i don't like GMs

not, like, as people. i've been a GM for many games in my time. i don't like the role as it is widely understood--i especially don't like dungeons and dragons' 'DM', because i think it encapsulates what i don't like about the play role most of all, but in general i don't like GMs. & the reason i don't like them is that there is in the mind of a lot of game designers and players a hard line between 'GMing' and 'playing'. 

i think that sucks. i think if you get five people to sit down at a table together with a rulebook between them, all five of those people should be playing. when you create a dynamic where one of those people isn't a player, you get a lot of weird stuff like this: 

(name blurred because i don't want to put some random guy on blast just to illustrate a point)

the point is here not that the person in the screenshot is necessarily wrong for being unhappy about their friends not being on the same page as them--but that they conceptualize what they've been doing as work. & this is something you very commonly see in D&D's play culture, that DMing is a burden, that DMing is exhausting, that you need to "control" "your players" to DM properly. it's an attitude that basically puts the DM in the role of unpaid game designer, or extension of rules text, as someone who is not being invite to play but instead only to manage. 

in most trusted adviros i called the facilitator role the 'Liege player' to emphasize that they were a player just as much as anyone else. but language alone isn't enough to get away from this perspective--one thing i've really come to love about PBTA games is the GM move, mechanical levers and rules toys that the GM is allowed access to--stuff that lets them feel like they're playing, like they get cool moves and mechanical permissions and things to do that aren't bookkeeping or adjudicating or carrying the creative load for the whole table. 

D&D, i think, is particularly bad about this because gary gygax grandfathered in a really nasty and antisocial play culture. but i do think the rules of a TTRPG can go a long way in whether or not playing the GM / faciliator / bookkeeping role is play or work, not least of all by deciding whether it even exists. & i know that to some people, that work element of it, going away and spending hours making maps and coming up with Lore and even the social metagame of trying to fight the players for contorl, can be fun. but i don't like it, and i don't like GMs.