Education and Gaming

One of the things that happens being back in school is looking at things in a different light and seeing things that you learned of in the real world. Okay, maybe it just happens to me I don't know. This all starts with three instances withing the last few days all involving gaming.

The first was I get a board game called Michelangelo. Last fall I took an Art History course that covered many of the pieces used in the game. The second bit was someone on EN World using the Socrates questioning method in a thread though not a very good job of it I'd say. And the third and the one that really got this post going was talk of games that were feminist over on RPG.Net. After taking class on it I would say Blue Rose is the only one I've seen. Many games tone down gender and make it equal but at the same time making it invisible. Gender was always one of the defining characteristics so it needs to be important in the game.

But looking over my classes and the games we have out on the market few of them embrace a higher level of learning. Economics is never shown well if all all. Few games have a real sense of history and culture in them. Geology as are most of the sciences something to be ignored, made up, or just lucked into. Philosophy is one that games tend to have, at least their own philosophy. But none I've seen take up the debates of the or use the arguments of the classic philosophers.

One challenge is that most games tend to throw out what is not going to interact with the PCs. And it goes a step farther because there are players that just won't give a damn even if it does matter to the characters. Babylon 5, the TV show, was ultimately a show about two different philosophies. But it took the show four years to get there and in an RPG you'd have one player who read the book ahead of time and knows what's coming up, two that have forgotten what went on year one two and maybe even three so they don't follow the events that leads up to this, and perhaps you'll have one player that gets it. Perhaps my opinion on players is to low. Perhaps the opinion of the game publishers is too low.

There are games and products that get close. Scion has the potential to really embrace the classics and the mythologies of many different cultures but just doe not go far enough or indepth enough. Space Opera, I think, has hard sciences represented but that might be one of the reasons it never seemed to take of. D&D as produced by Wizards never got close to any of these but some of the third party books tried.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. It is not my first post on these type of thing and certainly won't be my last. But I feel the desire for a game that does more then what I am seeing out there. Maybe I'm missing something obvious and perhaps what I think I'm looking for can never exist. But I feel like there should be something more to these game we play.