Bureaucracy, Ritual and Games

Proto-Cuneiform tablet: administrative account of barley
distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure,
hunting dogs, and boars. Probably from the city of Uruk.

This will be my last blog post directly based on Graeber and Wengrow's book, The Dawn of Everything, an anthropological critique of our most basic assumptions about human civilization. I finished reading it a month ago but I revisited it and the notes I made to write this post. It is my final but also most sweeping application of their anarchist anthropology to TTRPGs, hopefully it is successful in making an interesting point.

One of the main concepts introduced in the book is that there are three types of domination that occur, which are in their simplest forms: violence, control of information, and charisma. These types of domination can scale up to create "state" like power, respectively becoming: sovereign monopoly on violence, bureaucracy, and competitive politics. It's possible to make diegetic models of all three of these within a TTRPG or apply them to the practice of playing TTRPGs, but I'm going to focus on the real world application of bureaucracy in the form of game texts and unwritten procedures. It is tempting to think of WotC's hegemonic control over the industry as some sort of sovereignty, but that is a bit of a stretch for me. Similarly, a charismatic player can lead the table in any direction they like through force of personality alone, but that's not what I'm interested here.

In the Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow look towards anthropology to examine historical precedent for many ideas we take for granted about human nature. One of these assumptions they deconstruct is the parallel growth of cities and a need for hierarchy. 

In Uruk, one of the earliest Mesopotamian cities, there was an interesting phase that lasted for centuries before royalty appeared. The city has the oldest recorded bureaucracy, documented by their famous cuneiform tablets, tablets that recorded transactions of goods and services made by temple factories that output products in uniform packaging for equitable distribution to its populace. The authors comment in the book, "administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening." 

Across the ocean and centuries later in the Andes mountains, there was a similar phenomenon. Before the Inca empire came to dominate the land, ayllu village associations were a form of bureaucratic administration that performed the redistribution of agricultural land among families as they changed in size, to ensure that wealth disparity did not develop. They also made sure the infirm, orphans, widows and disabled were taken care of. 

Ayllus used an accounting method involving tying knots in strings called khipu to track debts. At the end of the year debts were to be cancelled out and knots were untied. When the Inca empire came to rule over the ayllus, these khipu knots were never unraveled, representing a permanent debt to masters.

Now, it is important to point out that these examples are not indicating a pure, primordial period of human innocence, but instead that bureaucracy is not inherently coercive. Tracking and control of information can in fact be used as a means of producing equality as much as it can to take it away.

I think this same bureaucratic tension exists in TTRPGs, where game rules control flows of information. Mechanics, procedures and modules can be liberatory, and push us to more unfettered ways of thinking, but they can also dominate us, narrowing our thinking and funnel us into restrictive, hierarchical behavior. What these are exactly, is hard to say, especially without getting sanctimonious about wrong-bad-fun. To a degree, if someone wants to finish a hard days work, turn off their brain and play a railroaded adventure prewritten by DM Johnny, that is their right and they should be able to do so free of judgement. But at the same time, games can create a space where instead of reproducing the oppressive structures of capitalist society, they can help us to transcend it and try to imagine something new. 

In the Dawn of Everything, there is another interesting thing that happens with bureaucracy. In some societies where the two other forms of domination - sovereignty and political power - come to the forefront, bureaucracy can be pushed to the imaginary. The ajaws of Classic Maya used control of information very little to exert control over their people, while their society observed a complex mythological, cosmic bureaucracy. Here the control of information can become the domain of ritual, or even games. Ritual and games can act as a repository of knowledge and zone of experimentation for a society. Throughout history, new technologies emerged first as experimental flirtations with new ways of life through play. According to French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the indigenous Australian corroboree can be a festive ceremony where ritual is marked off from ordinary life, where essentially imaginary social institutions are maintained, and where the power to create new social orders appears, projected onto totemic spirits and their emblems.

This is games at their most grandiose, where they offer a window to the most ambitious and idealistic visions for society and possibility. They already inherently contain these seeds. We talk about some of these ideas in the game design world as "the magic circle," to describe the separation of a game world from the ordinary world. While I am not saying that people are obliged to use TTRPGs to recreate society, I also hope that we can recognize the full potential that game texts and unwritten cultures of play have to offers us.