Charismatic Leadership and Digital Games

Digital games have long cast players as commanders who act decisively on critical problems or managers who organise processes toward known ends. Drawing on Grint's distinction between command, management and leadership, and Etzioni's typology of coercive, calculative and normative compliance, this short conference abstract argues that more recent titles such as Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) and, to a lesser degree, Fallout 4 (2015) put players in the role of leader, whose decisions must win the normative compliance of followers. Dragon Age simulates this through on-screen reactions, shifting dialogue options, faction support and an ongoing evaluation of whether followers remain loyal.

The paper deliberately sets aside earlier work on games as leadership training tools or on skills transfer from multiplayer activities such as World of Warcraft raids. Its concern is instead the cultural role of popular culture, including games, in sustaining the conditions under which charismatic leadership can emerge.

The theoretical frame is Max Weber's charismatic leadership, understood as a counterweight to modern rationalisation in which extraordinarily gifted individuals gain devoted followers during crises. Weber left unresolved whether the inner circle of followers amplifies charisma or incubates it. Because charismatic figures appear mainly in societies with traditions of support and expectation for them, the author contends that popular culture helps maintain and develop those traditions.

The central thesis, part of a larger project, holds that changes in dominant media alter how audiences understand charisma. Early twentieth-century media, led by cinema, favour an amplification model in which the inner circle matters little. Later media, namely serialised comics, television series and digital games, allow the inner circle a far more significant, incubating role. The argument rests on textual analysis of representative cases, with Dragon Age: Inquisition as the featured example of charismatic leadership enacted in a game. No empirical findings are reported at this stage.