Assigning Expert Authority to the Dominant Player in Role-Playing Games
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi16.640Keywords:
Authority, social power, player behavior, gamesplaining, passive content, implicit content, game cultures, glorification of knowledge, rules lawyering, tabletop role-playing games, game master, player behaviorsAbstract
This paper investigates how a dominant player is socially assigned expert authority that legitimizes behaviours of gamesplaining and rule lawyering: it delves into how authority is distributed and validated between players and examines how social norms and implicit consent play a part in both the validation of authority and the normalization of exercises of power. The research introduces a synthesized framework derived from theoretical analysis of the social process of assigning and consolidating “expert authority” (Haugaard 2018 & 2021) to the dominant player in the context of playing tabletop role-playing games.
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