Four 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. Three months ago, two months ago, and last month I discussed how games can teach us languages for understanding, skills and knowledge, or about the other players, respectively. This month, I will be finishing up by discussing how to design RPGs that give us insight into ourselves.

Pushing Yourself

One of the easiest ways to learn about yourself is to push yourself past your prior experiences and your comfort zones. Seeing how we react when in a new situation can help to validate our beliefs about ourselves, or tear them down. As far as game design is concerned, the main way to allow players to push themselves is to give them the opportunity to make difficult decisions, ones where no matter what is decided, it will leave the comfortable.

Difficult decisions are a sort of constrained freedom. On one hand, players must have the ability to go with several options. On the other, the options must all have definite consequences which cannot be avoided. But to make this really effective, there must also be a buy-in, a point where the player uses his or her freedom to ensure that the consequences do matter.

This very freedom proves to be a major risk for this approach to self-learning. It can be very easy to gear your consequences in such a way to ensure that your decisions rather than opening up more of yourself, tell you exactly what you wanted to know. The social aspects of RPGs often exaggerate this risk, as we may be even less comfortable revealing ourselves when others might notice. Like all forms of self-learning our capacity for self-deception is truly incredible, and we can only hope to slowly work around it.

In the Silence

Perhaps the hardest form of self-learning to achieve both in RPGs and in general, contemplative self-learning is when we learn about ourselves by removing distractions and pressures. This approach seeks to remove the very pressures that could push ourselves past our comfort zones as well as those that keep us from looking into ourselves.

To design a RPG to foster this type of learning means reducing the pressures that normally appear during play. It would likely allow departure and separation of players, to keep social pressures from destroying contemplation. It would likely eschew goals for possibilities, keeping structure to a minimum. It would also likely exploit interpretive mechanics where outcomes are reflective of a players state of mind.

It may be that contemplative play is something which RPGs are simply unsuited. Even in this case it may be a valuable tool in the midst of other forms of learning, especially self-learning. After all the fervor of pushing yourself, silence may reveal what noise has not. In the very least the contrast might help bolster players for further self-discovery.

Looking Back

Both pushing and contemplation deal with an immediate learning. But much self-learning in RPGs derives from reflection, long after the decisions have been made. Indeed, both difficult decisions and contemplation can food for later reflection. But but to support reflection, a RPG must have a way to link the past events directly to a time for looking back.

This requirement is two-fold. First, the design must include a phase to examine what has happened. Second, there must be a record of some sort, reminding and focusing the players on what happened, why it happened, and most importantly who was responsible. This could occur at the end of a session, or it could be a periodic slowing of the action. In any case taking that time for reflection should confront each player with what they have done.

What Have You Done

Over the last three months I've presented an 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, how it teaches a tactical view of social interaction, and how it enables learning about each other. In that same vein, Savagery can teach players about themselves.

Trigger scenes in Savagery are opportunities to do horrible things to fictional people, and to what what horrors other people will perform. Club scenes occur between each trigger scenes, during each of these scenes, the player who just had a trigger scenes gets to relate what happened to his club mates. This is a prime moment for reflection, as the previous fight is deconstructed and possibly built into a new sparring match among the club members.

RPGs affect us, long after we've played them. Perhaps not in earth shattering ways, but in small ones. And those are ultimately more important. They can help us understand and learn about the things and people around us, including ourselves. But if they can affect us this way, why don't we exploit this in design. in particular why don't we build on what one game gives us to enhance the next, building sequences of RPGs to be played in order.

Next Month: In Order