".
Questo però nel GdR va in conflitto con quei GdR che non prevedono il "master" come figura tradizionale... anche se si potrebbe obiettare che un "master" di fatto esista lo stesso e sia un ruolo condiviso da tutti, come lo è l'oligarchia senatoriale in politica per le comunità ristrette.

Il Big Model è funzionale, ma alcune terminologie prese a prestito da altri vocabolari possono essere discusse.
Una è questa. Non la si discute perché, in fondo, di dove posizioni la definizione di "autorithy" non interessa molto, a patto che dopo averla assegnata venga rispettata (e questo è cmq ambito di Contratto Sociale nella sua accezione più estesa -> rispettare le cose fissate).

The first concept is that "leadership" and "authority" are not the same things. I'm going to use leadership to indicate a sort of elected or consensually-recognized social status, involving looking to a given person's judgment about stuff. The key point about being a leader is that one can't grab and hold leadership; it is only granted, and it's always subject to revision by the led, at the very least through suggestions and even through non-painful transference of the role. That's important.

Whereas I'll restrict authority to a division-of-labor level. A lot of things need to get done in this particular endeavor, and you do this, and I do that, he does that other thing, and when X comes along, he and I will take care of that as well. This is best understood, I think, as a way for a person to know he or she does not have to do a certain thing, yet can rely upon it being done. One of the implications of looking at it this way is that challenging authority is not really done, not if everyone's doing his or her job, and suggestions are emphatically only suggestions.

So this thread is, I think, about leadership. OK, brace yourselves, because I'm now going to take the concept of "the GM" and stomp it into the dirt, at length, and coming up an hour later to slit its throat to make sure.

Just a list

What sorts of leadership and authority are associated with this concept of "the GM"? Here's a quick rattling-off of what I've observed.

GMing as social organizer
GMing as host
GMing as rules-owner and introducer
GMing as creative leader
GMing as social/procedural leader
GMing as player with specific authority

The interesting thing is that you can remove the illusory-centralizing concept of "GM" from all of these, and in doing so, a number of insights emerge. The first is that many of these can be disconnected from one another, i.e., don't have to be the same person. The second is that within any one of them, the role/function can shift from person to person without causing terrible traumas. The third is that that gaming terminology and traditions have fucked the whole thing up by nesting these functions in precisely backwards order.

I'll break the above into two basic concepts.

The real-people, social leadership roles

Like any social activity, role-playing does need (1) an organizer to ensure others' presence. It does need (2) a host (even in a public place, one person typically acts as host!). Finally, it does need (3) someone to own and suggest a particular rules-set (i.e. "game").

All these are pretty straightforward, but I want to make two points about them. First, none of these three sub-parts have to be the same person. Second, people often see this social concept as a result or subsidiary of the next concept, whereas in fact the two are not necessarily even related, and if they are, it's perfectly all right (perhaps better) for the connection to operate the other way 'round.

The real-people, creative leadership roles

1. Role-playing does need a creative leader as a kind of overseer, either at the start or ongoing or both. This is a very difficult topic and I anticipate a lot of incomprehension. What I'm talking about is someone who, formally or informally, is looked to by the others as a reliable judge of what to do, or how it's going when under way, in aesthetic terms. This is why, for instance, I have always said Sorcerer works best when one person, at the outset, really has a strong notion of the look, feel, and general (if unstated) questions, when suggesting it to the others. But I also want to stress that this kind of leadership is not dictatorship or controlling at all. It wholly depends on the others (i.e. it's informally "elected") and in many cases, it actually shifts around person to person, which is quite functional and may depend on different people's personalities and expertise.

2. Role-playing does need a social/procedural leader during play itself. This is absolutely key, especially for games that around here, we call "GM-ful," like Universalis or Polaris. The rules might say, "Now the person to the left takes the next turn," but in practice, someone real is actually monitoring whether this happens and reminding others, or correcting them. As with the above one, some groups arrive at a more communal version of this role, but my point is that it's a necessary, important role. I anticipate that people are going to have kittens over the idea that this role (procedural is being split out from the above one (creative, as well as split out from the owner of the physical book, but oh well, I'll brace for it.

The within-the-fiction authority roles

In the thread Silent railroading and the intersection of scenario prep and player authorship, I outline four types of authority that always occur during role-playing, and make the key point that they often get smushed together by assumption, when they don't have to be. I also make the point there that when one gets distributed differently from what other people are used to, they might flip out because the only alternative they can imagine is total absence of authority, i.e., anarchy.

For present purposes, though, I am saying that any organization of authority can itself be placed within this scheme of leadership I'm outlining ... but notice that I've put this third (at the bottom), and you should think of it as subordinate to the two types of leadership above it.

All right, now for the difficult part

If any of these functions are to be centralized in any formal way, then the order I've put them in (top-down) should indicate which supercedes which, looking at any two of them. And that going the other way is rife with potential social/structural flaws.

I suggest that nesting the concepts from bottom-up causes problems for extremely basic social reasons, not specific to role-playing at all. Here's an example.

Let's say Bill is a good procedural leader, but happens not to be the person who holds situational authority in a particular game, who is James. James is thus nominally "the GM," and part of his job (in this game and group) is to set scenes and play NPCs. So, James goes ahead and sets a scene or has an NPC do something, but in a fashion that doesn't fit with what's been done or understood to be done so far. Bill steps in and says, wait a minute, that's not following the procedure, let's back up a minute. Wham. Power-struggle.

Why? Because, I suggest, everyone inherently knows that a thing is only fun insofar as someone doesn't violate the procedure everyone else thought was the way to do it. James' authority over doing it is inherently not the same, and not as powerful, as whoever-has-authority over how to do it.

However, in this case (gaming), everyone shares the same verbal illusion or delusion is that it does ("situational authority over the fiction emcompasses procedural leadership in general"). So James gets mad and everyone gets nervous, because (a) they want James to do his job, but (b) they do trust Bill in his understanding of the procedures of how Bill should do it. So now it's cognitive dissidence - by supporting Bill, they mistakenly think they'll undermine James in his function, but by supporting James, they correctly know that procedures will now be up for grabs, and they don't want that either. The whole concept of "the GM" then blankets this mess and turns it into an indigestible, stinking hummock.

If I'm right about that, then the worst-case scenario would be ...

a) Calling a person "the GM" because he or she holds the bulk of the four types of authority.
b) Then assuming that the same person, because he or she is "GM," automatically is the social/procedural leader; and continuing up, the creative leader (i.e. we smush the three creative subtypes together)
c) OK, now we look up to the social level and automatically smush all three social subtypes there together too (social organizer, host, rules-owner and suggester).
d) And finally, since this "GM" exists as a total helmsman over the smushed-together creative level, it is now presumed that he or she is also the main person involved in the smushed-together social level.

Gee, that's funny, the worst-case scenario seems to be what a whole lot of people do. So either I'm entirely wrong and all those people are happy as clams, or I'm pointing out some very negative embedded traditions in our hobby that should be reconsidered as soon as possible.

So, Paul, what I'm seeing in your post all seems like grappling among the various types of leadership, and your focus seems to be on the negative versions - a person hosting because they want attention, for instance. I tend to take a more benign view, that hosting is part and parcel of social activities, and only problematic when someone is being dishonest or weird about it. However, I am also saying that in gamer culture, a number of deeply-embedded and assumed fallacies have led to such dishonesty and weirdness taking root more commonly than they otherwise might have.

[cite] khana:[/cite]Hmm... il Social Contract è una definizione implicita di un rapporto tra enti sociali.
Questo anche in politica.