No Dice, No Masters: Procedures for Emancipation in Dream Askew / Dream Apart

This study of Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum's Belonging Outside Belonging system for tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) follows in Jacques Rancière's project of ignorance, as set out in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987) and as continued in The Emancipated Spectator (2008). With Rancière's politics as a framework, this study works backward from Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games (2007) to his Unit Operations (2006), and then to Alain Badiou's Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), in order to recover the radical politics undergirding Bogost's distinct method of game criticism. Badiou's Manifesto, going beyond Bogost's primary philosophical source, Badiou's Being and Event (1988), clarifies the political stakes of Badiou's ontology, allowing us to return to the present with a more robust politics of procedurality motivating our critical work. From here, Alder and Rosenbaum's Dream Askew / Dream Apart (2018) furnishes us with a provocative model of emancipatory procedurality suited not only for radical play but radical design, challenging the limits of Bogost's "persuasion" as an activist paradigm.