Alternative understandings and types of authorship have been debated in academic literature across multiple disciplines for some time.1 In terms of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), one of the most broadly cited and relevant frameworks of authorship was conceived by Hammer (2007). Hammer’s framework makes a valiant attempt to distinguish different types of authorship present in a TTRPG play experience and highlights notions of authority and agency within each different frame. Analysing TTRPGs as primary, secondary, and tertiary texts, she breaks this framework down into:
- Primary authorship, belonging to the game designer;
- Secondary authorship, belonging to the Game Master (GM)/Dungeon Master (DM)/facilitator;
- Tertiary authorship, belonging to the rest of the players of the game.
While Hammer’s justification for this framework is sound, I argue there are more productive ways of analysing authorship and its interrelationships in TTRPGs. Specifically, I call into question the use of the chosen qualifying titles for each frame; while “primary,” “secondary,” and “tertiary” are likely only used by Hammer as chronological qualifiers that explain when each level of authorship happens in time (eg. a game designer designs and publishes the game first, so they are the primary author), there are also hierarchical and power-laden connotations that relate to such qualifiers which radically change the way that Hammer’s framework can be interpreted, particularly when relating it to wider Western notions of authorial authority. The relevance of this lies in the fact that while TTRPGs are, at their core, games, they are also narrative-driven experiences that hold deep connections to storytelling. Therefore by reinterpreting and critiquing Hammer’s framework as a hierarchy of importance of authorship and control, rather than as a chronological identifier of authorship, critical questions arise: how has Western philosophy, history, and culture influenced notions of authorship in TTRPGs? How is power materialised in TTRPG contexts? What are the implications of viewing authorship roles in TTRPGs through the lens of dominance and marginalisation? And most importantly, how else could we better imagine and analyse authorship in TTRPGs?
Historical Context of Hierarchies of Importance
The terms ‘primary,’ ‘secondary,’ and ‘tertiary’ originate from philosophical and cultural traditions that encode hierarchical relationships of importance. Their etymology alludes to this: in the case of ‘primary,’ while its earliest known usage in Middle English meant “original [or] earliest,” it was “borrowed from Latin prīmārius “of the highest importance or station (of persons), first-rate, chief” (Late Latin, “original, lying at the beginning,” Medieval Latin, “foremost, leading”), from prīmus “first, foremost, earliest, of first importance”” (Merriam-Webster English dictionary, accessed 2025). ‘Secondary’ follows from this, borrowed from the Latin “secundārius of the second class or quality,” initially used from the 14th century in the sense of “belonging to the second class in respect of dignity or importance; entitled to consideration only in the second place. Also, and usually, in less precise sense: Not in the first class; not chief or principal; of minor importance, subordinate” from 1386 before it was used to denote chronology in 1398 when related to a causational primary occurrence (Oxford English dictionary, accessed 2025a). Finally, ‘tertiary’ is borrowed from Latin “tertiārius of the third part or rank” which correlated directly to “of, in, or belonging to the third order, rank, degree, class, or category” from 1656 to the present day (Oxford English dictionary, accessed 2025b). As the root of each term is, itself, rooted in hierarchies of power, it makes sense that many academic framings of these terms follow suit.
We can see the influence of these original root meanings in the work of many influential scholars and philosophers who have had a profound influence on not only Western academia but also Western society and culture. Aristotle’s differentiation of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary substances’ in the Categories underpins his initial theory of substance in general (Robinson & Weir, 2024), and speaks to the imperative of such hierarchies of importance not only in ancient Western civilisation but philosophy and meaning: “thus all the other things are either said of the primary substances as subjects or in them as subjects. So if the primary substances did not exist it would be impossible for any of the other things to exist.” (Categories 5.2a, in Ed. Ackrill, 1988, p. 7) Similarly, Kant differentiates between a priori and a posteriori knowledge (two terms originating from Aristotle himself, which were first used in the Organon) in Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1969)to explain his theory of transcendental deduction. Kant argued that while experiential knowledge (a posteriori) is important, it relies on intuitive and foundational knowledge (a priori) to exist. This creates a hierarchy where foundational knowledge is prioritized. Though many hierarchies of importance exist in Western philosophy, these key examples trace how both the language and concepts of terms ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ (and thus, ‘tertiary’) align themselves more firmly concerning power, importance, and influence, rather than simply chronology.
Such usage also applies to academic narrative theory and narratology discussions, to bring these ideas closer to the realm of TTRPGs. For example, similarly to Hammer’s levels of authorship, Genette introduced the concept of diegetic narrative levels in literature, in which “any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed” (in Trans. Lewin, 1972/1980, p. 228; original emphasis). Thus, a hierarchy of diegetic levels is produced: extradiegetic (narrators outside the story), intradiegetic (characters within the story), and metadiegetic (stories told by those characters). Each level reflects a shift in narrative power, with authority diminishing as one moves deeper into the levels. Tracing their origins back to at least those of Homer’s Odyssey, Genette’s diegetic levels are encoded with a hierarchy of importance that is extremely similar to Hammer’s levels of authorship in TTRPGs, where extradiegetic narrative is seen as foundational and creates base context for everything on every other level, including the role of the narrator and author outside of the story world, who controls how the narrative is communicated to the reader (much like how the game designer dictates the rules and systems that constrain the play and story). The other secondary and tertiary levels map to Hammer’s levels as well: intradiegetic narratives describe the story world itself, and intradiegetic narrators can be translated to the role of the Game Master as a secondary author, mediating the gap between the designer and the players; whereas metadiegetic narratives recount stories within stories2, and these subordinated metadiegetic narrators can be read as the tertiary authorship belonging to the players, whose actions and decisions create narratives within the constraints imposed by the first two levels. Mirroring Genette’s diegetic levels and Hammer’s levels of authorship highlights in these theories the authority that the primary narrator and author, respectively, have over the entire work. Therefore, it can clearly be said that even if Hammer did not intend to imbue her levels of authorship in TTRPGs with such a hierarchy of power, when we take into account how such hierarchies have dominated Western philosophy, academia, and literature over several centuries, it becomes nearly impossible to read these levels as anything else.
Power and Marginalisation in Authorship Roles
If we turn to Barthes’ The Death of the Author (1967/1977, Trans. Heath), we begin to see how limiting and damaging ascribing full authorial power to the ‘original’ author can be, as “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” (p. 147). Barthes eloquently argues that the importance placed on the identity of the author of a work of literature ultimately limits how a text can be read, critiqued, and understood. By engaging in hierarchies of importance, such as those of Genette or Hammer, and placing primary or foundational authorship (and thus, power) on the shoulders of the original author or game designer, we are restricting and regulating the way a text or game can be interpreted, played, or even enjoyed. Barthes declares,
“Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s utility lies not in its origin but in its destination.” (p. 148)
Likewise, Foucault’s What is an Author? (1969/1998, Trans. Hurley et al.) states that an author of a work is “the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (p. 222), emphasising the power that modern society gives to the name and figure of the author over the interpretation and legibility over the text in discourse. In an adjacent vein to Barthes, Foucault writes,
“…the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” (p. 221)
Thus, as Barthes and Foucault both point to, it is the reader, bringing their own interpretation of the text to life through reading, that ascribes that text a meaning more meaningful than the original author’s intentions; it is in the reader’s mind that words, texts, symbols, become alive and story and, therefore, meaningful. Likewise, if we apply this to a TTRPG context, it is the GM and the players who bring the game to life through play via their interpretation of the words on the page. It is the GM and players that ascribe meaning, that make such words (and the order they’re in) a game worth playing.
This is not to discount the role of the game designer; if the game designer did not design the game nor write the words on the page, there would be no game, and no play. Rather, it is to say that the foundational and primary power does not belong to the game designer, but the people playing the game. This is a notion that some authors have already come to understand—such as Salen & Zimmerman (2003) describing game design as a kind of second-order design, and Baur (2019) writing that game design is removed from play and how the players will play the game.
But, as Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988/1994) implies, the identity of the author is inherently important in the sense that those with dominant identities are afforded the power to devalue marginalised and intersectional identities, continuing to Other them and speak for them rather than to them. It is not the power of such authors that is of interest, but rather how marginalised voices should but empirically have not been afforded such power and authority. What is also of interest is how authors depict Others in their works—and, turning to Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) (5th Edition, Wizards of the Coast, 2014), it is painfully obvious how the earliest editions (first published in 1974), played into such harmful tropes by linking Otherness to monstrosity in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, among other facets of identity (Morris, 2022; Pinkston, 2018; Stang & Trammell, 2020, et cetera). Hammer’s concept of primary and foundational authorship belonging to game designers plays into the very issue that Spivak presents, because by assigning inherent power and authority to the designer of a game we are also validating their politics and worldviews (Alder & St Patrick, 2013; Kiraly, 2014), granting them privilege and power over those they devalue, including their community of players, who are thus delegated as merely secondary and tertiary authors—of lesser importance or rank, to return to their etymology.
One could easily argue, however, that subverting this typical hierarchy by changing who the designer of the game is (say, a designer with a more diverse and intersectional identity) and ascribing them primary authorship could reverse this hierarchy of power, as it would place importance on more intersectional politics, worldviews, and lived experiences in such games and play. I am not disagreeing that the world needs more intersectional game designers—specifically those that are women, people of colour, trans, queer, crip, and/or any other type of identity that isn’t commonly represented in the field of game design. However, subverting a hierarchy of power but still using qualifiers of power (primary, secondary, tertiary, et cetera) does not eliminate the power wielded of and over others—it would subvert a hierarchy of (white, heterosexual, cisnormative, hegemonic) dominance, but as Foucault makes clear, hierarchies are still products and materialisations of social power which continue to subject and regulate others, especially in terms of capitalism, for “since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive, a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property” (Foucault, 1969/1998, p. 222).
Capitalism is one issue of many that arises when discussing traditional understandings of authorship across fields of literature and games alike, including (and especially) even TTRPGs themselves. Ownership over narratives (or narrative-building systems) limits and turns such narratives into products or objects to be sold, rather than interpretive meaning-making experiences that we know most (if not all) narratives are capable of. Capitalism serves to uphold the power an author or designer has over their own work—which is not necessarily a bad thing, until it begins to limit what a specific piece of literature or game or such is culturally capable of when authorship is shared and iterated upon. Examining phenomena such as participatory culture may provide a glimpse at what a more collaborative approach to storytelling and authorship could not only provide players, but also communities.
Rethinking Player Agency and Participatory Culture
Jenkins’ seminal works, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992/2012) and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) discuss the concept of participatory culture, in which fans of specific media franchises engage in such franchises not merely as active consumers, but as co-producers and co-authors of material often beyond what is considered ‘canon,’ such as fan fiction, fan art, fan zines, and cosplay. As Jenkins posits, “fans cease to be simply an audience for popular texts; instead, they become active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings” (1992/2012, p. 24). He goes on to say that fans do not strive for their meanings to overtake the original author’s meaning, but that a fan’s meaning and interpretation of the original work is an extension of their own experiences attached to parts of the work. However, given the capitalistic nature of authorship and ownership over such franchised narratives, fans who engage as co-producers or co-authors may have to juggle or avoid legal constraints associated with copyright over the original work, which can limit how the derivative (or transformative) work may be further produced or disseminated. As such, “fan culture stands as an open challenge to the “naturalness” and desirability of dominant cultural hierarchies, a refusal of authorial authority and a violation of intellectual property” (1992/2012, p. 18). D&D itself is a derivative work, as it was heavily inspired by existing works such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) and The Hobbit (1937) among others, not only in genre but so far as to use specific appropriated terminology like ‘Hobbits’ and ‘Ents,’ which later had to be changed to avoid legal ramifications (Peterson, 2012; White et al., 2018). D&D’s creation and conception was thus, in itself, a product of participatory culture.
What we can take from participatory culture and apply to TTRPGs more broadly is that a mode of shared and iterative authorship between players (or readers) and game designers (or authors) does not necessarily involve the players overriding all of the designer’s contributions to and decisions regarding the game itself, but rather involves the players expanding, re-interpreting, and/or re-contextualising the game to create a more meaningful game and play experience that speaks to, reflects, and enriches their own lived experiences. Such play experiences therefore have the potential to be more unique and diverse by sharing power between all players and, thus, highlighting and including everyone’s different intersectional identities and lived realities.
Participatory culture and associated production may also improve the original work, which is exactly what happened with the original publication of D&D in the ‘70s beyond its original conception. As Peterson diligently documents in The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity (2020), D&D’s earliest generation of players understood it more as a guideline or framework of a game, as “the original D&D rules left so much unsaid, so much to the players’ discretion, that to play it was to reimagine it” (p. xvi). Concerning this, Peterson emphasises the fact that D&D’s initial target audiences of wargamers and fans of science fiction and fantasy literature (including that of Tolkien) had something key to the game in common: that “both of the two cultures supported an open, collaborative environment where fans shared ideas freely, usually without much concern for intellectual property” (p. 3), and therefore were already engaging in a type of participatory culture, especially in regards to fan content such as zines. Through this participatory culture, much of which proposed and discussed early theoretical conceptions of role-playing and role-playing games, and direct communication with D&D’s creators, later iterations of the game improved with more fleshed-out rules and a better grasp on what D&D actually was: a role-playing game, a completely new type of game coined by its players.
Without its active community of players, D&D would have never achieved the household recognition it receives today. Without participatory culture, D&D might have likely only existed still only as a patchy set of guidelines inspired by and based on pre-existing wargames, such as Gygax’s own Chainmail (Gygax & Perren, 1971). How, then, can players only be relegated to a tertiary kind of authorship when it was originally the players who became arguably better designers of D&D than Gygax himself? In this vein, Peterson ponders authorial authority (albeit, in the context of the first publication of D&D) as follows:
“But for a game that is so plastic, so insistent on being merely “guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign,” how much weight can authorial intention really carry? D&D as a phenomenon was realized largely by its practitioners, the people who sat down to play it. The implementation of D&D depended hugely on the backgrounds and interpretations of its players and most of all of its referee.” (p. 28)
So what if we imagined a different type of mapping of Hammer’s authorship framework, where it is not the game designer who has the primary power and role of authorship, but the players? How might this shape the way we perceive and interpret not only TTRPGs, but play itself?
By framing players as the primary authors of a TTRPG, power shifts from the game designer (who is already placed and designing at a distance from the game itself, as we have briefly discussed) to the players, and affords them a higher amount of agency and authorship to shape the game to their play as they see fit.
Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997/2016) establishes a distinction between agency and authorship in terms of electronic games in that the video game designer acts as a procedural author to the player’s role as a derivative author. In Murray’s view, this derivative authorship in the form of interaction is not necessarily authorship, but agency, as “interactors can only act within the possibilities that have been established by the writing and programming.” (p. 142). While that may ring true in the context of most video and computer games, this is not a plausible framework to apply to TTRPGs, since there is no writing and programming that limits the possibilities of play. There are certainly rules that create the bounds of most TTRPGs, but even they are not limiting to the point of an immovable, unchangeable procedure. What is limiting is categorising TTRPGs as little more than procedural systems in the first place, and to defer all authorial authority to the author/s of such systems. Gygax himself was apparently against such notions of a supreme, primary authorship belonging to the creator of the game system, as Peterson (2020) recounts:
“If referees strictly adhered to the published D&D system, Gygax would actually see that as a failure: “I don’t believe there is anything desirable in having various campaigns playing similarly to one another,” he wrote, and “if the time ever comes when . . . players agree on how the game should be played, D&D will have become staid and boring indeed.” Gygax explicitly encouraged others to innovate, urging, “if you don’t like the way I do it, change the bloody rule to suit yourself and your players.”” (p. 9)
Thus, from the very conception of the genre of RPGs (even though such a title was not bestowed upon D&D by its designers, but by its players), TTRPGs have always afforded players more than mere agency: they have offered them the chance of authorship, even to the point where it superseded the original designers’ own works. To denote this type of power as little more than secondary or tertiary authorship, as Hammer does, entirely ignores the long history of players helping shape and craft games like D&D and the entire TTRPG genre into the powerhouses they are today. Rather, understanding and viewing players (including GMs) as the primary authors of TTRPGs changes the scope of what’s important when playing, studying, and designing TTRPGs—as opposed to looking at games as a design artefact in of itself (which is still of importance, but not the utmost when it comes to play), we can look at games as artefacts that aid play and, above all, create the base context for collaborative storytelling and worldbuilding to occur. Many queer designers and scholars understand this well, and game structures like Ruberg’s playground (2020) and Jenkins’ narrative architecture (2004) describe design opportunities for players to assert their rights as agential authors via harnessing emergent narratives (Aylett 1999, 2000) or transforming the game altogether to their own ends.
Some might argue that increasing the amount of authorial power a player has could result in Main Character Syndrome (Clapper, 2015; The Game Detective, 2013), a classic TTRPG issue where a player takes too much control over a campaign to centre their character as the sole protagonist, or the main character. While this is a real (and common) issue, this can be mitigated by deliberately sharing power between all the players with the DM acting in more of a mediator role who weaves the different character strands together. By sharing power between the players and considering this the primary mode of authorship rather than tertiary, every character becomes a main character, and so rather than a player jockeying for more power (in the form of Main Character Syndrome), there comes an excess of power in which there is more than enough to go around. By reversing Hammer’s theory, it is the players and their characters who become most important, with the game designer and the intent they put into the rules as written least important. From a game designer’s perspective, surely the game itself is of most importance, validating Hammer’s theory to a degree. But from a player’s perspective, the designer’s game and all associated crunch and fluff act only as mere context for the play that occurs inside, on top of, and outside of it; it is a fixed set of signs and symbols in the form of rules and lore that the players (including the DM) can interact with at will. We can see this in the long history of homebrewing and house rules that occur in D&D and other TTRPGs at large; D&D has always been player-centric, and so leaning into that idea even further only creates the opportunity for better narratives to emerge out of the game and play.
A character- and player-down approach may seem rooted in individualism, a political and narrative concept and trope highly prominent in classic Western literature. But when one considers that it is not a single character that is prioritised (in the vein of Main Character Syndrome), but the relationships and interactions between these PCs, (alongside other relationships to NPCs and the world around them), that individualism is transformed into a sense of collectivism that places the spotlight onto such relationships.
However, the issue still remains: by continuing to uphold Western notions of authorial power encoded in Hammer’s authorship framework, and by limiting the identity of the primary author, we also limit how a game and its meaning may be (re-)interpreted, understood, shared, and ultimately, played. Even when interpreting the primary author as a group of people, such as the players, power is still being exerted over someone in some way, especially if the initial game designer is someone with a more diverse and intersectional identity. Therefore, in what ways could we reimagine the power vested in TTRPG authorship so that the identity of the game designer still remains an important part of the game (especially in the vein of intersectional designers) but the role of authorship is spread and shared more equally across all parties, rather than hierarchically (in terms of chronology or otherwise)?
Networks of Authorship: A Collective Approach
It seems the best way to untangle notions of TTRPG authorship from hierarchies of power is to imagine a different strategy of authorship—one that honours the history of participatory culture and derivative and transformative works involved in TTRPGs, and is also player-centric, but still honours and makes space for the original designer/s of each game.Taking inspiration from Barad’s concept of agential realism in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) and the role of collective action in cultural production highlighted in Becker’s Art Worlds (1982), if we understand both authorship and agency as areas and processes of entanglement, it seems impossible for them to operate in isolation in TTRPGs as per Hammer’s framework. Thus, rather than imagining a linear hierarchy, these intersectional connections are perhaps better understood as a network (Fig 1).
A network of authorship does not disregard the initial work put into designing the game itself, but rather highlights it as one of many factors feeding into the play experience overall. In terms of the design of the game, a network of authorship is a better way to describe current TTRPG design because it does not ascribe primary authorship to a single designer but acknowledges the effort of many different people who may have had a hand in the game itself, from writers to publishers, artists to play-testers, editors to sensitivity consultants, and everyone else in between. These days, unless a game is published independently by one person3, TTRPGs are not designed in isolation; they are a product of many people’s work, inspired by a slew of existing games, media, politics, contexts, and common tropes that speak to both pop-culture and media literacy. A network of authorship can help to visualise the complexity of TTRPG design and production, and all the factors and authors that feed into the finished product. Other factors might include the players themselves, their own culture, backgrounds and lived experiences, as well as the relationships and histories between them; the circumstances and contexts of the play, including where and how it is physically or digitally taking place; and other media, narratives, and games that inspire both the TTRPG being played and the play itself, respectively. Even if we look at a singular designer and the role they play in a network of authorship, it’s clear to see the multitude of connections they may have not only within their creative team, but to their own personal play history, outside media, and personal background and identity which all may play a part in the way they contribute to the design of a TTRPG (Fig 2). For, as Barthes points out, “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (1967/1977, Trans. Heath, p. 146).
In this way, a network of authorship not only describes and ascribes power in terms of ownership over the TTRPG artefact itself, but emphasises the transformative and participatory nature that is so crucial to the history of TTRPGs and their community of players. A network structure therefore does not focus purely on the game it is describing, but is a better way to understand and break down the authorship of play of the game. A network of authorship, therefore, does not describe a linear process of game to play and hierarchy from designer to player like Hammer’s framework does, but it embraces the fact that players can and will change a game in any number of ways to create a better, more meaningful play experience for them and their party. It is only when we recognise this that we can begin to understand the full spectrum of experiences TTRPGs can offer their players, and how important their contributions are to bringing the game to life through play.
Some TTRPGs and systems already recognise the strength of a networked approach to both authorship and storytelling. For example, Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco (Bully Pulpit Games, 2009) functions without a GM, and features a custom system in which narrative authority is shared between all players. This increases the amount of control each player has over the play experience overall by offering a greater degree of agency where their actions are not limited by the system or each other. Avery Alder’s GM-less engine, Belonging Outside Belonging (BoB), employs a No Dice No Masters (NDNM) approach, in which neither the game, play, or system relies on the authority of dice or GMs to facilitate play. Featured in games such as Alder’s Dream Askew (Buried Without Ceremony, 2013/2018) and Jay Dragon’s Sleepaway (Possum Creek Games, 2020) and Wanderhome (Possum Creek Games, 2021), BoB TTRPGs foster a sense of collaboration in players that echoes real-world community building and agency that speaks directly to a networked authorship approach.
That is not to say that a network of authorship is not manifested when there is no GM or DM involved in the game. Systems such as D. Vincent & Meguey Baker’s Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA), first published in Apocalypse World (Lumpley Games, 2010), are still contingent on the presence and guidance of a GM, but offer a more collaborative storytelling experience than more traditional TTRPG systems. With more focus on shared worldbuilding and mutual understanding of both genre and character archetypes (typically flavoured as ‘playbooks’), PbtA games allow for more flexibility and fluidity in terms of play. By engaging in such networked and collective authorship experiences, players can assert a higher degree of agential authorship over not just their character, but their environment, which may include references to external source material and/or cultural histories, thus further expanding the network of authorship to create a truly unique and meaningful play experience. Some TTRPGs like the author’s own, Interwoven (Morris, forthcoming), or Ben Robbins’ Microscope (Lame Mage Productions, 2011) take this to the extreme by making shared worldbuilding from scratch a key part of the game, as an exercise not only in shared creativity but as establishing genre conventions and expectations for the rest of the game.
Embracing a network of authorship approach in terms of TTRPG design, play, analysis, and research has great potential to discuss and explore how different sources and people contribute to both TTRPG design and play. Rather than ascribing authorship to one individual or one publisher, we can examine how factors such as political standing, lived experiences, external media, and existing games (among other things) have shaped not only how a TTRPG is designed, but how it is played. This invites all authors (designers, GMs, players) to partake in a high degree of reflexivity alongside a new imagining of how games can (and should) be played. By reflecting, citing, communicating, sharing, and collaborating, TTRPGs have the potential to be much more than just games designed and authored by one person; using a network of authorship approach, TTRPGs and the play they inspire can act and be read as microcosms of culture.
- See: Barad, 2007; Barthes, 1967/1977; Caughie, 1981/2013; Ede & Lunsford, 2001; Foucault, 1969/1998; Jenkins, 1992/2012, 2006; Keen, 2007; Nehamas, 1986; Spivak, 1988/1994; et cetera.
- Notably, Genette also terms metadiagetic narratives “second-degree narrative[s]” (in Trans. Lewin, 1972/1980, p. 231), once more enforcing a hierarchy upon these diegetic levels.
- Also known as an “indie” game, although this can also apply to games independently published by small studios with a handful of designers as opposed to just one designer.
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