John K. Kirk’s School Of Geek – Synchronicity

The geek-child inside me never grew up; he just got a larger bank account and credit rating to buy more of the toys he always wanted.

This is the focus of School of Geek. What do the embryonic geeks-in-training of today have in common with the geekosaurs  around them? What are the common features that we share in the geekoverse?

   (Can I manhandle the word geek any more?)

I’m lucky. Every day, in my classroom, I get to interact with today’s teenagers and see these things that they enjoy, see them as the modern day incarnations of the things I loved in my youth and share the history of them with my students. It creates a shared and more meaningful geekosphere, complete with learning opportunities and media awareness. (And if you’ll notice, I just made a new geek-word.)

  For this first time out, I’m going to look at the notion of role-playing games. Read after the jump!

The Teacher As Young Role Player (or, Back When I Was A Kid…)

One of the great things about playing role playing games in my youth was the companionship.  Every week, my friends and I would make our way over to another friend’s basement, where we’d listen to Sting wail out Synchronicity, collaborate on character backgrounds, read rule books, consult matrices and create adventures together.  I remember an instance when we contrived of a plan to bankrupt a local corrupt Count. We planned to hire away his private army by using gold ‘won’ at his medieval casino through telepathy and magic. This was role-playing at its most social and pure Nirvanic geekdom.  Dice would determine our fun and our pencils would record our victory at liberating the town from the oppressive yoke of the evil Count’s tyranny. Our heroes were then ready for more adventures. Sometimes, we remembered our characters’ backgrounds more easily than our own!

Today, if you asked a thirteen year-old how to define a role-playing game, she’d probably come up with any one of the popular computer games created by software companies like Bethesda or Blizzard Entertainment. If you sat a modern day iteration of Dungeons & Dragons in front of her, she’d probably balk at the amount of the text she’d had to read to figure out the game and choose to do her homework instead.

The amount of information required for a typical teenager to absorb in text-rich RPG’s is an extremely daunting process.  Moreover, calculations like probabilities, percentages, and bonuses to skills, basic addition and multiplication also slow down a game’s functioning.  Today’s character sheets (which sometimes can sometimes take up to five sheets per character) are highly complex in terms of organization and function. Most of them can be printed but out, but new copies always have to be created whenever a character advances in level and capability. Forget about the simple sheets of loose-leaf I used to use in my day. Character files are not easily portable and sometimes require specialized software to display characters.

Granted, the rulebooks were large and ominous, but they were the culminations of works-in-progress; From Gary Gygax’s initial Chainmail to the boxed edition of the D&D Basic Set; from contributions from members of the Role Playing Gamers’ Association to the formation of The Dragon magazine. Rulebooks grew larger but were entertaining to read because of their developmental nature. Kids had already done the pre-reading on the earlier incarnations of the rulebooks and were just reading the changes.

Any character modifications were our own inventions. Sure, there were basic modifications and changes recommended by the rules, but the joy was found in building your own character and recording his progression. In computer roleplaying games, there are no “off-book” mods. You either follow what the computer has laid out for you or you don’t. You can’t save your characters and play them in other adventures, and you certainly can’t share in the fun of the character’s growth with the computer.

Whenever I play role-playing games with my friends today, I can’t – unless I have a copy of the book (personal choice), a laptop and an active Wi-Fi signal to access the internet and go online to access my account on the website to research information far quicker than having the group search through the book. Oh, don’t forget about all the paper I use whenever I need to share my character information to the group.

I like the book though. Nostalgia – what can I say?

Yesterday Vs Today

There’s a tremendous difference in the simplicity of yesterday’s role-playing games compared to the ones that embryonic geeks could obtain today. Forget pencil-and-paper – what kid in his right mind would put himself through all this algebraic nonsense when they can simply plug a disc into a console and just get into playing the game? I remember trying to coach some of my grade eight English students in playing a 3^rd Edition D&D scenario and they thought they were in a math class. Remember THAC0? The first question they asked: is there a computer version of this?

Sad to say, the computer is the thinking component for the RPG-players of today. The computer determines their bonuses or penalties, remember your curses and even do your imagining for you by providing an incredibly detailed GUI, scenes, character portrayal, etc., ad nauseam. Curse those programmers and their renderings of attractive and buxom she-barbarians!

Who’s to complain? Is it really such a bad thing? I mean, I’m in the same boat with my younger compatriots. If I were thirteen again, I’d probably be steering the computerized boat into ports of pretty, pixelated pleasure myself. It’s such an easier and attractive option that it’s no wonder that the print runs on the new Dungeons & Dragons products are roughly one fifth where they used to be in 1989. A million copies of the D&D boxed set versus the two hundred thousand Player’s Handbooks today (www.acaeum.com) shows the declining interest in text-heavy games in today’s age of computer role-playing.

Of course, Call of Duty: Black Ops II beat $500,000 in sales within the first 24 hours of release. I don’t know if companies like TSR ever experienced those numbers but it certainly shows the appeal.

The point is: though software companies are definitely the new venue for role playing, they still fail to produce social aspects of the experience like problem-solving, collaborative story-building and hey, what about the simple recognition of mutual victory among friends? These are things essential to learning, socialization and just plain fun with other people who share the same values. No computer system can ever hope to replace those, and speaking as a parent and a teacher, I see these values more essential to a young person’s developing array of life-skills than familiarity with the newest gaming console.

One of my students remembered my lament about how role-playing games used to be fun – the way my friends and I now play: as writers and readers, instead of illiterate button-punchers.

So what’s the solution? Answer: common ground. 

Role Playing Today

Bring on Descent: Journeys in the Dark (2^nd Edition) by Fantasy Flight Games. This is a game where the young can enjoy the same role playing fun without getting bogged down in the rules. The character sheets are pre-printed and remarkably simple. The pieces and tiles boards are tactile enough for players to see the background and the locations of the players, yet still allow them to imagine the combat and other action. Also, one person acts as overlord in a GM-like capacity to run the various types of encounters the players run into. There is a central scenario, situation and each character has a distinct background and personality that the players can enjoy.

D&D light.

With the remarkably simple rules, players can start playing right away and the progression of their characters is still your own to keep for future scenarios. This is one of the areas of common ground where both generations of geeks can meet and play. This game captures the spirit of the role-playing game of the past while still managing to allow for a streamlined and entertaining game experience that present-day players can enjoy and initiate right away.

I was excited to learn that this is a game that is finding lots of ground with my students. It allows them to read together – to create together.  Hell, I’ve even ordered a copy for myself. When I asked one of my kids why she liked it, her response was that it was something that she and her friends could all agree on. They could get a pizza, sit in their basement and they could all focus on the same thing for once, instead of just watching someone play on the computer while the others waited for a turn.

I smiled. I was thinking that you might even be able to hear some new Sting numbers playing on an iPod in the background.

There is hope for the future of role playing gamers.