Kids and Gaming

I won't be able to run my game this week, so I figured I would fill the time with more geeky life observations.

I've had the joy of having kids at my encounters table. Beyond that, I also am participating in a D&D game primarily to teach my friend Sheldon's teenagers and their friends the game. I've also recently begun teaching my nieces D&D.

First and foremost, any adult geek with kids in their life not trying to pass on the geeky goodness is doing it wrong. We've come a long way. Michael Stackpole is allowed to write novels instead of essays about how gaming isn't Satanic and doesn't cause psychotic breaks from reality. A cast member of Firefly is a regular in Disney movies. Monte Cook even co-designed a game specifically for introducing pre-schoolers to role-playing.

But there's still a distance to cover. It doesn't help that online games are filled with racist and sexist commentary and that Gamergate was a thing. Companies that put out freemium video games designed to make money on microtransactions certainly can help turn parents and grandparents away from letting their kids game. Last but not least, it doesn't help that so many kids' "games" available in mainstream toy stores don't really have any game play. They just have the "players" generate a random result and move a token around a board with bright, pretty colors.

The best games, of course, teach. Here, I'm defining actual game play as a situation where the player is faced with a limited number of almost always sub-optimal decisions, and the choices have consequences for that player's outcome. This definition is vague enough that almost anything could be made into a game. Indeed, games have been made about almost every experience imaginable. But two real key components are the decisions and the outcomes.

Part of growing up is learning that you have to make choices, and sometimes you won't like everything on the list you have to chose from, but that making those choices will have an effect on your life. That's why a good game is life in a nutshell. And why a kids' game that involves rolling a die and drawing a card and then moving a pawn around a board according to that random result is terrible. My nieces figured out that Candyland and Chutes and Ladders were (language alert, youngsters) bullshit pretty quickly.

Aside from that important life lesson, what else do we want games to help us teach? Any game that offers a random outcome as part of the decision-making process can help teach math skills. More importantly, it can teach probability, a subject people are pretty stupid about if the money made by casinos and lotteries is any indication.

Any game that teaches verbal skills is important. And not just Scrabble, but one of the joys of a game like D&D is coming to a description including a teachable vocabulary word: crenelation, censer, or gazebo, and pausing to tell the kids what the word means.

Last, but not least, the best games are social. In our increasingly online social environments, it's important to expose kids to activities that require them to meet other people in person and interact with them. There's definitely a few parents out there going: "What about sports?" Not every kid likes sports. Not every kid is good at sports. And those kids deserve a chance for healthy human interaction, too.

But these are the great moments when playing an RPG with kids. I've seen it a few times, and the first is that look of glee when they realize that they can have their character literally do almost anything. Frequently they'll do something they know will be disruptive to the other players at that point. However, they soon discover the consequences: the other players won't want to play with them anymore, and this is a game that they need to play with other people. So they start amending their actions. Usually, they're still looking for ways to push in their own direction, but they begin to understand why compromise and working with a team is better.

If, as a DM, I can foster that sense of the importance of teamwork in at least one kid gaming at my table, I think I've done my job.