Ur Kidz R Stoopid

RANT WARNING

Sorry to write two rants in one day, but I am having a shitty week and I am feeling a little red blooded tonight. However, I do eventually connect this to RPGs. So stick with me.

I have been reading quite a few articles lately about the failing schools in the United States. It has been clear to me for some time that there is a deep and serious problem with education in this country. However, as someone who taught college freshmen for a couple years and who has been paying close attention to some cultural shifts that not too many people pay attention to, I am pretty sure that the problem is not money, facilities, or teachers. That is what people are spending tons of time talking about these days and I think they are irrelevant to the actual problem. We are spending a lot of money per pupil. And while we do have some outdated facilities and some bad teachers in the mix, I really don't think those problems are at the kind of scale required to really fuck up the system as a whole.

No, I am pretty sure the problem is our kids. The problem is that they just don't give a shit about learning anything. And it doesn't matter how much money you spend, or how good your facilities or teachers are. If your kids don't give a shit about learning, they are not going to learn.

And before you start accusing me of being an old fart saying "kids these days", I am not talking about a perception of shift. We have hard mathematical evidence that kids are getting dumber and dumber in the United States. We have comparative testing data across multiple countries. Our kids are falling behind. This is not just some dude's perception, this is a very real problem.

So the question is, why do kids just not give a shit?

Lets step back a bit.

One of the greatest predictors of educational attainment is how many books are in your house when you are growing up. And while it may seem logical to assume this closely correlates with educational attainment of the parent (which is also important), what it really represents is the degree to which the parent actually buys into integrating with the wider world through the written word.

Profuse ink has been spilled on the differences between a visual and a written culture. I dont feel I need to rehash that. But it is important. If the parent has a lot of books in the home, they believe in a written culture. They connect to the world through text, not just images. And that connection is far deeper than the visual alone.

There have been some claims that the internet is a return to that kind of written culture, but that is bullocks. Yes, there is a ton of information on Wikipedia about the nesting patterns of migratory birds or the campaign maneuvers executed in the Hundred Years War. But our kids aren't reading that shit. They are dicking around on Facebook or Foursquare or Twitter or watching videos of two cats fighting over a twinkie (sounds interesting, doesn't it?).

You can watch the History Channel's specials on the Vietnam War or you can actually read substantive books about it. The former is likely to give you a strong emotional feeling about the Vietnam, the latter may help you actually understand it. The internet is only the first option. If knowledge is acquired, it is trivial. It is without connection to a wider spectrum of events. It is worthless in that sense. It is the same as knowing that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, while having no actual knowledge of it's contents beyond "life, libery, and the pursuit of happiness". Or if you are a Tea Party Candidate, you might think that Abraham Lincoln wrote it to warn Paul Revere to stop ringing his damn bells, or else.

Our entire culture has gone ADD. People cannot bear to do anything anymore that doesn't give them some immediate results. This is across all mediums. Video games have gotten dumber. I even wrote something about this myself earlier, about how there is a marked dumbing down just between Mech Commander 1 and 2. Video games are moving towards less complex stories, less complex decisions, and allowing less complex behavior. Strategy games have become farsically easy to defeat, devoting all their money to fancy graphics instead of AI. The game manufacturers actually playtest the game towards an optimal path of completion for the most morons at once. The challenge is gone. It's one of the reasons I gave up playing video games. Movies have followed the same trend into stupid land. The occasional film that doesn't sticks out like a sore thumb (ex. Inception). Television is perhaps the worst, having devolved into a war to see who can get the most viewers through the cruel destruction of real people's hopes and dreams or through creating petty arguments through contrivance, all for your viewing pleasure.

Our society has largely lost it's ability to hold up higher forms of entertainment. Opera, theater, and other similar "high culture" artifacts are being dragged into the depths and strangled. Book and newspaper reading is in decline, people are shifting to other mediums that are faster and have more sensationalist content.

And children, in the absence of any motivating force in the culture that tells them learning and knowledge is important and valuable, just stop caring. Why learn about mathematics or history when you can play Halo XIV?

In the face of this ADD culture, RPGs represent (to me) the last stand of high-culture in the fantasy/sci-fi genre. There will be no "great fantasy or sci-fi novel" akin to Tolkein or Asimov that is going to sweep the world. Any work like that is likely to be lost beneath the waves. Sci-fi movies have become more and more limited, with a really good assumption-challenging sci-fi thesis only emerging every 5 years or so. Sci-fi movies have instead become mostly graphical orgies of lasers and aliens and all sorts of shit; none of which challenges thought in the way that classical sci-fi has done.

No, RPGs will be the last stand. And thankfully, we are armed to the teeth. We have stripped away a lot of the publishing barriers and we are able to get the word out to more people, more cheaply, than ever before.

The challenge will be getting to the kids. We have got to find a way to appeal to children. And that doesn't mean dumbing down the content, it means shaping it in a way that appeals to them. The information has to be accessible. We have to accept that if you simply put a huge block of text down, that is going to scare people off. We have to innovate on the presentation and layout side of the equation as well as the content side. We have to make games that are complex, but not so complex that they are obtuse and not so poorly organized that they are unreadable.

This is a page from Ars Magica 5th Edition. It is an example of what not to do.

This is dense. People don't read dense. They read clear and open. They need things to flow properly, to be easily understood. We have to work on that. But even it you are not a game designer, there is something you can do.

1. Play games with kids.
2. Talk about games in front of kids.
3. Give games to kids, as gifts, if you can afford it.
4. Talk to parents of kids about RPGs as a family activity
5. Keep the artifacts of gaming around you in your life
    (I keep several minis on my desk at work)

Play an RPG with adults, you play for a day. Teach a kid to RPG, they play for a lifetime.

This is actually an RPG podcaster playing with his son.
Bonus points if you can name him.

Use your time wisely. Else one day, you will find yourself completely surrounded by idiots. Or maybe you already are.

SAVE YOURSELF FROM IDIOCY! PLAY RPGS NOW!