RSSExperiment: Role-Playing Games in innovation
Put together on May 5, 2008 1:30 pm by Dimitris
What do you think?
Although I probably don’t need to explain to people reading this blog what Role-Playing Games (RPGs) are, I do need to say a few words about my take on RPGs in order to avoid any confusion. As with most, my first encounter with RPGs was in my teens and in fantasy, Lord of the Rings-style terms: a group of my friends and I would get together, create characters and make them come alive in an imaginary alternate reality of adventure and magic. All this was within a plot set up and gradually unfolded by one of us (the game master) over the course of a number of playing sessions.
Much later, when I was studying for my PhD in the UK and working at the same time in a hall of residence, I had to participate in a seminar where I encountered RPGs again – only in an entirely different context. The seminar was aimed at tutors (i.e. mainly postgraduate students like me who were responsible for the students’ welfare and helping run the hall). Among other things the seminar included brief sessions where attendees would be presented with an imaginary mini-crisis in the hall and asked to ‘get in role’ and solve the problem as a tutor or as a team of tutors.
And that’s just one example of RPGs not being just about recreation. They are being used extensively for educational and training purposes in various settings as well. From schools and psychotherapy sessions to professional seminars for marketers and CEO’s, such exercises – when guided by people experienced in the field in question (the equivalent of game masters) – can provide whole new insights for those involved. Examples include psychologists taught how to handle (roleplayed) patients’ symptoms, managers being trained to efficiently interact with employees, salesmen improving their customer-handling skills, project teams trained in collaborative problem-solving etc.
I’m pretty sure though that RPGs can be put to use in another way perhaps yet unexplored. A few months back, right before I was to start my military service, I had a few weeks off work and started a mini-campaign with two friends. Now, the game master did not use any of the existing world settings but instead had set the game in the current world a century in the future. He had given things quite a bit of thought and (although not a simple task) had managed to create a consistent looking possible version of our future world. There was obviously no magic, just advanced technology and gadgets (the wifi cloud, a simple form of AI, simple human implants, etc), advanced genetics (people could engineer their and their offsprings’ bodies), some space exploration (confined to our closest planets though with a bit of terraforming) and the global village (the whole world interconnected with everyone having a voice) was a reality. All in all, an exciting new environment to create characters and work through the scenario he had in mind (which, incidentally, was about what happens when our future civilisation contacts alien life – in the form of a telepathic virus).
Now our game was obviously focused on our characters and the scenario instead of just exploring the world. But what if we turn the game around and the opposite was true? What if we wanted to shift the attention of those involved from their characters and the game master’s plot to the setting itself or perhaps to a particular aspect of that world? That way we could in essence get an inside glimpse at what the ‘world’ in question is like. For example, we could try to play our way through what our world will look and feel like, not in 100 years from now but say in 5. I’ll show how we could try doing that in my next post.
tags: idea |
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