"Adventure Learning System"

Adventure Learning System

This is what DragonRaid, the infamous Evangelical RPG, called itself. Not a roleplaying game, or a story-telling system or anything like that. Its purpose is to teach.
Now, because of the subject matter of DragonRaid, a gamer can easily take it as manipulative, harshly didactic or even cringe-worthy. (Evangelical and moralistic Christianity did a lot to alienate the nerd and gaming community back in the day. By doing so, they ultimately stunted their own cause, because a society's nerds generally decide how that society will lean in the next decade or two. If you need convincing of this point, just take a look at the popular movies and TV shows of the last decade or so. It's all high-budget fantasy and Marvel stuff.) Anyways, because of its context, that whole "adventure-learning system" idea was marginalized and largely ignored.

I had an exchange with someone in my group.
To set the scene, we had all met for our weekly game, but play had been interrupted by one of our many inevitable tangents. I quietly said something to complain about this. My friend responded something like this;
"Oh well, we all got together and we're hanging out; getting social interaction. That's the important thing."
I believed I detected a hint of sarcasm or doubt in her voice, so I was emboldened to speak my mind:
"I'm here to have a deeply immersive fantasy experience."

Seriously. I'm trying to get some catharsis up in here. But that is a tough dragon to chase. It takes some serious magic to pull off catharsis in game. Light some candles, get the oils out...
Some people talk about whether a game is more "narrativist" or "simlationist." But these definitions are fairly worthless for any application. People say "it's only a game! It should be fun." but you look around the table and see some bored, unengaged sonsabitches.
What if those poor, bored sonsabitches came to the table with the expectation that they could actually get something out of it?

Like language or money or strike-on-box matches; Roleplaying is a technology. But what if we have completely misconstrued the usefulness of this technology? What if DragonRaid had it right? What if Roleplaying Games are at their best in an educational capacity? 

The simulation of peoples and worlds cannot be earnestly attempted without learning about people and the world.

Consider the history which led up to modern roleplaying.
War-Gaming was originally developed as a tool to teach tactics to military officers. However, in such Kriegspiel, entertainment value was not a remote consideration and the rules were miserably unwieldy.
When H.G. Wells invented his game Little Wars, an observer declared that he had invented a type of kriegspiel. Little Wars was a game meant to be played on miniature, hand-crafted battlefields with tin soldiers and a sort of spring-powered toy cannon which is no longer widely available, but easily improvisable.  Players were expected to get down and aim the cannon by sight when firing.  Little Wars is worth looking up if only for historical interest.

They appear to be playing in the "out-side." How quaint were the ways of the ancients!

In musing about the possibilities of his game, H.G.Wells envisions "sanatoriums" where the war-pigs of the world can live out their sadomasochistic tendencies without disturbing the rest of the casual gamers. When a sci-fi writer proposes something like this, it is a fair bet they are only half joking, and at least fractionally correct:
It came to pass that, the term "roleplaying" was originally invented by psychiatrists to suit their own purposes. They noted that role-play exercises could have therapeutic or psychosocial benefits. There are many people going around who testify that D&D helped them to overcome shyness or social awkwardness. I have personally witnessed people having their horizons expanded through roleplaying games (provided they can be kept away from splatbooks and self-indulgent expansions) The very act of roleplaying is an exercise empathy. It is also a method for analyzing and compartmentalizing one's own impulses. Ask me about my chaotic neutral barbarian-huntress. She's not technically an atheist, but she has only recently heard of such things as "gods" and imagines them only as powerful magic users.

I find myself imagining the use of roleplaying in applied political science. There was once a game called Diplomacy. Players in Diplomacy took on the roles of national leaders and played by sending written orders and negotiations to other players and to the referee. It was a game you could play by post. Imagine if you applied the principles of actual poli-sci and played it out as a serious simulation.

This is not to remotely suggest that games should drop fiction or escapism. Far from it. But even when produced for mere pleasure, people tend to not be pleased with their games unless there is some underlying verisimilitude to the creation. There needs to be some familiar realism for the fantastic to grow upon.

So how do you make a game more educational?
I think it would start with communication between players and Game-masters. There needs to be an agreement on the setting and subject matter. that way everyone can do their homework and bring their books so to speak. Adjusting the initial parameters of a game will do a lot to determine the themes and thoughts involved in the adventure. I'll be writing a list of such parameters soon. With very little adjustment, your average fantasy roleplaying system could be used to address grand philosophical and cosmological questions. The hard part is the little, practical stuff. How, for instance, could a ranger's knowledge of the habits of wild animals be transmitted to people sitting around a kitchen table? Or the thief's knowledge of traps and trickery? How could a fighter's familiarity with weaponry be transmitted, short of some very intense LARPing?
These are tantalizing problems.
Please leave your precious input in the comments.

By the way, whenever I talk about the history of D&D, it is largely a regurgitation of what I learned from Jon Peterson's book "Playing at the World." PatW is an excellent text on the history of rpgs, and it is doubly amazing for maintaining the citation standards of an academic work.  I gave it 5 stars on amazon.