Tales from the Rocket House

Educational games, particularly video games (but also board and card games), have been getting a lot of attention lately, primarily in the younger age groups (served by Leapfrog and Vtech, for example). As an Instructional Technology student, it's something I'm very interested in, in part because my recent experience as a high school teacher showed me just how disengaged the majority of our public school students are. The old methods aren't reaching the new generation of students, and something has to change. Educational gaming may very well be part of the answer.

This leads me to ask: are roleplaying games a good fit for educational content? And if so, how can they best be used?

As we all know, the main difference between an RPG and any other type of game (card, board, video, whatever) is the relative lack of limits on what players can do. Unless the GM railroads, the players can choose to do anything from high adventure to cynical smuggling to goat herding. And that's a large part of the appeal, getting into someone else's skin and deciding what they'll do.

However, this feature makes it very hard to build educational content into the fabric of an RPG. Video, bard, and card games all have limited sets of activities. Not only are all of the pieces' moves strictly delineated in chess, but it is also quite impossible for a player to broker a truce between black and white, to switch sides in mid battle, or gain the white king's trust, only to assassinate him.

In essence (and I know I'm preaching to the choir here) a roleplaying game is not about what the game designers say it's about, but what the players and GM decide it's about. And while it's entirely possible to set an RPG in a historical time period and spend as many of the game book's pages as you'd like detailing the social, military, and political history of the setting, there's no guarantee that any of that material will even be read, beyond the equipment lists (those always get read). And even if it gets read, there's no guarantee that it will be used enough in actual play that the players will really remember it.

So, from a game designer's perspective, it seems like traditional RPGs are not really fertile ground for educational gaming.

But what about “indie” games, those Forge-type creations that focus on doing one thing, in which everything from fluff to mechanics supports that one goal? Trollbabe, and, more starkly, Polaris come to mind as examples. Could these tightly-focused RPGs be built so some of the educational content came through by default?

Honestly, I'm not sure. Indie games tend to feature a lot of shared narrative control, and I'm not sure how that would fit into creating an inherently educational environment. If the people exercising the narrative control wanted to learn from each other, it would be easy enough to do, but for a game designer to “write it in” so that it came through automatically, the way the learning could in a more limited game . . . well, I'm not convinced.

Professor Seymore Papert, in his article “Does Easy Do It?” warns of “Shavian Reversals,” which combine the worst qualities of each of their “parents.” In this case, he's talking about learning games which they are neither fun games nor sound educational pedagogy. Papert notes that an educational game must first be a good game, or it will fail both as a game and as an teaching instrument.

And while it would be trivially easy to hack together an “educational,” OD&D-ish dungeon crawl game, either board-based or more like the very first RPGs, it could very easily be a Shavian Reversal. The basic mechanic could be: answer a question correctly, and you “hit” or “succeed.” The difficulty level of the questions would be equivalent to the difficulty level of the task in the game. If you hit, in combat, you then get to roll damage. The Fighter rolls the most damage dice, and has the most hit points. The Thief is weaker than the Fighter, but can backstab (answer a tougher question than is required, but then gets double damage) and dodge (answer a question to avoid an attack). The Mage is weaker still, but has spells, and so on. Monsters always hit, but do less damage per attack.

Well, this could be an RPG as much as OD&D is, or it could be a board game, and it does have an educational component: the players have to answer study questions to succeed. On the other hand, it's a heavy-handed approach that I doubt most roleplayers would find too exciting. And most likely the questions are going to be multiple choice drill-and-regurgitate contextless facts, which is mediocre-at-best pedagogically.

While such a game could be fun, if the rest of the game is put together well, and it could actually teach something, if the questions are well-written, and the “deck” is somehow randomized so you don't just end up memorizing that “the question that starts with 'who assassinated-' is answered correctly with 'b',” I'd be hard pressed to call it a shining example of educational gaming. Honestly, I can't think of anyone who'd choose to play that over almost any of the RPGs that are on the market today. And that's part of the problem. To be really successful, educational games need to not only be more fun than doing book work or listening to the teacher talk; they need to be able to compete with commercial entertainment, including non-educational video games.

Well, that's it: I'm tapped. It will take a sharper mind than mine to create a functional, educational RPG. But that's all right. As far as I'm concerned, roleplaying is a perfectly worthwhile hobby that needs no external justification.