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When my 5th grader and his friends decided they wanted to throw themselves into Dungeons and Dragons, it gave me both reason to pause and a great opportunity to watch kids in action.
Kids and RPGs
Thanks for the excellent article. As a psychologist and teacher, I run an after-school club at an international school in which roleplaying games, including D&D, are a huge part. I got my own start in gaming a very long time ago in much the same way your younger son has although we didn't have the benefit of an older brother to help show us the ropes. Since then I've found it to be a great creative outlet. Nowadays I get to introduce 10-16 year olds to the hobby and get to seem them in action once a week. The activity is a great social activity that fosters camaraderie, creative pro-social behavior. It's become a major source of inspiration for my own blog.
Some notes on the social aspect
As someone who entered the hobby of roleplaying games at the ripe age of 11 over 30 years ago when roleplaying was D&D (it is much, much more than that now) I have a couple of comments on the social aspect.
First, I have never gotten the dig that D&D is for the anti-social or those with poor social skills. It is, as the author points out, a highly social game. Because it is a verbal game built out of conversations it has to be. In fact, my observation is there is more social interaction in a game of D&D than in a similar sized group gathered around an XBox.
Second, while I understand the authors concern about older players with her sons looking back this is the crucial aspect of the game with me. By 13 I was playing with adults and the group I played with through all of high school (every Friday until I got my first job) was 75% adults with just two teenagers. I've concluded this simple fact is probably the biggest reason I still play today. It was the first place where adults treated me as their peer. The social norms of the gaming group significantly affected my general social norms (for good and for bad) by being my defining adult experience.
In fact, if there is any aspect of the hobby that has changed in a negative way since the late seventies it is the loss of age span in groups.
Regardless, thank you for the article. It is rare that it is approached in any kind of serious manner.
age spans
I have absolutely loved watching the kids play D & D. It has been so good for them and they are having a GREAT time. I hope they keep it up.
In terms of your thoughts . . .
One thing to keep in mind is that 5th grade isn't 13 and there's a huge difference between elementary school, middle school, high school, and college aged people. So the qualms I had about my young son weren't ones I had when my older son started in high school. They are just very different age periods.
The social aspect of D & D is one of the great things about the game. My point wasn't that it's not social - it is, absolutely, very much so. That's why a lot of people like to play (my older son, for example). And that's also why on-line D & D is just not the same.
When I was talking about being 'social skilled', I guess what I was thinking was that most of the kids who play D & D are not the most popular kids in school - they have different interests, they tend to be smart, like science fiction and have good imaginations. It's like any other peer crowd and it has it's own norms for what you talk about, how you talk about it, how you interact, what you wear, etc. As a former wicked science fiction geek, I know from experience that the norms for my friends were really different from the norms for - say - a crowd of popular cheerleaders. I liked my friends better and thought they were more interesting. The cheerleaders liked their friends better, and they thought we were geeks. The point is that different groups of kids tend to have different norms and when a kid is entering a new crowd, that's something to think about. I was happier when my kids moved into band, orchestra, and Academic Challenge teams than I would have been had they decided to hang out with the soccer jocks.
In terms of age groupings . . . I think there's a big difference between kids playing with adults and very young kids playing with high school students - and there's a lot of research on this. Some high school kids are great with young kids, act appropriately around them, and treat them like the intelligent, imaginative folks they are. They mentor them into the game. LOTS AND LOTS of adults who play with younger kids do that. That sounds like your experience and I expect it would be a terrific one.
However, it is also true that some kids who are middle school or high school aged don't remember that little kids are just little kids. I see this all the time with college students hanging around in the park. It's perfectly appropriate for college students to swear, tease each other about sex, make off color remarks, drink, etc. I don't think that's appropriate for 10 year olds. But lots of time the older students are talking among themselves and just don't pay attention to the fact that the kids around them are hearing everything they say and some of it just isn't appropriate.
So I would have some hesitation to young kids hanging out with middle school/high school kids who might well be involved with and talking about activities that were appropriate for them but not for the young ones. If the older kids were aware, terrific. If they weren't, I'd worry. Most adults won't offer a 10 year old a beer. Lots of high school kids might.
I would agree completely
I would agree completely about the mixed age groups: I have to monitor our after-school club kids pretty closely because a lot of the 16+ crowd has a very different standard for their language than the younger (under 14) students and they tend to forget that there are younger kids around - it's the impulsive side of the teen brain which sometimes leads them to say things before considering who's also at the table. It's one of the reasons I've been moving to split the current group into two separate campaigns. All that said, a lot of the kids at the club (we have 10 regular RPG players at the moment), are very good with the younger kids around and there's lots of very helpful, mentoring that also goes on. It's more a matter of making sure they are aware of those at the table.
You missed something...
D&D is one of the few games in which all of the players cooperate. Can you name a game that kids love where the players are playing WITH each other instead of AGAINST each other?
It is also more fun when everyone knows how to play...mentoring other players is part of the fun. The game is best when approached as an “all for one and one for all” team experience.
Wow, you're right
What a great point. I never thought of that.
The number of cooperative
The number of cooperative board games designed for kids has been growing over the years (thankfully), although many of them are still only found in Europe: For example, Wer War's? (translation is Who was it?) is a great cooperative board game. http://tinyurl.com/y8su63f
Other games include Descent and Pandemic, although neither is really a good fit with kids under the age of 14 or so. Wizards of the Coast (WotC, publisher of D&D) have a couple of cooperative D&D-themed board games coming out later this year so they're throwing their hat in to the ring.
On the RPG side of things, there are quite a few options including games designed specifically for kids. Examples include John Wick's "My Monster" and Green Ronin's "Faery's Tale." WotC also is repackaging the latest edition of D&D with its Red Box starter set and Essentials line (which make their debut later this year too), which are aimed at beginners.
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