Cognitive Development

Since I've now got a post-doctorate degree in education, and I'm working as a teacher, I've been exposed to a lot of ideas about how we learn and how our brains work. A lot of these ideas conflict with each other, and they also conflict with the way roleplaying games handle experience and character development.

 

There are probably ways that these various ideas can be fused together, but there are numerous ways to link these ideas together, and many textbooks discredit certain ideas while promoting the concept that match the agenda they're trying to push. It basically reminds me of the way roleplaying games handle firearms... as soon as you start trying to push for realism you'll get different "experts" who claim that different elements of the play mechanisms are accurate, and other parts aren't, and you'll find that few of these "experts" agree with one another. Similarly, by the time you start to incorporate enough elements to make anything more than a vague simulation of realism, the mechanisms start to become too complicated to easily use during the course of play.

 

Yes, there are those players out there who are more than willing to sacrifice ease of play in their pursuit of realism, and such players often love their charts and tables, but trying to determine which tables are realistic and which ones are just complicating matters with erroneous notions can be a fools errand. This is one of the reasons you'll find a dozen games who all claim realism, while offering contrary ideas.

 

It's generally easier to admit to everyone that mechanisms of play aren't designed to be "realistic" but are instead designed to simulate a style of narrative, or a genre. Horror movies aren't realistic, so if you're playing a game designed to reflect the kinds of tales that you see in a horror movie, it doesn't make a lot of sense to use a set of rules that is "designed for realism". The same holds true for anime, fantasy novels, or action movies.

 

When it comes to character development, there are certain things a character knows and does which are instinct or second nature, certain things that could be learned by simple observation, and things that require study of the theory or regular practice to perfect.

 

Two of the conflicting theories of cognitive development involve neural plasticity and schema formation. Neural plasticity claims that a young brain is more capable of change as it develops new neural linkages. This basically means that a young brain develops at an accelerated pace, but as time goes by it slows down in it's rate of development because it becomes harder for a brain to continue developing synapses and links that will accommodate new information.

 

Schema formation is more about the actual data kept in the brain, the way it is accessed and the patterns that form when multiple data points are connected together. When multiple facts are linked together into a common field, a schema is formed, and when new data is assimilated into a person's mind it tends to be connected to one or more schema, or it generally gets discarded. A person with little education, or a person who is narrow minded, has a limited number of schema and has trouble accepting new ideas... conversely, a person with many schema will find it easier to connect new facts into their existing patterns of thought, maybe even connecting a new fact with multiple schema and thus finding it more significant than they might otherwise.

 

Neural plasticity gives the idea that new skills and abilities should be accumulated more slowly as a brain matures. Schema formation gives the idea that the accumulation of new skills and abilities should accelerate, because the more you know the more capable you are of knowing even more.

 

How can we do realism in cognitive development and character experience when we can't even agree on what learning actually is?

 

The reason I'm thinking about this stuff is because I'm working on the character development system for Walkabout, and following through this into the experience system.

 

A number of Australian Indigenous communities divide the years into 12 year cycles, they then identify the level of maturity in their members by the number of these cycles they have survived.


This means...

• 0 to 11yrs11mths counts as childhood. This is when play occurs and when there are no responsibilities in the community. It is when the adults of the community watch, come to understand what affinities the individual has, and what skills they might be best suited to learning for the good of the community
• 12 years to 23yrs11mths counts as a time of maturing into adulthood. At some stage during this time, the individual undergoes a rite of passage into adulthood and gains the knowledge they will use for the community while they are an adult. 
• 24 years to 35yrs11mths counts as young adulthood. An individual of this age is expected to serve the good of the community with the skills and abilities they have learned, and may have one or more children to perpetuate the community's numbers. 
• 36 years to 47yrs11mths counts as mature adulthood. At this age, the individual will have gained the knowledge of their training in youth, and will have spent years practically refining those skills and understanding how they work in the real world. They will be expected to pass those skills on to members of the next generation.
• 48 years to 59yrs11mths counts as the time of taking a role of elder leadership in the community. An individual of this age should have had any children, and should have raised and trained them to be valuable members of the community for themselves. They may assist the next generation in their learning, but will typically step back. Many will have died by this time, so those who survive become revered for their survival and longevity, they challenge the last generation to become the primary elders of the community. 
• 60 years + counts as the time of stepping aside for new leaders, and advising those who have leadership roles.    

 

Character generation in this system basically fills the first 24 years of life, with each 12 year cycle divided into 6 year half cycles: Infancy (0-5), Childhood (6-11), Adolescence (12-17), Maturity (18-23). I'm thinking that neural plasticity covers the basic things that a character learns, such as walking, talking, reading, writing, counting, general social etiquette for the community they've grown up in. More learnt in the early life of the character, and more reflective mechanically by the character's attributes. Schema formulation covers the skills acquired once those basics have been mastered...but it's the rate of acquisition for these character elements that is currently causing me problems.


Then we also get the issue where characters suddenly accelerate in their development compared to the communities around them. If a character has an average of four attribute upgrades, a half dozen skills/abilities and about five special advantages or edges, we can probably say that infancy and half of childhood is spent learning the base level aspects of humanity, and once per year after that point (on average) a bonus is gained. Characters being regularly played in weekly sessions would crawl at a degree that feels like stagnation rather than feeling like any meaningful development were occurring...


... unless we completely change the paradigm of character development to reflect the themes and narrative we're trying to simulate in the game.