In which MetalJim wonders about kinder, gentler, role-playing games…

I just finished watching a new episode of The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central, which featured an interview with Ian Bogost, a professor and video game developer interested in making video games that are actually educational and insightful.  Oh wait!  Smite wrote an article about this guy a few weeks back.

Today, I’m going to push the discussion a little further, and ask, “Why can’t we make our role playing games more educational?”  Towards that end, I’m going to propose some scenario ideas…

The History Lesson

A couple of years ago, I ran a modern day occult horror game based in a city called Split, in the country of Croatia.  I picked this town as a place that no one in my play group had ever heard of, but which I imagined as the sort of place where a shadowy group of magical terrorists might want to hang out.  I ended up doing a lot of research into the history of Croatia, and I was able to share a good deal of that with my players.  It ended up working really well.  Right now, I’m doing some research about a resort town called Marienbad, in the modern day Czech Republic, circa 1895 (pictured at right). 

The trick to the “history lesson” RPG is to pick something obscure enough that the players don’t have a huge number of preconceptions going in.  At the same time, you should be willing to wander off the track of perfect historical accuracy in order to keep the game fun.  A historically based RPG should feel more like an playground, and not be some sort of historical slide show orchestrated by the GM.

Life in Prison

A long time ago, I came up with a Theatrix RPG scenario called “Battle Island Apocalypse.”  The idea was that in a world suffering from severe global warming, violent prisoners were basically being dumped onto a jungle island where the prisoners scavenged for weapons and fought for their lives.  I suppose such a game could be considered educational about our planet’s future, but at the time I meant it more as an homage to cliche 1980s post-apocalypse movies like Escape from New York or The Road Warrior.

Could a prison RPG actually be fun?  Imagine a limited series scenario in which the players are inmates at a somewhat poorly run prison, forced to band together in order to deal with a rising tide of gang violence inside prison walls.  Imagine packaging such a scenario for teenagers in ways that make prison seem really unappealing, but also allowing kids to act out a few of their more violent fantasies…hmmm.

Banana Republic

Mr. Bogost, in his interview last night, talked about how games were good at giving us ways to simulate complex systems in order to learn about them.  How about politics?  Would it be fun to have a party of players working as campaign managers, helping a politician to win a tightly contested race?  I think not.  It would probably be more fun to imagine something out of the board game Junta.  In this sort of “Banana Republic” scenario, we have a fictional Latin American country with an ailing military dictator.  The players represent the ruling elite of the country – military commanders, police chiefs, even the mistress and the son of el presidente.  This group gets together for weekly meetings to deal with various issues, like how to deal with the growing rebel insurgency in the mountains, and what to do with a dwindling stockpile of U.S. aid money. 

The really educational part of the Banana Republic game is seeing at what point the players fall into the morass of political corruption.  At what point does it become OK to torture a few prisoners?  When is it OK to accept a bribe?  Do you punish a village where the locals seem to be harbouring communist rebels?  Hey, sometimes having a highly efficient death squad can solve all sorts of problems!  Things could get really interesting when the players start to turn against each other as the dictator’s health grows steadily worse.  Or maybe, just maybe, the players will actually behave ethically and turn their homeland into a tropical utopia!

Thinking Outside the Box

Who says that RPGs have to be about killing monsters and gaining levels?  A few years ago, a visionary game designer named Peter Molyneux released a game for PC called The Movies.  I was intrigued by the previews, but the game fell far short of what the previews initially promised.  After a while the game turned into a frustrating exercise in micro management.  You had to maintain the shrubbery in your studio lot, write scripts, etc., but you really spent most of your time trying to coax your dysfunctional actresses away from the studio cantina in an effort to get them on set where the rest of the crew was waiting for them.  For all that, the finished “movie” was little more than a chain of canned animations.  It turns out that making movies is a very complicated process, and one that’s hard to capture properly in a video game.

However, could you build a paper and pencil RPG around a movie production team?  Characters would fill roles such as location co-ordinator, set decorator, directory of photography, producer, etc.  For the first few sessions, start them off as a “second unit,” working on some outdoor location stuff for a larger Hollywood action movie.  Then, give the team a chance to develop their own “indy” film, right through script development, casting, location scouting, and finally the actual shooting process.  Of course, you can’t actually produce a recorded film of a movie that only exists in your minds, but you could probably help the process along a little if someone in the group has access to screen writing software, and if someone else is enough of an artist to produce rudimentary storyboards.

Would a movie-making RPG still be anything like a tradtional RPG in a way that we would recognize?  Or would it be an entirely new kind of activity?  How does the role of a game master evolve in such a scenario?

If we game masters can convince the business world that we can teach valuable job skills through simulation development, then just maybe someday we can make a living running RPGs.  Until then, we probably have to put up with our players asking us to deliver game experiences where they get to kill lots of zombies.  Not that there’s anything wrong with zombies, mind you.  I’m just asking whether or not our beloved games can somehow go a little further…