Every experience changes you. Usually this is in small, subtle ways that will never be noticed until many such changes accumulate. These can be changes in how you understand or relate to people or things. They could be new skills, or a loss of old ones. Indeed, the changes can be another experience to draw upon later.

In any case, RPGs offer an opportunity for significant personal change. Both roleplaying and games, alone are powerful tools for developing new outlooks and learning things. Combining the two can synergize or retard this development, but the potential exists for a great many things to be gained from playing RPGs.

A Language of Experience

One of the most subtle, but useful advantages of roleplaying is that it provides a structure to comprehend something which the players have not experienced or have not experienced deeply. In essence, roleplay gives a context to react to new situations, or give a new context to respond to existing situations which are reacted to poorly. This is why roleplaying is used for therapy, it can help give a foundation for response. By roleplaying through aggravating situations, people can learn new responses to anger.

When we add games to the equation, something very interesting can happen. Games have, at their root, a set of structures which are easily understood and communicated. If these are linked strongly enough with the roleplaying aspect of the RPG, then these structures can form the basis for the new perspective. In essence you use the game as a language for the experience, and learn this language through roleplay.

Many games do this, in some way or another. How often do experienced White Wolf players call an unexpected failure a "botch"? And how often do D&D players find referencing abilities or classes to help describe a fictional character? These are a basic reflection of the game becoming a language.

What makes this an interesting development, is that in principle you should be able to design a RPG which can provide a language for whatever you desire. If you want to put forth a different way to understand romance or violence, then making a game can be a way to do this. Especially if the concepts you are attempting to codify are not categories, but relationships or dynamics. Verbal language is innately poor at relating these types of ideas, which makes a game, something which focuses on relations and dynamics, ideal for representing them.

In many ways this is a rich and fertile field for RPG design, although it moves away from the fun RPGs to something more serious. Unless you are making games for people who simply enjoys changing perceptions for its own sake, it's important to balance the descriptive power of the game with the more traditionally enjoyable.

Learning from the Game

Nearly every RPG in existence is something you learn how to play. And this process is not usually something which ends after your first few sessions. In many cases, the body of knowledge about how to play can be expanded without limit. Sometime we limit ourselves to just a subset, but often, knowingly or not, we absorb the skills and information slowly.

Just as the chess player will identify regularities in that game, RPGs often possess deeper and deeper levels of knowledge, all of which can enhance play. Knowing the ins and outs of a setting or having developed an intuition for mechanics can be used cooperatively or competitively, but in either case, there is a drive to learn more. With enjoyable play it is almost impossible not to learn something about what is being played.

This tendency to learn from the game is usually irrelevant to the goals of a RPG design. It is expected for players to learn enough about the game to reduce the need to reference material, but otherwise, this learning is doesn't impact on a larger scale. However, a game set in a historical period, or one based on scientific or academic theory can use this tendency to learn as a way to impart more generally useful information. The important matter is, again, balancing utility with enjoyment.

Learning from Each Other

In a very real way, the game isn't the only thing at the table. The other players, GM included, are present and interacting. In most human interaction we have roles, which manage the interaction. RPGs are quite typical in that respect. RPG roles exist on multiple levels, from the GM - player divide, to the specific roles being played as part of the game.

Roles in social interaction provide a context, a way to signal what is permissible and what is not. If you know what role a person is adopting, then the way they play that role can be illuminating. Once you've identified that someone is flirting, the way that person flirts and interacts says quite a bit about what that person believes is attractive or romantic.

RPGs are the same way, except in many cases the roles are well defined and openly declared. The way people play a character openly intended to be a hero, can tell quite a bit about what they believe about heroes. Thus, part of the material during the game which is open to learning is not the game mechanics or the setting, but the ideas and perspectives of the other players.

This learning can be for competitive reasons, much like the chess player focusing on playing his or her opponent more than the board. Cooperatively, this type of learning can help factor into better play, by revealing what is lacking or going wrong. On the other hand, this type of learning is often biased, and can convince people that what is going wrong is actually what should happen. In any case, this is a large part of what makes RPGs a social activity.

Learning from Ourselves

Just as we can learn about others through the roles they take, we can learn about ourselves as well. This is often a difficult step. Introspection is rarely as easy as it sounds, and to perceive how our own roleplay speaks of our own values and perspectives takes exactly that.

Often we learn more through reflection through other players. The way that another player reacts to our decisions can tell us where we should look, and even how our decisions may not match our expectations. Likewise the consequences of our decisions, both from the RPG itself, and the other players, can tell you much more than your state of mind when you made the decision.

RPGs may be even more promising for this than conventional roleplay. While roleplay often introduces difficult, and usually illuminating, decisions, it can rarely make the consequences as real as the decisions. But these consequences are the natural feedback, which tells the player what the decision meant, and allows the evaluation of that decision in that light. To do this, the consequences cannot be fickle or random, as this tends to only reinforce the decisions as they are, but instead must be built on some deeper insight, whether tactical, social, or ethical.

The Dangerous Claim

Earlier in this article, I spoke about balancing learning and fun. This is somewhat misleading. I claim that learning is the root of fun in RPGs. What is truly being balanced in design is the different ways to learn, and hence have fun in an RPG. But no matter what we take with us from RPGs, it is important, because that is the reason we keep coming back to them.

To further explore these different types of learning, I will be focusing the next few articles on designing with learning in mind.

Next Month: Speaking in Patterns