"I'd rather be running the game than playing it"
About this Quote
Control is the real fantasy in Brust's line: not the swordfight or the heist, but the seat at the table where the rules get written. "Running the game" isn’t just winning; it’s designing the win conditions, deciding what counts as fair, even choosing what risks are available to take. "Playing it" suddenly sounds small, almost infantilizing, like being handed a controller with the settings locked.
Brust writes from inside a tradition where games are metaphors for power: court intrigue, criminal syndicates, guild politics, magic systems with their own bureaucracies. In that context, the quote reads like a character telling on themselves. It's ambition, sure, but also impatience with other people's scripts. The subtext is a refusal of consent: if the world is already gamified, then participation feels like complicity. Better to become the dungeon master than the pawn.
The phrasing does extra work. "Rather" signals preference without apology; it frames domination as simple practicality. "Running" carries motion and management at once: the runner sets pace, the manager keeps the machine humming. "Game" is the killer word, because it trivializes stakes while sharpening them. If everything is a game, then morality becomes strategy, and strategy becomes identity.
There's also a writerly wink: Brust, the novelist, literally runs the game. He builds worlds where characters think they're improvising, while an unseen hand arranges the board. The quote doubles as a sly thesis on authorship itself: the ultimate power isn't to make moves; it's to make meaning.
Brust writes from inside a tradition where games are metaphors for power: court intrigue, criminal syndicates, guild politics, magic systems with their own bureaucracies. In that context, the quote reads like a character telling on themselves. It's ambition, sure, but also impatience with other people's scripts. The subtext is a refusal of consent: if the world is already gamified, then participation feels like complicity. Better to become the dungeon master than the pawn.
The phrasing does extra work. "Rather" signals preference without apology; it frames domination as simple practicality. "Running" carries motion and management at once: the runner sets pace, the manager keeps the machine humming. "Game" is the killer word, because it trivializes stakes while sharpening them. If everything is a game, then morality becomes strategy, and strategy becomes identity.
There's also a writerly wink: Brust, the novelist, literally runs the game. He builds worlds where characters think they're improvising, while an unseen hand arranges the board. The quote doubles as a sly thesis on authorship itself: the ultimate power isn't to make moves; it's to make meaning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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