"Dungeons and Dragons," "Champions," and
"GURPS" are the titles of three of the most popular role-playing
games, yet most non-gamers have never heard of them. If they have heard of any
of them, "Dungeons and Dragons" is likely to be the one they
recognize, but not for its positive aspects. "Dungeons and Dragons,"
or more popularly, D&D, is considered the epitome of the role-playing game,
or RPG. Many non-gamers equate it with a group of stereotypical nerds or geeks
sitting around a table eating pizza, rolling dice, and playing make-believe,
and to a great extent, they are correct. After all, stereotypes are based on
common perceptions. What the non-gamer misses, however, are the many benefits
that RPGs provide. As an avid role-playing enthusiast, or simply, a "gamer,"
since the age of ten, I have benefited greatly from RPGs, and now at the age
of forty, I look back on my gaming experiences and realize the role that they
have played in my life from an educational perspective. Playing RPGs improved
my literacy skills, strengthened my creativity, and gave me strong analytical
skills.
"Verisimilitude," "maladroit," "perquisite"—all
words that I learned and knew the definition of by the age of eleven. The
single most important aspect of role-playing games is the ability to read,
comprehend, and recall information, and to use that information to communicate
with the other players. Much like the popular games "Monopoly," "Life,"
and "Clue" that we all played as children, RPGs have rules that
control the game and determine outcomes, but these rules tend to be written in
books that are at least thirty-two pages long, much larger then the couple of pages
of a typical board game. Because the rule books are also typically written by
well-educated individuals for adult audiences, as a young boy, I found myself
stumbling over the words and having to look them up. I wanted to because it was
not school work, it was a game. The rule books spoke of fantastic ideas,
places, and creatures that compelled me to find the original sources—the
literature that inspired the games. I found myself consuming books such as King Kong, The Lord of the Rings, and I,
Robot, not as school assignments, but as background material for the RPGs
that I played. My friends were doing the same, and when we got together to play
RPGs, we each brought new words to the table. I was learning words in the RPG
books that I read that were years ahead of my fellow classmates. Many of these
words were showing up in the purchased adventures, or modules, that we used for
our games.
Many RPGs that were published in the late 70s and 80s had
adventures that gamers could buy, which one player, the game master, or GM,
would read and then use as a story to lead the other players through. The GM
would present the setting, describing the area that the players’ characters, or
PCs, would be adventuring in, and the players would then use that information
to make decisions about what they wanted their characters to do. This typically
involved overcoming an obstacle, righting a wrong, or discovering a secret. In
other words, the players were pretending that they were mythical heroes, and
their characters provided the abilities that their heroes had via the mechanics
of the game. The restrictions placed on the PCs meant that the players could
not simply say they overcame a given obstacle. The player would have to use
only the abilities that their character had, much like real life in the sense
that no one can do everything and we have to find solutions to problems using
our own experiences and abilities. This lead the players to come up with
surprisingly creative ways to overcome the problems that the GM presented.
Eventually, I outgrew the published adventures and found myself creating my own
scenarios. I used what I had learned in those adventures and the various novels
I read to create my own unique worlds and puzzles for the players to solve.
The puzzles and obstacles in RPGs are where a great deal of
analytical thinking is done. Players and GMs alike have to use analytical
thinking in RPGs to solve problems or create sophisticated obstacles,
respectively. Although it is the same thought processes that a writer goes
through when creating a story, in the case of an RPG, the writer has no idea
what his protagonists will do in a given situation, and more often then not,
they do something the GM never thought of. At the same time, the players are
the readers of the novel, not knowing where the story is going, or what the
characters are thinking, and their control of the story lies only in their
ability to influence events from their perspective alone. This, in turn,
requires the GM to be able to think through the series of causes and effects at
a moment's notice to keep the story moving, and to fit the players’ actions
into the story. Another way of understanding the concepts would be to look at
an RPG as a group of actors performing improvisational theater with a set of
guidelines that control their behavior with random elements being presented by
the director.
By now, it should be apparent to the reader that
role-playing games improve literacy skills through reading and communicating
with fellow players, boost creativity by exercising the imagination of the
players, and strengthen analytical skills through the creation and solving of
complex problems. I have played many RPGs over the years, in a number of genres
and settings, and I am continually impressed with the general intelligence
level of gamers in general. When I step back and look at my own educational
experience, I see many times that role playing was used in the
classroom—without it being a game—such as when I had to present reports on
Alexander the Great and Thomas Edison, and I dressed up like the characters and
presented their biographies as if I were those people. It is no surprise then
that RPGs themselves are starting to find their way into the classroom, and
some teachers are even sponsoring RPG clubs at their schools.
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