RPGs and Learning Skills

In the mid-1970′s parents were nervous about RPGs. Concerns were fuelled by inaccurate and sensational media reports that re-branded D&D as a cult. This may have increased sales of D&D at the time but it also left tabletop RPGs with a reputation for being a bit ‘out there’ or ‘niche’. Any school or library that tried to encourage RPGs risked complaints from parents.

Thirty years on most parents would be delighted to see their kids unplugging themselves from super violent console titles to read books, meet up f2f with real friends and enjoy imaginative storytelling. The same parents are also becoming more aware of the ‘hidden treasure’ locked up in tabletop RPGs. Not through players or RPG companies – but by libraries and teachers.

Trying to make learning fun is difficult. Kids see right through candy-coated learning at a glance. Fortunately, some kinds of fun, including tabletop RPGs, deliver valuable learning as a by-product that doesn’t need candy-coating.

Researchers have linked a wide choice of learning skills to tabletop RPGs and librarians in the US have begun to push the use of RPGs in public libraries and school media centres. The American Library Association (ALA) is helping out with a website at http://www.librarygamingtoolkit.org/. By offering places to meet and full RPGs at no cost, RPGs in libraries and schools could let a lot more kids try out tabletop RPGs.

There might be wider benefits too, as the kinds of skills used to play an RPG can include critical thinking, decision making and collaborative planning. These are the very skills seen as essential to high skill – high wage economies, and RPGs deliver them ‘in spades’. This may be because open-ended, tabletop RPGs let kids build and test skills that develop effective ‘situation models’. These ‘cognitive blueprints’ can then be taken straight from the tabletop to classes and businesses.

Nobody is talking about ‘teaching’ RPGs. Just making them more available and better understood. Players can stay ‘edgy’ if we like through our choice of games and playing companions.

Parents, teachers and players may also want to think about which games are offering what kinds of skills. Battle game RPGs like D&D and Dragon Age develop literacy, understanding of complex rules and reward expert knowledge of the rules. Exploration based RPGs like Traveller and Treasure have fewer mechanics and often require planning, teamwork and quick thinking to survive.

Battle game RPGs regularly stretch to many hundreds of pages and appeal to players who enjoy battle-based videogames. They are less appealing to the ‘uninitiated’ who may feel the necessary ‘apprenticeship’ is too much or find the mechanics overwhelming.

Exploration RPGs are likely to be quite complete at a couple of hundred pages. They usually make combat more dangerous, with storytelling, planning, negotiation and teamwork replacing complex combat mechanics. Younger players, occasional players and families are more likely to enjoy this kind of game, which appeals to a less committed but much larger potential audience.

For individual players it may not seem to matter whether or not games involve any kind of learning. Except that everyone benefits if the pool of RPG players gets larger. It becomes easier to set games up, there’s more choice and quality from publishers, and there’s more free content to tap into.