Is RPG accelerated learning?

In a way RPG can be considered a teaching machine that speeds up our learning process.  The reason for this, is that RPG is completely in the mind’s eye of the player.  Computer RPG looses much if not almost all the active player’s imagination that comes from traditional table-top RPG games.

The difference between a book and a movie has been used to describe this phenomenon.  Movies provide the imagination of the director who wrote the movie and enslave us into the main character’s shoes throughout the entirety of the plot.  Books enslave us to the plot, but the imagination is ours.

The plot in RPG however is of the collective and moves according to how the group wants things to move.  In computer RPG, the imagination of the programmer is the only imagination the collective sees.  In the traditional table-top RPG however, the player’s can create freely everything that happens.

This need to create a plot in collective and the need to create the happenings in the mind’s eye are what solidify the experience of any given game.  And if a game tells the story of Pythagoras, then students really live-out the experience of being Pythagoras, and end up with a whole lesson in geometry that goes far beyond the mathematical Theorem alone.

RPG offers an experience that can be used in unlimited areas of learning, group dynamics as well as the traditional therapeutic uses in psychology.  10 years from now, current RPG players will no longer be a group of social outcasts, but leaders in the field of their choice. 

The difference between 10 professionals in any area with the same diploma’s and experience level is the one who plays RPG.  That is the professional who will be responsible in the future for what in the past could have been equivalent the first spark of fire, the first wheel, the first airplane or even the first home computer.

“RPG is the future.”