Blankshield

Shameless self-promotion:

Death's Door and "I play dead people" Tees are available now from my website and game company: Blank Shield Press. If you are local to me, please e-mail instead of using the paypal links, else you'll be tagged with a shipping charge.

/shameless self-promotion.

Also, yes I am working on the next in the series of articles about teaching gaming; this one is a bit of a tougher slog to get out. I know what I want to say, I'm just having a hard time making it coherent.

James

Information Overload

This is the working copy of part two of a several-part essay that focuses on How to be Comprehensable both to people in the gaming hobby as well as newcomers to it. It is absolutely a work in progress, and please do contribute via the comments.

What is information overload? It's the situation created when there the sheer volume of information being presented in and of itself prevents that information from being retained.

Situation: Person A can be practically anyone; new or experienced doesn't seem to matter.

Problem: Person A shows they're missing some information, and someone else floods them with it.

Example:
GM: Roll your panache.
Person A: (blank look)
GM: Hmm. If you flip open the book to pg 110, it's got a brief description of what panache is, but I've always found the entry on page 233 to be more evocative and useful. Panache is one of your basic stats, like Brawn, Finesse, Wits and Resolve. Panache is how cool and flashy you are, like Brawn is how big and strong you are [...]

There's a whole lot of information there that just is stunningly irrelevant, and the information that is relevant is getting lost in the flood.

Why is it a problem?
Unlike the shotgun approach, there's little that's redeemable about the information flood. Everyone has a couple relevant thresholds: How fast they can process new information and how quickly they can flag information as already known. These will vary from person to person, and it's compounded by the fact that it's two different processes. Switching back and forth takes time and mental effort, which brings both of those thresholds down substantially.

Here also is where a 'bad behavior' that got mentioned in passing comes into its own and shines: Talking about something instead of teaching it. One of the things our society values strongly is knowledge, and it fairly naturally progresses into having lots of knowledge is a bragging right. Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, Trivial Pursuit, and hundreds of like things are all basically social cues saying "know more, reveal your knowledge and bask in the adulation!" Ok, that's a bit of an over-simplification, but the basic point stands that being the first to produce reams of information is a social one-up.

Giving someone else that knowledge, on the other hand, means that it's no longer unique; you're widening the pool of people who can compete in the one-upmanship - therefore it's better by far to dump information only when it benefits you, and not in a fashion that is actually learnable - your goal is to get "oooh, aaah, smart" not "I get it now."

It ain't pretty, but that's where the information dump comes from: social competitiveness and the desire to look smarter.

So how do we fix it?
Shut up and check your ego at the door. And again, be socially aware. Recognize that answering questions isn't the arena to compete in. If you absolutely can't keep from competing to get the answer out, try one-on-one. If the urge to pontificate still overcomes you, work with a mirror. It doesn't take long to realize how much you're saying and how little you're actually conveying.

Practical tips:
Go Socrates, dude. Instead of opening your mouth and letting answers pour out, force yourself to ask a question, and not the rhetorical kind. You have to stop and wait for a response, and you might even get a better idea of what the other guy is looking for.
Bite your lip. Metaphorically or physically, whatever works: don't speak up first. A lot of the bad habit stems from the rush to be first. Cure that and you're halfway there.
Be concise. Learn the art of precision. One of the things our society holds in very high regard socially is the ability to sum up a conversation in a sentence. Lose unnecessary words, lose unnecessary subjects.

Back from Gencon.

Had blast.

Recovering.

More soon...

James

The Shotgun Approach

This is the working copy of part one of a several-part essay that focuses on How to be Comprensible both to people in the gaming hobby as well as newcomers to it. It is absolutely a work in progress, and please do contribute via the comments.


What is the Shotgun Approach to teaching? Simply put, it's the technique of throwing enough answers to a question out that (you hope) one of them will click.

Situation: Person A is new - either to the specific game, the gaming group, or to gaming as a hobby. There's a lot of stuff they don't know that everyone else present does.

Problem: Person A asks a question, and gets 4 answers.

Example:
GM: Roll your panache.
Person A: (blank look)
GM: It's a three.
Player 1: The bottom stat.
Player 2: It's how often you get to act.

--or--
GM: Roll your panache.
Person A: (blank look)
GM: It's a three, the bottom stat. It's how often you get to act in around.

It isn't so much the number of people firing off answers as it is just different answers.

Why is it a problem?
The shotgun approach comes mostly from 'scrambling for an answer' - the explainer sees the blank look, and keeps trying different explanations until they see a lightbulb. You see it a lot at convention demos and game clubs, and also when a new game is being taught. In all fairness, it's not a bad technique for teaching, when used well. Poke your head into a classroom, and you'll probably see the Shotgun approach from the teacher, especially early in the year.

When it becomes a problem is when it becomes a habit. You stop pausing between answers to see if it clicked, and just always toss out three or four different takes on something. Nothing is going to confuse a person faster than telling them something that makes sense, and then telling them three more things. Because they'll assume they didn't actually get it, and you're worse off than when you started.

It's also a serious, serious time suck. It always takes way more time to teach something with the shotgun approach. For games in particular, it makes for very confusing rules if the designer is using the shotgun approach, because you end up with, unless they're a very very skilled writer, rambling and seemingly contradictory explanations.

So how do we fix it?
Slow down. S L O W D O W N. When you explain something, stop. See if it made sense. Ask if it made sense. If it doesn't, then try another take on it.

The key thing to fixing many of the problem behaviors, and this theme will come up again and again, is being socially aware. Be aware that you are teaching something. Don't make the mistake of talking about the rules; talking about something and teaching something are very different behaviors.

Practical tips:
Give yourself a physical cue. If you've got a drink at your elbow, then every time you touch that glass, stop and ask if it makes sense so far.

Don't mix metaphors. Metaphors are often useful; they let us bridge huge comprehension gaps. But also be aware of their limits. If you use them too broadly, they can often cause more problems than they're worth. "It's kind of like D&D" "Isn't that the satanic game that kills kids?" If you're using a metaphor, use it tightly, for this specific thing. If it doesn't work, drop it - do not try and stretch it.

Use what works. If the first couple things you explain with the shotgun method always get the "ah hah!" on explaining the numbers and the math, then start with the math for the next thing. If they always get it with an "It's like when you..." then start with that.

----------------

Well, there's the first draft. It took a little longer than I was expecting, and other stuff is waiting in the wings. Let's just say I get a little less ambitious and try to drop one of these out a week, instead of one a day. Again, please, comment, discuss, send hatemail and praise. That's what comments are for.

thanks,

James

Neat, people do still read my blog. :)

Couple minor organization-like points, then on to the meaty bits.

Sometime in the near-ish future, this blog is going to move to blankshieldpress.com. I'll post a note here. Along with that, it will shift slightly in focus to include more game and game-related stuff like several of the last few. Part BSP news, part gaming-talk. Depending on the strength of my design fu, it may be threaded, such that you can opt to see only the game stuff, or only the non-game stuff, or the news, or some combination of the above. Don't hold your breath, though...
It will also look different. This whole "one shade of blue" thing is passe. Perhaps something in three shades of blue...

On to the meat.

Brian: I hadn't meant to imply some kind of failing in your group particularly; it's hobby-wide. Honestly, I've only seen about two or three people that have managed to usefully transcend the crappy teacher stage, and only one to do so consistently. I am not one of these people.
Also, while it's kinda related, the "just here to hang out" vs "here to play" issue is a side thread, and I don't want to go down there just now, as that is a big murky bog that deserves to be tackled on its own.

Angel and Dave (et al): Yeah, those are two of the biggies, right up with the shotgun approach I described yesterday ("Let's all talk, and something will get through!").

So, we have some bad behaviors:

• Shotgun approach.
• Information overload.
• I know it, therefore you know it.
• The butt first method.

I'm sure there's some more, but let's look at those first. It's also worth noting here that the "too many numbers" problem that Myrna mentioned in relation to D&D isn't actually a teaching problem, but is a complex system. Complexity interacts extremely poorly with lousy teaching, but isn't itself a problem. I'd lay odds that some of the work processes Myrna does are much more complex than what D&D has to offer. I know some of mine are. But they were taught much better, so we don't notice. I'm going to try and tackle these behaviors about one a day for the next little while. Feel free to suggest others or add discussion in the comments; I don't work well in a vacuum.

(It gets hard to breathe.)

James

Everything that is wrong about how gamers pass on knowledge is happening in the next room over.

No insult is intended to the folks playing; this is a hobby-wide behavior, and I'm guilty of it too.

It's just striking me very forcefully right now. There is a new player in the game that is played here on Monday nights. It's a Seventh Sea game.

He clearly does not know the rules. Knowing this group, I would lay strong odds that the GM "helped" him make his character - which is to say, he's been given some illusion of choice is terms of his character's personality, but otherwise has been led by the nose into a character that matches the GM's definition of fun to play.

They are halfway through the session, a fight is starting and the new guy is looking blank. "Roll your panache." I'd lay long odds it's the first time he's heard those words that way. More-or-less at the same time, he's told "It's a three." "The bottom stat." and "It's how often you get to act."

From there it devolves into one player trying to explain the way 7th Sea breaks down their rounds and a couple other people yakking around that about panache and cool panache stories and....

Is it any bloody wonder that most of the people who touch this hobby don't come back to it?

James