Gaming can be good for you, really

By: John Bailey

Posted: 11/21/08

You probably had a bunch of kids that played "Dungeons and Dragons" in your high school. Remember those kids? Now, if I asked you about "the positive functions of pencil and paper role-playing games," what would you tell me?

Honestly, if you had nothing good to say, I wouldn't blame you. Many people who play role-playing games - and I'm talking the extra-strength, triple-distilled nerdy kind, rolling dice and drawing maps and whatever - are huge pains in the ass. As far as anyone can tell from most high school gamers, all role-playing games do is cause you to develop acne and wear those black pants with neon chains on them.

But try to forget those people. I know - it's tough. But these games are some of the best things you can do with yourself, although I guess volunteering at homeless shelters is a little more significant. Pencil and paper role-playing games - colloquially, "RPGs," of which "Dungeons and Dragons" is the most well-known, but there are plenty more - are some of the best, most enjoyable educational tools available to today's disgruntled youth.

The numbers game

Math comes easy to me - because I grew up knowing exactly how many paces away that thief is, how much it'll cost to fix my platinum-plated armor and how much ale we can put on the cart before the wheels will break.

Math is generally a pain to learn, and even more of a pain to practice - and RPGs can help with that. No, they've got no calculus or linear algebra to teach a college-level mathematician, but they are full of numbers that won't crunch themselves.

"I was attracted to the number cruching," said Joseph Gilbert, a 5th-semester computer science and engineering major. And those numbers are all attached to problems that need solving. Sure, numbers are boring, but solving puzzles isn't - how many hours have you wasted doing the Sudoku while you're supposed to be texting in class?

"It was almost like a puzzle," Gilbert said of his RPG experience. "You had all these cool character traits, but at the same time, all these elements of good and evil, profession, all broke down into numbers - it's a very interesting system."

Put a few RPG books and a bag of dice in a kid's hand, and I guarantee you he or she will do a good 50 points better on their eventual math SATs. Guarantee not guaranteed.

Bookworms

When's the last time you read a good book? No, "Twilight" doesn't count, and neither does anything from high school English class. At the risk of aging 40 years on the spot, kids today don't read enough.

And I mean, they should be reading good books. I'm not going to suggest that the "Monster Manual" is fine literature, but it's certainly text on a page - and it's riddled with lots of big words, classical etymologies and unusual vocabulary. There's a lot of critical reading and parsing of difficult topics involved in these rulebooks - if you think Foucault is tough, try the 3rd edition grappling rules! (Heh, heh. No, seriously, don't make jokes like that, it makes people hate you.) If parents really want their children away from the screens and getting some reading done, RPGs are a prize way to do it.

The "tea" in "team"

"Group management" and "critical problem solving" sound like training programs in a Human Resources department - but they're exactly the skills you need, and develop, in pen and paper RPGs.

"You get a better ability to understand others and yourself," said Dave Beattie, a 5th-semester English and psychology double major. "If you're pretending to be a character - even someone else's character - you have to understand what makes that character real."

Even in fake worlds, empathy and teamwork are essential to success. Every player brings their own unique skill set to the table (literally) and somehow, you need to get across that yawning lava chasm guarded by the Seven Serpents of the Seranath in order to slay the Queen Mother of the Firemoth tribe. Or maybe you just need to find a place to sleep for the night.

Whatever the situation, the group needs to coordinate their skills in order to maximize their ass-kickin' potential, and the challenges are many and varied.

"Maximize?" We can go further: "utilize your disparate qualities to manifest the ideally suited and generally desired result preferred by the majority." Today's battleaxe-wielding kid hopped up on Mountain Dew is tomorrow's Fortune 500 CEO.

Tell me a story

When your daughter looks up at you with those big brown eyes and asks you to tell her a story, will you be prepared? You're learning a lot in college, but at some point you're going to have to build the skills you need to take that parenting equivalent of the 3 a.m. red telephone off the hook. And unless you're getting the concentration in creative writing, there's no class you get to teach you how to tell stories.

And ultimately, if you do it right, that's what RPGs are all about: protagonists who journey through a world, meeting their individual ups and downs, their triumphs and trespasses, their shining successes and miserable failures.

"[Role-playing games] are a wonderful outlet for creativity," said Sean Carey, a 7th-semester English and philosophy double major. "It's an early experience in storytelling."

When each player creates a character, it's more than just an avatar with some rules slung around its shoulders - it's an (imaginary) living being, with a backstory, hopes, dreams, fears and embarrassing personal problems.

"[The games] obviously inspire creativity," Gilbert said.

So remember: with the right RPG background, you don't have to stutter and stumble your way through your daughter's first bedtime story. You'll always have "that time we escaped the blast furnace in full plate armor and climbed the spire to defeat the ninja lord" to fall back on.

Of course, if you missed the boat growing up, it's not too late - those friends you have? Some of them probably play these games - and they're probably the ones who are otherwise intelligent, attractive and in complete social control. Call them up! They'll be glad to show you. And what else were you doing tonight - "Halo?"