What I was getting is that by GMing, a player will see the other side of the equation: What the GM does to make the session happen, keep it going, contribute, etc.

That, in turn, will inform how they play from then on — they’ll have a better understand of the meta-level stuff that makes the game fun, and be better equipped to provide it as a player.

Does that make more sense?

I’m not sure I agree as to the four traits you propose (though “A better understanding of what goes into each session” is pretty near universal). In a lot of ways, the way a player runs his characters (over time) may be an excellent guide as to how they’ll GM.

The only all-GM campaign I’ve been in was a really cool concept. We got together for a weekend of gaming, and the concept was round-robin.

Nothing was prepared except the characters, and we each played a character created by another player, chosen randomly. Next, we decided who was the first GM by playing Rock-Paper-Scissors. After that was done, the GM’s character is run as an NPC while the rest of us participate in an adventure the GM makes up as he goes along using a pre-determined map. After one hour, a timer sounds and the person to the GM’s right takes over the game, no matter the current situation of the PCs, relegating his character to status of NPC and then the previous GM comes in and their character becomes a PC. It continues around like this for as long as we want it to, but everybody had to GM at least twice.

There was a mixture of experienced and novice GMs, and the best part of all was creating a situation that the next GM had to play off of.

More commonly, I’ve usually had two or more GMs among players, but also one or more exclusive players. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a game with all exclusive players.

Interestingly enough, my wife just directed/game-mastered her first game last night. It was one of Shifting Forest Storywork’s Parlor Larp series. So it was mostly complete out of the box, but she wrote in two new PCs since we had ten people rather than eight. They’re a good option for a first event, I think, since they’re complete out of the box and very player-driven.

Oh, and he only had about an hour to prepare it.

It was actually a fun game, and very different from anything I would have done. We woke up in a room in a dungeon, kicked the door open and went from there. Good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, complete with Door-That-Cannot-Be-Opened-Without-Key-No-Matter-What ™ and a gem from a water elemental that we figured out wuld kill a fire elemental later.

I think it was probably in large part influenced by his background in video game RPGs.