Three months ago, I described various ways in which we learn from our games. Not solely in terms of playing, but the way RPGs affect us long after we have stopped playing them. Two months ago and last month I discussed how games can teach us languages for understanding as well as skills and knowledge, respectively. This month, I will be discussing how RPGs give us an opportunity to learn from each other.
Tactics and Strategies
One of the most direct ways RPGs can let us about each other, is by exploiting the game itself. Whenever a person attempts to achieve some outcome, there is ample room for tactics and strategies. By observing how other players act, and by interacting with them, you can learn how they approach different situations and how they develop their approaches.
While this kind of learning is often associated with mechanics, tactics and strategies arise regardless of the presence of mechanics. Indeed, some of the most important tactics used by players in a RPG only become apparent when you remove the bias introduced by mechanics heavy games. These social tactics include how ideas are presented and how players influence each other. Often these tactics arise outside of play, as general means of social interaction or approaches to problems.
Learning these tactics and strategies is something which is fairly simple, in building and revising our own approaches, we will automatically begin to take into account those of other players. But to intensify the learning the game must give constant feedback on the strategies and tactics used by each player. This feedback ensures that you can better understand why a player's tactics may have changed, or guess what long term strategies might be in use.
The simplest way to design such a game is to focus on competition. By directly pitting player decisions against each other, they are constantly being vetted and their consequences are pertinent to all of the players involved. Competition could be based on control of a story, or getting the largest number of kills, as long as it brings players to head. A more complex approach is to design the game system as antagonist, or even to have overt points which can be observed by players at different times.
Finding What Matters
While tactics and strategy show you how other players think, they do not tell you much about the emotional state of those players. Discovering this is also based in challenges, but less intellectual ones. What a person values and his or her beliefs are often difficult to find. Most people keep those things quiet, most of the time. Paradoxically, in RPGs we reveal more of what we care about, by not being ourselves, because in an important way the role we take in a RPG is one chosen with more freedom than those in our regular lives.
If we seek to stress and discover what is important to these characters, the responses and the meanings don't end with those characters. Instead, you can get a glimpse into how the player feels. This becomes a very real, very personal encounter, within the game as a whole.
To design a game for this type of encounter, balance is needed. On one hand, you must let players push at each other, probing things that might be important. On the other hand, you must give players some sense of safety, whether it be describing the characters in caricature or by allowing certain times or mechanisms for players to safely disengage. Without something of this sort, it is too easy to probe too hard, and cause other players to cut off their emotional responses or risk ending play.
Building Relationships
When you begin to understand how someone thinks and feels, you've opened the way to understanding that person. This is the foundation of building a relationship, of any sort. Intimacy, from friendliness to devotion to romance, is a way of behaving unique to each of you. Learning this intimacy is perhaps the most difficult thing we can learn from each other.
Designing a game to support this type of learning is going far past the frontiers of game design. In the very least it must build upon other ways of learning about others. And it must do so in a way that allows intimacy to be attempted. To improve your understanding of another, you must have the chance to find your misunderstandings and remove them. Beyond that, this is a largely unexplored area of game design.
On the Battlefield of Hearts and Minds
Over the last two months I've presented and extended example, called Savagery (warning pdf), a game of social and emotional combat. I've discussed how Savagery offers a language for describing social conflicts, and how it teaches the skill of perceiving social interactions tactically. However because of the nature of Savagery's combat it also provides a place for players to learn about each other.
As a essentially a tactical combat game, pitting player against each other on alternating scene, Savagery encourages tactical learning. This is augmented by the use of maneuvers focuses on certain general approaches to problems. Some deal more damage, some provide better defense, some are more precise. Thus play decisions are rife with hints of tactics.
On the other end, Savagery is an emotional combat game, focusing on the brutal forms of verbal warfare. While it's violence is a pervasive, ordinary kind, that only makes it more inexcusable. This gives Savagery combats the chance to be about something more than tactics, not about how to reduce someone to a quivering mess, but about whether you should. When will you show mercy, and what scars will you leave? These are questions which can hit home, even in the midst of the tactics.
Of course, such questions hit an even more personal place than the other players. What do these decisions tell you about yourself? I'll discuss that and more next month.
Next Month: Introspections
