That's a good point. So the way in which a lusory attitude can accomodate rule-deciding power is that the lusory attitude applies to rules made up in the course of play. My concern is over what guides that making up? Based on your thought here, it's
also the lusory goal and lusory attitude.
If so, then does GM have
the same lusory goal as the other participants? Suits could be read to be supposing that "players" is a homogenous group. Your observation implies a different category of "players" (i.e. referees) with differing lusory goals and attitudes from others, who still give normative credence to the rules for the purpose of getting to play the game. (Nothing forestalls overlap betwee referee-player and other-player goals of course, along with any anticipated differences.)
It seems plausible to me to suppose a referee has a lusory attitude, because when we watch say a football referee they act in constrained ways consistent with whatever counts as the proper refereeing of the game. Can it be said that they adopt
less efficient means? I think they adopt the most efficient means they can to achieve their goal.
Suits' "less efficient means" says something similar to Baker's "create the unwelcome and the unwanted." As Suits put it "the voluntary attempt to overcome
unnecessary obstacles". (Emphasis mine.) And that's pretty interesting, also in light of Baker's "if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better..." It seems to me that Suits and Baker are presenting similar views in this respect - where the why of game rules is to create unnecessary obstacles.
Is right to say that those with rule-deciding power share in that why? Are they too accepting unnecessary obstacles to their lusory goal? If not, their goal is presumably not a lusory one and they are as I started out thinking, not players. Where
@loverdrive's contentions might lead is that TTRPG referees ought to (or can) be players, through creating unnecessary obstacles to their lusory goals.
I have not read Suits beyond this quote from Wikipedia (which is the quote that you provided), in the entry on
Lusory attitude - Wikipedia:
To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].
From this quote, it seems reasonably clear that Suits is writing in a fairly mainstream, post-War English-speaking analytic tradition. Given his interest in rules, he seems to be closer to the British (post-Wittgenstein) than the American (post-Quine) strand of that tradition.
The notion of rules as constitutive of an activity is derived from a prior body of philosophy: work on
truth by convention in philosophy of logic and mathematics, and the resulting work of the logical positivists, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and others on rules and meaning in natural language.
The "lusory attitude" is a fairly obvious cousin of HLA Hart's "internal point of view", which is another product of the British strand of post-War analytic philosophy. As I noted upthread, it is the attitude of giving normative credence to a set of rules that are, in a certain sense, arbitrary. That is not to say that the relationship between the rules (as "lusory means") and the goal of play (the "prelusory goal") is arbitrary - that very non-arbitrary relationship is the subject matter of game design, where technical failure and accomplishment are very real possibilities.
What is arbitrary is that one should adopt a pre-lusory goal and hence embrace lusory means at all. This is a point of contrast with logic, mathematics and language. The "lusory attitude" is simply a philosophical redescribing of the commonplace fact that people play games for fun rather than out of necessity, and in playing them for fun treat their rules as binding (ie give them normative credence) even though they don't
have to do so.
There's no connection I can see between Suits' "less efficient means" and Baker's "unwelcome and unwanted". "Less efficient means" is an attempt to capture the idea of a game posing an "artificial" challenge - ie the most efficient means to create 4 piles of cards, in suits, from A to K, would be to sort and arrange them just so; but the game of solitaire imposes a baroque set of constraints around the sorting and arranging process - ie less efficient means - and thereby creates the game play. In the context of shared imagination, imposing rules about who can say what when are less efficient means; Baker's suggestion is that the only reason for
wanting such less efficient means is so as to achieve the unwelcome and unwanted in the shared fiction. My OP suggests some other possible reasons too.
With all of that ground cleared, let's consider the role of the GM through Suits' lens.
Suit says nothing about players being a homogenous group. I'm sure, for instance, that he was familiar with football (soccer), in which different players enjoy different permissions resulting both from status (compare the goalie to the other players) and from position on the field at particular moments of play (the offside rule). But I doubt that he would describe this as being subject to different rules. Rather, he would describe the rules with sufficient precision to capture these different permissions. (The rules will probably end up being stated as moderately complex if-then statements along the lines of "If a player is X, Y, Z etc, then the player may A, B, C etc". Whether it's more effective to state rules in terms of what's permitted, taking anything else to be forbidden; or in terms of what is forbidden, taken everything else to be permitted; or in some combination of both permissions and forbiddings, will probably vary from game to game.)
I doubt even more that one would posit that these different players have different prelusory goals. They have a common prelusory goal, which can be summarised as
playing football. (And further analysis of this might be undertaken using, for instance, Bratman's work on "we"-intentions.)
The referee of a football game is obviously not a player in Suits's sense. They don't share the prelusory goal. And they do not hold themselves bound by the rules (the lusory means). They are bound by different rules, rules of professional conduct in the refereeing of a sports game. In this way, the role of being a referee - at least as far as rules are concerned - has more in common with being a police officer, a lawyer, a doctor, etc, than it does with being a player of the game.
Through this lens, we see straight away that (for instance) while a late nineteenth century Prussian free kriegspiel referee has a lot in common with a football referee, a contemporary RPG GM has little in common with them, as the contemporary GM
is a player, share the prelusory goal with the other players, and has agreed to adopt the lusory means that will enable that goal (ie a certain sort of shared fiction creation) to be achieved.
In the passage I've quoted, Suits say nothing expressly about making rules up as one goes along. He was almost certainly quite familiar with Hart's discussion of the game of "scorer's discretion". So the most natural way I would expect him to approach this is to deny that rules are made up as one goes along: rather, a proper statement of the rules includes a statement of the permissions that the "rule zero" wielder enjoys. If we take "rule zero" at face value then I think the natural conclusion is that the Suits-ian description of a RPG with a rule zero is going to look much as Vincent Baker describes it
here (I've elided Baker's aesthetic judgements as best I can, which are separate from his description of the process):
with task resolution . . . whether you [the non-GM player] succeed or fail, the GM's the one who actually resolves the conflict. The dice don't, the rules don't; you're depending on the GM's mood and your relationship and all those unreliable social things the rules are supposed to even out.
Task resolution, in short, puts the GM in a position of priviledged authorship.
In short, a RPG with "rule zero" adopts as the preeminent lusory means for achieving the prelusory goal that
the GM is permitted to author the shared fiction.
