jgbrowning
Hero
Umbran said:
hehe, never underestimate the power of the imcompetent...
joe b.
What is an RPG really? (A look at Game Theory and Psychology)
- Thread starter jester47
- Start date
hehe, never underestimate the power of the imcompetent...
joe b.
Gotta chime in as well
This little topic is beaming like a lighthouse.
Being a gamer, a recent psych grad., and a believer...
Psychology is only 100 years old.
Look at the crap astronomy, biology, and physics came up with in their first century. Every science had its infancy, the cool thing about psych is that we're alive during it.
Role playing in psych is similar to role playing games. As similar as all fruits are to one another. The main focus of role playing in pyschology is to break away temporarily from one's thought process and adopt another's. This is often used for marital counseling and other environmental stressors. Frequently the role adopted is that of another person in one's life, mimicry if you will. The goal is to walk away with understanding of another's viewpoint.
Another form of roleplaying is called "2 chair therapy." Often this is done for people who had problems with authority figures (horrible parents, etc.) People are told to sit in one chair then move to the next and roleplay according to the rules given by the therapist. Chair 1 is how they reacted to given situations and chair 2 is how they wished they reacted or want to react in the future. Chair two could also be used to lash out and vent frustrations since often people cannot do that to their authorities.
This is possibly the closest thing psychology has that is similar to RPGs. Since in RPGs you can react to things that you never would yourself.
RPGs, at least the vast majority, the focus is on adopting a non existing persona. We all know its an escape. We really don't gain any understanding and its questionable if it has any use in our daily lives. Its just fun to do. It reduces stress and gives us a creative outlet - Woohoo!
From speaking to my fellow believers (those who game and those who do not) the main problem is the escape part. Some believe that all kinds of mental escape are bad; that escape is not necessary and detracts from what is important. What it boils down to is most Christian authorities believe that your religion should be your only escape. They view drugs in the same manner.
The deities, spells, etc. is just secondary stuff really. If the people who complain about DnD are purely ignorant to the subject they'll immediately go for the gods and spells but that is 80's news. Few people really believe that DnD invokes real critters and stuff these days.
Jargon and psycho-babble omitted for your reading pleasure
-Telor
This little topic is beaming like a lighthouse.
Being a gamer, a recent psych grad., and a believer...
Psychology is only 100 years old.
Look at the crap astronomy, biology, and physics came up with in their first century. Every science had its infancy, the cool thing about psych is that we're alive during it.
Role playing in psych is similar to role playing games. As similar as all fruits are to one another. The main focus of role playing in pyschology is to break away temporarily from one's thought process and adopt another's. This is often used for marital counseling and other environmental stressors. Frequently the role adopted is that of another person in one's life, mimicry if you will. The goal is to walk away with understanding of another's viewpoint.
Another form of roleplaying is called "2 chair therapy." Often this is done for people who had problems with authority figures (horrible parents, etc.) People are told to sit in one chair then move to the next and roleplay according to the rules given by the therapist. Chair 1 is how they reacted to given situations and chair 2 is how they wished they reacted or want to react in the future. Chair two could also be used to lash out and vent frustrations since often people cannot do that to their authorities.
This is possibly the closest thing psychology has that is similar to RPGs. Since in RPGs you can react to things that you never would yourself.
RPGs, at least the vast majority, the focus is on adopting a non existing persona. We all know its an escape. We really don't gain any understanding and its questionable if it has any use in our daily lives. Its just fun to do. It reduces stress and gives us a creative outlet - Woohoo!
From speaking to my fellow believers (those who game and those who do not) the main problem is the escape part. Some believe that all kinds of mental escape are bad; that escape is not necessary and detracts from what is important. What it boils down to is most Christian authorities believe that your religion should be your only escape. They view drugs in the same manner.
The deities, spells, etc. is just secondary stuff really. If the people who complain about DnD are purely ignorant to the subject they'll immediately go for the gods and spells but that is 80's news. Few people really believe that DnD invokes real critters and stuff these days.
Jargon and psycho-babble omitted for your reading pleasure
-Telor
jgbrowning said:hehe, never underestimate the power of the imcompetent...
*shrug*. If you find yourself at the mercy of the incompetent, who do you have to blame but yourself? I mean, if you cannot best an incompetent person, don't you deserve what you get?
FireLance
Legend
Umbran said:
*shrug*. If you find yourself at the mercy of the incompetent, who do you have to blame but yourself? I mean, if you cannot best an incompetent person, don't you deserve what you get?
Problem is, the incompetent outnumber the competent 100 to 1.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.
)Umbran said:
Actually, game theory deals quite heavily in games of imperfect knowledge. True, it's much better defined for games of perfect knowledge, but then, what isn't better defined when you know everything? Often in game theory, even the toy games used to illustrate the theories, a player doesn't know what strategy (or possibly even the goal) his opponent will be using (aiming for). This by no means necessitates that game theory be inapplicable.
The larger problem I see in applying game theory to role-playing games, is that most game theory research is centered around competitive games rather than cooperative games. I believe most people can agree that role-playing games are a cooperative game (some people may see it as a players v. game master, but it's not intended in such a fashion), and game theorists generally find competitive game theory more interesting to research (or at least, more fruitful) than cooperative game theory. That's not to say cooperative game theory research does not exist (it does, and I'm using some of it in my Masters degree research), but it's much harder to find than competitive game theory research.
