Dungeons & Dragons and Degrees

I recently started playing a game called Dragon Age: Origins. Those of you who know what that is can give there condolences to my family and friends in the comments section. For those of you who don’t know about the game: Dragon Age is a type of game known as a role-playing game or RPG. Playing an RPG is a bit like having a second life, where your character learns and develops various skills as you play. Each action you do earns you a certain number of experience points (XP) that will be added to your character’s overall experience, eventually allowing you to ‘level up’. Levelling up rewards you with attribute points and talent points (bear with me here, there will be a point to this) which can be used to add or improve your character’s abilities. Attributes are things like strength, dexterity, willpower, cunning, magic, and constitution. By increasing your attributes, you can gain access to more talents, as well as increasing the effectiveness of those talents. Talents are things like stealth, dirty fighting, evasion, and so on; and are special abilities that directly affect how you interact with the world.

So let’s say, for example, you start the game as a level 1 character with a smattering of attribute points across the board and maybe one skill. We’re going to say that skill is stealth. Now this doesn’t stop you from being able to do other things, it just means you can be stealthy whereas most other people can’t. A lot of the game revolves around doing heroic deeds and fighting monsters, so you run off to fight some nasty things. As I’ve said even though your only talent is stealth, you can still do other things such as fighting. Your stealth talent might help give you an edge against enemies by allowing you to sneak up on them, or later the game, staying completely hidden whilst attacking them (not very sportsmanlike; Fezzik would not approve). Each enemy you vanquish will reward you with a number of XP (lets say 50XP to simplify things) and once you’ve earned 2000XP, you level up to level 2. This gives you 3 attribute points to assign however you see fit. In this case I might want to improve my stealth ability to reduce the chance of being seen sneaking up on someone, so I add one point to cunning. I might be getting badly beaten up in fights so I’d add a point to constitution because this will enable me to take more of an ass whooping, and I would maybe choose to add my last point to strength so I can dish out more of an ass whooping myself. I can then use my talent point to upgrade my stealth talent or buy a new talent like deadly strike which will allow me to really mess up some motherfunksters. I can now take on bigger and stronger enemies to earn more XP, level up, and improve my character.

The reason I’m looking at this is because it, in some small way, reflects how we live our lives. Before you start calling the men in white coats, I’m not saying we’re all knights stomping around hunting goblins and killing them so we can level up, but the whole point of these games is to create a believable world in which a person can play and develop the role of a character. They are designed to imitate real life in at least some respects. There are, however, some flaws.

The thing I personally dislike most about role-playing games, and something that I think draws some parallels with reality is the fact that you must choose your profession before you begin the game. You see, the thing I neglected to mention at the start of this post is the fact that the skills available to you are dictated by the profession you choose to play as. Professions tend to be things like warrior (like a knight), mage (magical person), or rouge (sneaky, underhand weasel), and so on. My problem with this is that I have absolutely no idea at the beginning of the game, what I am going to encounter, or how I intend to tackle each task. If in real life I am asked to go and film something on location, I will ask every question under the sun to ascertain what tools are required to do that task. What is the location like? What am I filming? Will I need to record sound? What are the current lighting conditions? To arrive at a job with no information, having simply brought a few basic tools that you think might be useful is just plain unprofessional; and as a game mechanic, this irritates the hell out of me. I’m not being given the opportunity to try the profession before I commit to it; I have no real clear understanding of what is involved in such a profession; and, perhaps above all else, I am committing to a single profession that limits my abilities to only those that fit within one of a handful of specialisations. My biggest gripe? This is almost exactly what we do with generation after generation of children in our schools.

I can quite clearly recall being in school towards the end of my A-levels and telling my head of year that I wasn’t going to university yet because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. The look of shock on her face was almost as surprising to me as her assertions that I had to go to university because a degree was vital (Something I admittedly half agree on), and that I needed to go straight after school without taking any kind of gap year or time to make an informed decision (obviously she didn’t explicitly state “You should go to university without making an informed decision”, but that is what I inferred). Needless to say I took a gap year, and having failed to follow my original plan to travel, I ended up working in a hotel. Working gave me the money to do the things I wanted to do; it paid the bills and it gave me freedom to spend time discovering what I enjoyed and where my talents lay. I spent most of that year editing videos; the next year I took an art foundation degree that allowed me to try many different things where I discovered an appreciation for photography and animation. The year after that I started my B.A. (Hons) degree; and three years later, I graduated with a 2:2 in Moving Image Design. By comparison, I don’t have any figures, but I happen to know that a large number of people from my high school  who went straight into university; dropped out in the first year, and a good few more didn’t finish their respective degrees. I’ve known people who have began studying to be lawyers and architects, and dropped out before completing the course because it turned out to be something other than they expected.

There is so much wrong with this idea of forcing young adults to commit to a profession so early, or rather waste money (their parent’s money anyway) on a degree they will never use. If a young person knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what they want to do with their life, by all means, let them go to university. But if someone doesn’t know what they want to do, let them live their life a little. Make your kid get a job or do volunteer work; encourage them to find their own passions and interests. In fact, why wait? Do this from the moment they can walk. Encourage them to explore and play; because the biggest aid to learning is a passion for the subject, and nothing else can compare to that. It is a mentality that will serve them well, and something that many adults would do well to act upon too.

I leave you today with another video from TED. This particular video features Sir Ken Robinson who, to my mind, has produced some of the most interesting; funny; and, above all, important TED talks I’ve seen yet. Please do your children, and maybe yourself, a favour and take the time to watch this video, because I think it carries a very important message.