Game Masters and Referees

Certain games are so complex or have sufficient room for uncertainty that the players themselves cannot be relied upon to accurately and fairly enforce the rules. In such cases, a non-participant is added for this purpose. This is a referee.

The presence of a non-participant with knowledge of the game state creates an obvious new opportunity: parts of the game state which are unknown to all players, and whose very existence is unknown to all players. An entity managing unknown information and the interactions between game elements is a game master.

The difference between a game master and a referee is best understood in terms of knowledge: a game master knows things that the players don't, whereas a referee does not. Both of them enforce rules and adjudicate disagreements, both of them are considered to have authority over the state of the game which supersedes even the written rules, and both of them have a shared purpose of ensuring fairness and maintaining a structured flow of the game.

Because of the greater complexity of a game master's task, and the greater authority he carries as a result, a game master has substantial power to influence a game creatively, taking the role of an assistant game designer.

A computer is an excellent referee and can perform some of a game master's tasks very efficiently. Tasks requiring any degree of creativity or subjectivity are obviously best left to humans, however.

When designing your game, consider thoroughly how necessary independent rules verification is. For a computer game, this may not be an issue, as "independent rules verification" may also be considered "software." Certain genres of game consider it a privilege, rather than a chore, to be a game master (most notably the tabletop role-playing game, whence the term originates), whereas this is rarely true for a referee. If any part of the game state is to be acted upon by players who do not know its state, then a game master may be necessary. A highly structured game may require an unbiased third-party of either sort to ensure that the players do not trip over each others' attempts to play, and perhaps inadvertently ruin the game by revealing sensitive information to each other.

Since being a game master or referee is sometimes a chore, it may be best to hand off specific elements of this person's responsibilities to various players, for example, by christening one Monopoly player the "banker." This practice is ripe for extension into game mechanics of its own. Games based around the management of game-managing tasks already exist, and carried to their natural conclusion they become what is called a "legal game," a subject for a later post.

The relationship between all the participants of a game is a matter that a game designer must consider fully, and not all participants are players.