Teach Your Kids to Game Week

We're smack dab in the middle of this year's Teach Your Kids to Game Week, which runs December 3-10, 2012. I'm not sure a week is enough, since I think we should teach gaming whenever we can, but it might jog a few parents into action who otherwise wouldn't think of it.

Why Teach Gaming?
My wife recently shared an article listing the Top 10 Skills Children Learn from the Arts. When I read it, I realized that the same list neatly covers skills learned from Gaming as well. Patience, focus, creative problem-solving, perseverance - all of these spring just as easily from the gaming table.

I think Fitz's article about Cultivating a Beginner's Mind over at Game Knight Reviews hits another benefit squarely on the head. When you teach, a part of you recalls the limitless possibilities you had when you first learned. Before the limits and even defining what "failure" was in a gaming sense, you were free to explore and define your reality without fear. You were p'u, the uncarved block who had no preconceived limits on what was possible, and a piece of that mindset rekindles when you play RPGs and other games with your kids. I don't know about you, but tapping into that feeling helps keep me young.

Communication Is Key
In my mind, RPGs teach communication skills most of all. I've never heard anyone request less communication, unless they're trying to limit spam messages. But limiting face to face communications? I've only heard pleas for brevity, not less communication.

"It looks just like the GM described it!"

RPGs center around communication. It's a game where you create a new reality out of nothing but words: describing locations and items and actions and speaking in character. More thoughts on this in an upcoming post, so stay tuned.

No matter what work you or your kids end up doing in life, role playing games train communication skills and make habitual players more more rounded people, and thus more valuable workers. RPGs encourage speaking up around the table. They encourage taking action and describing that action in a way that everyone else around the table understands. Players come up with unorthodox ideas to solve problems. Players learn how to look at a situation from differing viewpoints and prioritize what to do next. Persevering through a quest rewards you with loot or character improvement. RPGs encourage working in a group and finding ways to get along with others to accomplish goals.

Do I sound like a business-based motivational speaker yet?

How Do I Start?
Don't overwhelm your kids with rules. Telling the story and controlling a character are key to getting kids jazzed about RPGs. I suggest using something lightweight, like RPG Kids or Argyle & Crew. I know people playing with something as light as the Clay-O-Rama rules from Dragon Magazine #125, and as crunchy as straight AD&D, so whatever rules you're comfortable with can work for kids, if you can explain them in small enough chunks for everyone at the table to understand. Or you can take all the math bits behind the GM screen and just have your younger players roll dice and decide what their character does next.

Drive Thru RPG has some other suggestions for RPGs for kids. And they're promoting Teach Your Kids to Game Week with resources like this banner:



I'm using Warrior, Rogue & Mage in my RPG for kids since it's all d6+bonus vs. target number. I've posted some lessons learned from my first RPG for kids run which you may find helpful. I'm also excited to get my hands on Sidekick Quests when the rules are released. Definitely read the Sidekick Quests webcomic if you haven't yet. James Stowe's character sheets and monster sheets are very accessible and irrepressibly fun.

What Am I Doing This Week?
Sadly, not much, though I've talked with my daughter about finishing up the story of Princess Ruth that we've been creating occasionally at bedtime. I'm flat out between work and homeschool and cleaning and being dad and shopping and adjusting to 2 new cats and getting back to writing The Tao of Gaming. But I am scheduling the next RPG for kids session for January or February. I can't wait to see what happens in Dragonville next.

Game on. And involve your kids this time.

The Gaming Experience and Virginity

I want to expand on an idea I just tweeted.

The desire for Old Skool gaming is the quixotic quest to re-experience gaming for the first time. http://bit.ly/dbopYY - From @gelconf

The video shows a talk from 2009's Gel Conference given by a sleight-of-hand magician named Jamy Ian Swiss.  He talks about user experience and how marketing is about empathy, about connecting with people, about getting inside your audience's head and telling a story that resonates with the person going through the experience you're providing.  At the end, he does a magic trick with a volunteer to illustrate his point.  Trick is, the volunteer is the only one who can't see how the trick works - then he apologizes to the audience for spoiling the experience of that trick for them forever.


He talks about magicians losing their "visual virginity" and how they can't see anything with innocent eyes any more since they know the trick and their job is to fool the audience.


How does this tie to gaming?  Many of the laments I've heard over the past few years are tied to re-experiencing the sense of magic in games.  "Today's games aren't as good/exciting/mysterious/wonderful as the games in the old days."


The games haven't changed.  We have.  We've lost our gaming virginity.  We've played and discovered and learned, and now our minds have categorized and been limited by our experiences with the games we've played.  We know not to try things because they don't work well.  We know that D&D isn't great for non-combat encounters since the point of the game as written is to meet interesting monsters, beat them up, and loot the bodies.  We know the Monster Manual entries.  We memorized THACO tables.  Fill in your own examples, you've got plenty to choose from.


Point is, we'll never have that experience of newness ever again because of our past experience with the game.  We've lost our innocence, and that means we've learned to limit ourselves.  The glory of children comes from their fearlessness, their lack of knowledge of what's possible, and their ability to throw their entire selves into what they do.  How many 40 year olds do you see balancing on one foot on the back of the sofa in an attempt to do a flip?  Not too many.

In our quest to discover what the game's all about, we paint more details onto our mental model of the game, and we eventually make that mental model solid, unchanging, brittle, and much less fun.


We have ways around this to re-inject a sense of wonder into the game:
1) Become a GM.  Game Masters perform magic by bringing a world to life.  They can take their knowledge and relive their innocence vicariously through their players.  Nothing is more satisfying to me as a GM than watching a player's face light up because they've had a breakthrough in the context of the game.


2) Have experiences in new contexts.  Whether you play a new game system every month, or shake it up and do a game at a con instead of at the dining room table, changing the context can change the game.  I remember my first LARP experience - at one point I was huddled in a bathroom in a friend's apartment ready to cast a teleport spell because the lynch mobs ran the streets.  It felt real because I let myself get into my character and I had no expectations about what was possible.


3) Remove the system.  Much of the shared experience comes from the shared rule set.  A player may know more about how the rules work than the GM does.  In the past I have removed the rules from the game with success.  Players create their characters and then I gathered all the character sheets during play.  The players focus more on the world of the game since they don't have a list of pre-fab rule options on a sheet in front of them.  The extreme result of this is to play without rules at all, but that requires absolute trust between every person in the entire group.


I may focus some of these ideas into another post, but I just wanted to get my ideas down before life washed them away.