Dominance

 "We have to look at what makes something a game, so strap in because we're about to get good and crunchy with our definitions here.  Games are sets of rules.  Rules can be generally divided into three kinds: the board, the procedures and the goals.  Goals are self explanatory.  They're the things that the player wants to accomplish in order to bring the game to a close.  Ideally, winning.  Procedures are all the things you normally think of when you hear about rules: what counts as a valid move, what are the penalties for a violation, scoring systems and so forth all fall into this category.  The board is the defined limitations of the game system and can actually be a lot of different things.  Board games have a literal board, sports have a field, video games have the game world, card games have a starting layout and role-playing games have a communal agreement of assumptions and the foundational structure of character generation.

"There's one more important characteristic and that's metaphor.  The actions taken in the game are arbitrary and symbolic.  They do not have intrinsic external consequences.  That's important because the entire point of a game is to present the challenge of conflict resolution without the actual risk.  In fact, most competitive games, from chess to football ot Starcraft are really simulations of war without the actual killing of other people."

 Dan Olson, Folding Ideas - Source Code

Power and influence occurs when we force another person to do something they don't want to do, or accept something they don't want to accept.  My team faces your team in a game of football.  Neither team wants to lose; winning forces the other team to lose — and in some circles, winning a football game is a point of honour.  When the Browns win over the Steelers, this is a reason to crow, even by fans who have nothing whatsoever to do with the game's play, except that they've bought tickets that support the owners who use the money to maintain the arena and pay the players.  It is a long reach from a fan who warms a bench to a player who risks CTE in order to win ... but sitting in the stands is also a vicarious metaphor for those in attendance.  Some of these have never played; some played once, but never reached the status to play in a professional league game; and a tiny few, a very tiny few, might relive their own experiences from when they were younger.  When the Browns win, especially over Pittsburgh, it is a reason to scream victory; to wreck cars and set Cleveland on fire, in a strange ritual of simulating war without actually participating in war.

The fundamental pleasure in winning is knowing that there are others who have lost.  Competition is a comparative apparatus ... and a biological one besides.  When two troops of primates encounter each other at the edge of their respective territories, they scream and shout at one another in a state of fury; this is an outward demonstration that they are ready for war.  We humans did the same a hundred thousand generations ago, a thousand generations ago, a hundred generations ago and all over the world within the last hour.  Shouting, stamping, taunting, threatening, demonstrating our prowess and our willingness to engage in war began as a necessary means of protecting our food supply for our troop against the danger that some other troop would diminish it.  The power and influence we exercised was to ensure that some other troop died of starvation before our troop did; and those troops that won that fight went on to give birth to the generations that gave birth to us.  The troops that lost are not represented in the present at all.

Wars are extraordinarily more destructive of late in our history, however.  As war has become progressively more destructive since the time of Lucy and far-gone Africa, efforts have been made to temper the devastation by seeking other forms of conflict resolution: negotiation, diplomacy, unification, the pursuit of higher things ... and, as it happens, games, which channels our biological urges to feel dominant into metaphorical avenues where less people die.

For some, "game" enables us to subvert the dominance-compulsion in large part.  My friends and I get together for some stickball and decide not to keep score.  Or to treat the score as something that doesn't matter.  This is possible because in fact we are already of one tribal organization ... these are my friends after all.  It is different if a group of strangers — another tribe — sees us playing stickball and asks if we'd like to play against them.  At once, the dynamic is changed.  We don't know these people; and as they start cheering whenever they make a goal, and slapping each other on the back, and start keeping score ... we're very conscious that our friendly Sunday-afternoon game is no longer that friendly.  Yet somehow, though we know we're not having as much fun as we were before, no one on our side wants to say suddenly, "Hey guys, we've changed our minds.  We'd like to just play among ourselves again."

The changed dynamic is that shame is on the table now.  Quitting is losing; even when we understand that "losing" means absolutely nothing here.  Our lives and the strangers lives won't be changed whatever happens ... yet still there's a tacit agreement among my friends that "we're going to win," because winning here is a means of escaping shame.  Our winning means that they're the ones that feel shame; and when afterwards we're congratulating ourselves, we'll say things like "Those guys shouldn't have messed with us!"  "Fucking right!"

No, I didn't play yesterday with my friends: covid and all.  But we've been here often enough we know how it goes ... and we know that when outsiders ask, the right answer when they ask if they can join is to say, "Nah, we want to play among ourselves."  We prefer to be loyal to the troop.  We've also been in that position when the outsiders don't take well to be rebuffed; when they return to the old trope of two primate groups threatening each other over territory ... though more nuanced, of course, with less screaming and jumping around.

Admitting, however, that in my teen years, going back to high school, there were groups who, if they weren't allowed to play, would want to fight for real.  Ah, youth.

Okay, so stick a pin in all that.

The communal agreement in role-playing games gives room for different groups to play different versions of D&D under an umbrella that lets them all identify as "D&D players."  Even if they play adjusted rule sets within a specific edition, even if the rules are contrary to one another, they continue to share a mutual desire to "accomplish" the game.  The differences are established along tribal lines, with each gaming group agreeing that they will play these rules and not those — and likewise disliking the pressure to play the game in a way that outsiders might want them to play.  When I, for example, stress that my readers should play in such-and-such a way, and with such-and-such an attitude, the tribal defensively begins to equate my stirring up a conflict with the need to protect and defend their tribe and customs.  That conflict awakens a spectre of shame.  Unlike the example above, however, I'm not directly competing with anyone; no one is losing because I'm not winning.  Yet there is still an inherent sense that if the territory isn't being defended, then the territory is in danger ... and to allow the territory to be lost, even if that loss was brought about by changing your mind, then shame rears its ugly head.  The biological urge is to push aside the enlightenment and go back to one's old ways.

Additionally, I don't make it easy, do I?  The way I write, the way I present my point of view, the way I vilify the old ways and mock them, the way I haul out all this psychological research about how humans think, the pedantic way I have of building up a case using a wide variety of metaphors based on both research and a good memory gives every impression that I want the reader to be ashamed that they don't run a better game.  My game or a game as dense as my game, with a rich and complicated game setting, empowering the players like most don't or won't or can't do ... it really feels like I am doing all that's in my power to diminish you, to dance and scream in your face, to scare you into getting the fuck off my territory and give up the tiny bit of ground you've managed to carve out for yourself.  The way I express myself, this can't just be a "feeling," either.  A person wouldn't write like this; wouldn't communicate as I communicate, unless they were an enormous prick with a threatening agenda.  Admit it. That's it. That's the thing that gets under your skin and stiffens your resolve to dismiss everything I'm saying.

Because ... and let's be clear ... I have to be wrong.  I have to be.  There's no other possible alternative.  I'm not there at the game table when the communal agreement between DMs and players is made.  I don't participate in con events, I certainly don't run them, I'm not invited to speak, I don't have my name on any official literature, I didn't write a module, I didn't invent one of the fourteen versions of the game, I've never received any approval from any of the known voices in the community, I'm absolutely not certified and I've made no effort at any time to get certified by any WOTC entity.  In no way do I have the least legitimacy.

Worse, I don't sound like any other DM anyone has ever read or met.  I make outlandish accusations, I attack beloved, traditional aspects of the game, I refuse to kowtow to long-established doctrine and I won't stamp "approval" on anyone who plays the game as a "game."

Do I want you to feel ashamed of the game you play?  Do I want you to feel ashamed of how much preparation you put into your games?  Or how you dungeon master?  Or about how you treat your players, what you handwave and what you won't let them do?

Is that what I want?