Thinking Big: RPGs, Teaching in Korea, and the Subversive Idea of Agency - In Skin Deep Wyrd Con Companion
When I first took up gaming, escape was absolutely one of its attractions.
My pursuit of RPGs undoubtedly had something to do with the difficulties of being uprooted, transplanted to a violent, hostile place,
and the struggle to make sense of the world, to figure out who I was in this new, dangerous place, largely without help from the baffled adults around me.
RPGs are the most affordable, flexible, and interesting approach to breaking through the simulacra that have come to define and constrain standard TEFL practice.
Gaming disconnects from their daily life.
Such a disconnect is useful. It’s especially useful in Korea, where students tend to be shy, risk-averse, and timid.
Part of that is cultural, and the rest is an artifact of their education system.
Games, though, are essentially
motivation engines.
The most surprising thing for me was how my return to gaming affected the way I think about writing.
Having learned how motivation really
seems to work in horror, I realize why someone like me, who’d started out in horror fiction, struggled so long to get a real handle on how motivation works in other
genres, and it reminds me that other models of character motivation remain possible in all genres.
Making the games work for a mixed group with different cultural backgrounds and differing expectations
Complex acts of translation and transplantation.
demonstrates the possibility of developing strategic competencies
It can serve as a non-standard form of
comprehensible input
using language to turn their motivations into results.
Many Koreans have told me that their experience of schooling was essentially to have the creativity drained from them throughout middle and high school.
forces players to imagine situations, characters, and settings that they have not themselves known or experienced previously
their school lives involved little exercise, and that physical education programs need to be improved
RPGs that put agency at the forefront emphasizing motivation, action, and personal decision-making
The best teaching methods change the teacher too.
Things seem to be converging: storytelling, role-playing, fiction- and screenplay-writing, game design, literature... they all seem to connect now, in an interesting way.