Quotulatiousness

July 3, 2023

Schools fail their students when they try to teach things the students have no interest in learning

Filed under: Education, Gaming — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Friedman has several examples of success in learning when the learner suddenly wants to learn the material:

One of the problems with our educational system is that it tries to teach people things that they have no interest in learning. There is a better way.

What started me thinking about the issue and persuaded me to write this post was an online essay, by a woman I know, describing how she used D&D to cure her math phobia.

How to Cure Mathphobia

    I was failed by the education system, fell behind, never caught up, and was left with a panic response to the thought of interacting with any expression that has numbers and letters where I couldn’t immediately see what all of the numbers and letters were doing. The first time I took algebra one, I developed such a strong panic response that it wrapped around to the immediate need to go to sleep, like my brain had come up with a brilliant defense mechanism that left me with something akin to situational narcolepsy. (I did, actually, fall asleep in class several times, which had never happened to me before.) I retook the class the next year. I spent a lot of that year in tears, with a teacher who specifically refused to answer questions that weren’t more specific than “I don’t get it” or “I have no idea what any of those symbols mean or what we’re doing with them”.

Until she had a use for it:

    The first time I played D&D, I was a high school student. My party was, incidentally, all female, apart from one girl’s boyfriend and the GM, who was the father of three of the players. We actually started out playing first edition AD&D, which I am almost tempted to recommend to beginners, just on the grounds that if you start there you will appreciate virtually every other edition of D&D you end up playing by comparison. I might have given up myself before I started, except that one of the players in the first game I ever spectated was a seven-year-old girl, and I was not about to claim that I couldn’t do something that a seven-year-old was handling just fine.

    One of my most vivid memories of this group is the time we were on a massive zigzagging staircase — like one of those paths they have at the Grand Canyon, that zigzag back and forth down the cliff face so that anyone can reach the bottom without advanced rock-climbing. We saw a bunch of monsters coming for us from the ground below, and we weren’t sure whether they had climb speeds, but we didn’t super want to wait to find out. The ranger pulled out her bow to attack them before they could get to us.

    “Now, wait a moment,” says the GM. “Can your arrows actually reach that far?”

    “Well, they’re only, like, sixty feet away.”

    “No, it’s more than that, because you have to think about height in addition to horizontal distance.”

    “Yeah, but that’s, like, complicated?”

    “Is it? Most of you are taking geometry right now, don’t you know how to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle?”

    There were some groans. Math was hard. But we did know how to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle. We got out some scrap paper and puzzled over it for a couple minutes, volunteering the height of the cliff and the distance of the monsters and deciding that we could ignore the slight slope caused by the zigzagging stairways. We got a number back and compared it to the bow’s range per the rules. We determined that we could hit the monsters without a range penalty.

    We killed the monsters. This wasn’t the real victory that day.

April 30, 2015

When Dungeons and Dragons met LEGO

Filed under: Gaming, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A picture really can convey a thousand words:

Lego version of 1977 D and D box

I’ve often contend that three of the most significant influences on my adolescent years were: LEGO building, computer programming, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. With this latest mosaic project, I more or less bring all of those things together (the LEGO and D&D are obvious, while behind the scenes I have the software program I wrote to help me map out the whole mural).

For those not quite as nerdy as myself, here’s the background on this image. It is the cover to the boxed set of the 1977 version on the game Dungeons & Dragons. This was the first version of the game released as the “Basic” set. It was the first set that my brother and I owned and played with. Obviously, the countless hours I spent reading the rulebook and perusing the illustrations made a pretty big impression on me. In fact, I still run a Basic D&D campaign semi-regularly using this very set.

December 15, 2014

The world of the imagination

Filed under: Books, Gaming, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

At BoingBoing, Jason Louv talks about getting back into his teenage passion (Dungeons and Dragons), but also worries that as a culture, we’re losing our opportunities — and capability — to imagine:

There’s just something about high Arthurian or Tolkienesque fantasy that cuts so deeply into the Western unconscious, finding a far more central vein than anything that Lovecraft or Edgar Rice Burroughs or Jack Kirby were able to mine. Nothing beats the experience of the Grail Quest, of becoming a heroic adventurer in a medieval world full of fantastic creatures, on a mission to slay the dragon and liberate the princess — or at least get some decent gold, treasure and experience points.

Until I left for college, fantasy paperbacks and comics were my world when I was alone, and role-playing games were my world when I was with friends. And how much more real, in a way, the inner palaces of my adolescent imagination felt to me than the gritty “reality” of so-called adult life, of endless war, losing friends to drugs, economic chaos, tumultuous relationships, chasing dollars.

Am I so wrong to want to go back to the Garden?

The Interior Castle

While our culture dismisses any use of the imagination as wasted time — something that distracts us from the “real” world of quantification and monetization — mystics and artists throughout history have told us that the imagination is the vehicle which brings us into contact with reality, not away from it.

William Blake is an exemplar of this approach — “The world of imagination is the world of eternity,” he wrote. “It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation is finite and temporal.”

In 1577, the Spanish Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila wrote a prayer manual called The Interior Castle, which describes her path to union with God as a kind of epic single-player Dungeons and Dragons game. In it, she describes a vision she received of the soul as a castle-shaped crystal globe, containing seven mansions. These mansions — representing seven stages of deepening faith — were to be traversed through internal prayer. Throughout the book, she warns that this imaginary internal world will be consistently assaulted by reptilian specters, “toads, vipers and other venomous creatures,” representing the impurities of the soul to be vanquished by the spiritual pilgrim.

Sixty-five years earlier, St. Ignatius of Loyola designed his Spiritual Exercises as the training manual of the Jesuits, in which adherents were to deeply imagine themselves partaking in incidents from the life of Christ, creating inward virtual realities built up over years as a way of coming closer to God. Similar techniques exist in many world religions — in the stark inner visualizations of Tantric Buddhism, for instance. Such mystics speak not just of the vital importance of daydreaming and fantasy, but of the disciplined imagination as literally the door to divinity.

As we progress into the 21st century, this is a door that we are slowly losing the key to. The French Situationist author Annie Le Brun, in her 2008 book The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm, suggests that information technology is causing blight and desertification in the world of the imagination just as surely as pollution and global warming are causing blight and desertification in the physical world. We are gaining the ability to communicate and hoard information, but losing the ability to imagine.

I literally cannot get my head around what it must be like to be a child or teenager now, raised in a completely digitized world — where fantasy and long reverie have given way to the instant gratification of electronic media. There can be no innocence or imagination or wonderment in the world of Reddit, Pornhub and 4Chan — just blank, numb, drooling fixation on a screen flickering with horrors in a dark and lonely room, the hell of isolation within one’s own id. I recently saw a blog post about a toilet training apparatus with an attachment for an iPad. No, no, no.

Just as electronic media is stripping us of our right to privacy, so is it stripping us of our right to an inner world. Everything is to be put on public display, even our most intimate moments and thoughts.

We need to go back. We need to re-discover the door to the inner worlds — a door that I believe encouraging young people to read printed books, and to play analog role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, can re-open.

April 11, 2014

Dungeons and Dragons versus BADD

Filed under: Gaming, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

BBC News Magazine looks back at the moral panic about Dungeons & Dragons in the early 1980s:

Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks

In 1982, high school student Irving Lee Pulling died after shooting himself in the chest. Despite an article in the Washington Post at the time commenting “how [Pulling] had trouble ‘fitting in'”, mother Patricia Pulling believed her son’s suicide was caused by him playing D&D.

Again, it was clear that more complex psychological factors were at play. Victoria Rockecharlie, a classmate of Irving Pulling, commented that “he had a lot of problems anyway that weren’t associated with the game”.

At first, Patricia Pulling attempted to sue her son’s high school principal, claiming the curse placed upon her son’s character during a game run by the principal was real. She also sued TSR Inc, the publishers of D&D. Despite the court dismissing these cases, Pulling continued her campaign by forming Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD) in 1983.

Pulling described D&D as “a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings”.

Pulling’s pamphlet on the dangers of D&D:

Dungeons and Dragons moral panic

In 1985, Jon Quigley, of the Lakeview Full Gospel Fellowship, spoke for many opponents when he claimed: “The game is an occult tool that opens up young people to influence or possession by demons.”

These fears also found their way into the UK. Fantasy author KT Davies recalls “showing a vicar a gaming figure – he likened D&D to demon worship because there were ‘gods’ in the game”.

Veteran roleplayer Andy Smith found himself in the unusual position of being both a roleplayer and a Christian. “While working for a Christian organisation I was told to remove my roleplaying books from the shared accommodation as they were offensive to some of the other workers and contained references to demon-worship.”

Looking back now, it’s possible to see the tendrils of a classic moral panic, and some elements of the slightly esoteric world of roleplaying did stir the imaginations of panicked outsiders.

March 27, 2014

Remembering “the war on Dungeons and Dragons“

Filed under: Gaming, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:31

First, the comment that @FakeTSR linked to:

It was never a fair fight between fundamentalist Christianity and D&D. One was a dangerous system full of dark mysticism and threats to warp a young mind beyond repair, and the other was a tabletop RPG.

And then, the article by Annalee Newitz:

Thirty years ago, a war raged between the dorks who played Dungeons & Dragons, and the conservative parent groups who believed that gaming was debauched at best and Satanic at worst. Lives were ruined. People died. And now that war is over. I still can’t believe we won.

[…]

Still, unlike my fantasy of being a hot half-elf, the Christians actually had some control over our lives. My best friend got kicked out of Catholic school for playing D&D, which we counted as a win because it meant she could come to our shitty public school and play D&D with us. Outside our southern California town, however, D&D players weren’t getting off so easily. They were ostracized by their peers, kicked out of public schools, and sent to glorified reeducation camps by parents who feared their children were about to start sacrificing babies to Lolth the spider demon.

Dungeons and Dragons moral panic

Update, 28 March: Techdirt‘s Timothy Geigner sorrowfully points out that even though this particular moral panic eventually came to a happy end, the lessons of each significant outbreak of hysteria are not carried forward and the next professional pants-wetting politician or “concerned parent group” does not get the scrutiny they deserve.

As the article says, looking back from the vantage point of a world where entertainment is strewn with the fantasy genre, it’s stunning to see the propaganda that had been unleashed. Unsurprisingly, said propaganda has since been eviscerated, with all the common tales of kids killing themselves being shown to be completely unrelated to anything having to do with children’s games. Still, this kind of thing propagated like hell-fire. For all the normal, non-Satan-worshipping kids out there that were just trying to have a little fun, it must have seemed like insanity would rule the day. Fortunately, it didn’t.

[…]

Winners who are now all grown up and who have moved on to their next moral panic, be it violent video games, drill gangster rap, or any number of the next thing the younger generations will come up with. The cycle repeats. Every generation was young, became old, and feared the new young again. That’s too bad, but for those of us still reveling in our youth, real or imagined, it’s nice to know that the moral panic over video games, like all those before it, will eventually subside.

March 19, 2014

Dark Dungeons Teaser Trailer

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Published on 18 Mar 2014

Dark Dungeons brings Jack Chick’s 1984 masterpiece to the silver screen. Visit http://darkdungeonsthemovie.com/ for exclusive updates!

Debbie and Marcie arrive at college unaware of the dangers of RPGing. They are soon indoctrinated into this dangerous lifestyle where they face the threat of learning real life magical powers, being invited to join a witches’ coven, and resisting the lure of Ms. Frost, a vile temptress of a GM. But what peril must the two friends face when they stumble across the Necronomicon and their fantasy game becomes a reality game? Find out in Dark Dungeons!

January 9, 2012

Dungeons & Dragons to take major leap of faith: asking the fans for help

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:17

Although I started playing role playing games in high school, I was never all that fond of the original Dungeons & Dragons rule set. I tried several other rule sets, but ended up “rolling my own” based on a simple combat and magic ruleset from Steve Jackson Games Metagaming (The Fantasy Trip, based on the Melee and Wizard hex-and-counter minigames). I worked at one of the biggest gaming stores in Canada at the time, so I had lots of access to RPG resources. What mattered to me was the role-playing, not the ultra-fine distinctions between different kinds of pole-arms.

Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the D&D franchise, are struggling to make the game relevant again:

True believers have lost faith. Factions squabble. The enemies are not only massed at the gates of the kingdom, but they have also broken through.

This may sound like the back story for an epic trilogy. Instead, it’s the situation faced by the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, the venerable fantasy role-playing game many consider to be the grandfather of the video game industry. Gamers bicker over Dungeons & Dragons rules. Some have left childhood pursuits behind. And others have spurned an old-fashioned, tabletop fantasy role-playing game for shiny electronic competitors like World of Warcraft and the Elder Scrolls.

But there might yet be hope for Dungeons & Dragons, known as D&D. On Monday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns the game, announced that a new edition is under development, the first overhaul of the rules since the contentious fourth edition was released in 2008. And Dungeons & Dragons’ designers are also planning to undertake an exceedingly rare effort for the gaming industry over the next few months: asking hundreds of thousands of fans to tell them how exactly they should reboot the franchise.

February 24, 2010

Roleplaying games, back-in-the-day

Filed under: Gaming, History, Personal — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:00

Jon, my former virtual landlord (and still host for my original blog archives), sent along a link to this article. Knowing Jon’s distaste for such things, he must have been grimacing when he clicked Send:

I was initiated into the mysteries of gaming via a grade school classmate’s copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. A mysterious artifact, this red box contained a set of waxy, dull-edged dice and a couple of thin rulebooks. Designed to be played on its own or as an introduction to the complexities of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the Basic Set-or “Red Box” as it came to be known by gamers-became the key to an entire universe of adventure and magic. Little did I know at the time this would be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with gaming and fantasy in general.

With the news that D&D publishers Wizards of the Coast intends to release a new edition of the introductory rule set-in a red box no less-I thought it might be fun to ask a few writers about their own early experiences with the world’s best known fantasy role-playing game.

My first experience with the game was in high school, where a classmate found out that I was into wargames and wanted to “help me” by diverting me away from such evil warmongering stuff. His gaming methadone involved mass slaughter of beings and beasts in a “dungeon” he’d created. About a dozen of us were introduced to the game in the same session . . . let’s just say that it didn’t go terribly well. With no experienced players in the pack, we specialized in aggravating the Dungeon Master (the person running the game for us). After about an hour, the DM was deliberately killing us off as fast as he could.

I played several other role playing game systems after that, but never found one I was comfortable with. I ended up “rolling my own” by basing it on Metagaming’s Melee and Wizard games (both designs originally by the great Steve Jackson) for the combat and magic systems. I found this worked best for my occasional RPG sessions, as I hate-with-a-passion being in games with rules lawyers (the archetypical one has memorized all the rulebooks, tables, supplements, and so on). If I don’t explain why something is happening, they have to concentrate on what to do about it instead of getting into heated arguments about die roll modifiers and such.

In the early 1980’s, I ended up working at Mr. Gameway’s Ark in Toronto (which appears to be Google-proof . . . or doesn’t have more than occasional mentions in mailing list conversations), which was the largest independent game store in town. I got to read the rules of dozens of RPG systems, but perhaps I was spoiled for choice . . . I never did end up playing any.

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