Game Book + You = Creative Sentai!

[Andy Kitkowski]

I wanted to pick up and direct this discussion a little bit back towards the original post, which seems to be more about using the learning modes (audial, visual and tactile-kinesthetic) in the conveying of the game (rules and setting) in the game book itself, not in a play session.

Actually, this topic really turned me on- I studied human development as part of my Sociology undergrad, and back then never really thought about the learning modes in relation to the experience of reading or producing a game book.  Interesting topic!

I like the metaphor of the learning modes as a Sentai Team in gaming books.  I think that more designers would be good to take non-audial modes into consideration: With most games, I see the book design (towards the three learning modes) not as a functioning Sentai team (Audial Red, the leader; Visual Blue, the strongman; and Tactile-Kinesthetic Yellow, the brains: "Design..... BEEEEEAAAAAM!"), but rather a Stong, fast, powerful Audial Red, a Visual Blue who is strong, punches hard, but has no stamina and gets taken out with one hit, and a TC Yellow who is nothing more than a blind, deaf gimp in a broken wheelchair...

Auditory is what you'd expect it to be - talk about the game.  You can also use recordings and music here... it seems to be popular, in some circles, to have 'game theme music'.

Actually, a big part of audial learning is being left out here: The actual game text itself. Reading words is understood as a component to audial learning (even though the text is coming "through your eyes").  It's only when the text is flavored with colors, various fonts, being highlighted with pull-quotes and text boxes that it falls into the realm of visual.  But text, at its core, is audial.

Back in the day, I took the test to see which I was, and I fell square between Visual and Tactile Kinesthetic, with Audial at like 10-15%. This is the reason I can't get into reading manuals and the like, and why I struggle through many RPG books (I usually just give up unless there's some sort of stimulation outside of "rules" "flavor text" "gaming fiction", etc). You'll also notice most older RPGs from the early 80s and the like were almost all text, often read like manuals, had very little illustration and the like, etc.  So the only people really benefitting from those older games (or newer games that rely on text only to push the point) are audial learners only- 1/3 of the people out there, including 1/3 of your gaming audience. The other learners either have to harness their love of the game and struggle through it, else just not read the book and pick up the flavor of the game through other stimuli (learning from the other players, etc).

Visual input, and gearing a game book towards visual learners, is a mixed bag: It's mostly ART and LAYOUT. Often, when you read reviews at RPGNet and the like, there's commonly critiques of the art. A lot of people associate the amount and quality of art in a game to the game's value. The people who are more vocal about a game "not having enough art" or "having art that is evocative of the setting", etc are clearly visual learners. People who rely on visual queues from the art and the like to understand the background or setting of the game are also visual.

So, to get more visual learners into enjoying your work (work here being "a gaming book product"), you need more art, right?  Not necissarily. Most folks forget that layout, the arrangement of text, color, and graphic layout tools (bars, text boxes, etc) are also extremely effective tools to get visual people into plowing through your text.

I'm actually stunned that more folks don't invest more time into designing layout.  Considering that raw text only turns on 1/3 of the people reading your book, you'd think that more people would spend more time creatively arranging that text to appeal to the next 1/3 of the people, the visual learners. Not by throwing in token bits of art, too, but using what art you have to really accentuate the text, like magazines commonly do.  I regularly hold magazines (sans ads, because ads are meant to pull your attention and are a Red Card here in comparison) up as the shining pinnacle of layout design. Magazines have text, but they really go after the visual people. Now, magazines can afford things that games can't, like full color pages, tons of pictures, etc. But even moving those off to the side, check out a magazine like WIRED (And again, ignore the ads cause that's not a fair comparison): They really go for the visual jugular with pullquotes, text boxes, fonts, article/section layout, etc. It baffles me that more game designers don't use these techniques in layout, or at least hire decent layout folks to do them.

Recently, in some of Monte Cook's PDFs or E N Publishing (specifically Hellhound AKA M. Jason Parent) these techniques have been used (even with a B&W design).  Once, we had a guest for dinner (a girlfriend of one of my gaming buddies, who was interested in trying out games) who works as a layout/design artist at Duke Publishing.  I was talking about how I like the visual aspects of a lot of games with her, and she asked me what games I thought were excellent in terms of layout.  It was hard for me to find a "shining example", because most of the games that I throught were pretty had pretty ART, not design.  Other games had clean and effective layout, like Blue Planet or some GURPS games. But very few games were out there that really laid out text in a way to reach out and grab visual learners.

In the end, I showed off (as examples of excellent layout) the small 32-page intro guide to the Planescape boxed set (which again gets a lot of rise from art), BESM 2nd edition (which only scored points for its effective use of color, the revised book, the B&W one, was a "step back" visually), the Tenchi Muyo RPG (also by GoO, and admittedly inundated with art, but it also has gorgeous layout... but again, it makes use of full-color pages) and finally Last Exodus: Filled with crappy art and layout that aimed more for "cool" than "accentuating the text", I can't help but to be drawn to it as an example of outstanding layout for visual learners. It seems that half that book is aiming at the visual. Unfortunately, I don't own them, but I also think CoC d20 and Alternity Dark Matter are other good examples of layout which makes the text less of a chore and more interesting to read.

Anyway, that's my take on Audial and Visual components to game books. Gimme a sec and I'll tackle the tactile-kinesthetic.

___________________________________________________________
EDIT:  I'm hunting the net right now for some relevant data, as it's been almost 7 years since I dug through Human Development readings: Check this out:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/tat/TEACHINGTIPSlearningstyles.html
Population breakdown: Visual 55% Auditory (I said Audial, oops) 30%, Tactile 5%

My contentions with the above are these: It was always explained to me in class by my professors and by their research and reading materials that there were more tactile learners (about 20% or more- This isn't just "moving your body", its physical action and repetition, as well as learning through experience: These folks can't fix a car engine by reading about it or watching interactive diagrams: They have to actually go through the process, usually with a peer, first before they "get it"), Auditory and Visual were roughly the same (with Visual in the lead), and that READING was associated with AUDITORY, not VISUAL.  In the Aristotelian sense, it seems to be wrong (visual = eyes, sound = ears, text is gained with Eyes therefore text is Visually gained), but the studies I was shown associated the reading of text to learning, because of the patterns/areas of the brain that is used (namely the habit of most non-speed readers to "listen" to the text in their heads as they read).

Finally, before the discussion on this threefold model starts up, I'd just like to remind everyone that it's not a model that aims at the ontological, even though people often mistake it to be. Arguing about these figures or this model is as realistic as arguing about GNS in RPGs or any other clever 'looking glasses'. In other words, I'm just using this threefold model as a tool to show how we can make game books (and games, maybe) more interesting for people who don't enjoy slogging through raw, cold text.

[A.B.W]

Sweet jumping Jehosaphat yeehaw, as Lawrence Fishburne says in the commercial.  I wasn't expecting anything like this quantity of really cool comment.  I'm learning a lot.

Andy, would you be willing to recommend a few good books or articles online to study on this subject?  I'm pretty good at self-study but I also sometimes find that I've wasted by time on refuted work or just plain cranks when I sail blind into the stacks.

[Mike Holmes]

Very quickly, the dyslexia is coming in handy again. Auditory is outmoded as a description because what's been determined is that the mode in question is actually "Symbolic". That is, language and text are both symbolic, as opposed to visual, which is an actual direct sensation (as is tactile sensation). Hence why text isn't visual; and why dyslexics often have problems with spoken language in addition to reading.

At least that's what I've been given to understand. In fact, IIRC, this is an observation that's been around for a while now.

If we could figure out how to make text and pictures in games work together, effectively, I'd be happy as a clam.  

Oh, BTW, on the tactile thing, I like to note that lot's of retailers are trained to put products into people's hands. Because this tends to form an instant bond between the holder and the object. Somewhere deep in your lizard-brain, something says, "It's mine!" the moment you touch something interesting. Hence why I think that "candy" rewards are so powerful. I've seen Jake do it mechanically, actually; occasionally when awarding dice, he throws them to you so you have to catch them. You could as easily pick one up later, but in making sure you touch it, he's ensuring that you get a little kick from recieving it.

Mike

[Andy Kitkowski]

Andy, would you be willing to recommend a few good books or articles online to study on this subject?  I'm pretty good at self-study but I also sometimes find that I've wasted by time on refuted work or just plain cranks when I sail blind into the stacks.

Hey ABW: Human Development works are updated and revised all the time, so stuff that I learned 8 years ago could very well be outdated now (and is in some places, see Mike's post).  I'm also not very willing to recommend an entire field of side reading on something that really doesn't require that level of intensity to understand.  See, I also have a degree in Philosophy, and the reason I never went to grad school was because I was sick of the whole "Well, to REALLY understand this one phrase of Kant/Hegel/Wittgenstein you really have to read this whole corpus of thick, indescipherable books" attitude, and don't want to inflict it on anyone else. :)

Auditory is outmoded as a description because what's been determined is that the mode in question is actually "Symbolic". That is, language and text are both symbolic, as opposed to visual, which is an actual direct sensation (as is tactile sensation).

Ahh, cool. Yeah, that explains things.

If we could figure out how to make text and pictures in games work together, effectively, I'd be happy as a clam.

Oh! This might be a great time to review an earlier post of mine on the same subject. There's visual examples there, too:

Go to this link and don't read for now, just jump STRIGHT to the bottom post of mine at the bottom of that page, where you'll see I imbedded some pics into the thread:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=5494

I think we need to see more of this (especially that last example, in comic-book format, of how the rules work in action.

TACTILE:  Even if Tactile (and from here on I mean Tactile as a shortening of Tactile-Kinesthetic) is used as much as possible in the "Sentai Team" of producing a gaming book, I'm afraid that, just because of the medium (a book) the best that we can ever hope for is a Tactile Yellow in her bright yellow battle suit, to stay behind, probably confined to a wheelchair, maybe she coming up with clever plans, and piloting the escape vessel when Audio-Symbolic Red and Visual Blue are done kicking rubber-monster butt...

Of course, there are the actual tactile portions of the game: the book, the paper, the dice, and the kinesthetic sensation of rolling fistfulls of dice, filling in dots on a character sheet, etc.

To get the tactile learners into the above sensations, we'd have to be right in front of them, leading a gaming group.  Or else create some sort of interactive demonstration homepage where we encourage the viewer to roll the dice while clicking on choices, etc as an online web demo adventure or the like.

However, there's that whole aspect of communication or learning through a process or action that we could be utilizing more here:

More SOLID examples of character design.
More than one example of character design or choices a player has to go through.
More SOLID examples of actual play: scripts, pictures/comics, etc.
More SOLID examples of how the rules could be interpreted, etc.

Somehow wrap all the above into "follow-through workbook examples" rather than a third-person narration, and you have a deeper level of interaction with the reader/potential player....

as for how, I'm kinda drawing a blank here.  I feel like that Episode of South Park with the Underwear Gnomes:
Step 1: Collect Underwear
Step 2: ...
Step 3: Profit!

-Andy

[Dotan Dimet]

If by "tactile" you means "more hands-on experience" with learning the game, than I think it's worth offering up the classic traveller boxed Starter set as a sterling example.
A game of it's time (the Seventies), Traveller is made up of seperate sub-systems: you have your character creation (with that infamous lifepath system with 4-year "terms" of enlist / advance / roll survival in a selection of mostly-military careers), you have your combat, you have modular spaceship creation system (spend X credits, try to figure out all the trade-offs between faster drives, roomier compartments, more weaponry, larger fuel tanks, etc), you have star-system generation, space sector generation (basically, fill up a hex page with star systems), animal encounter generation, etc.
Each sub-system has it's own chapter in the rulebook. Besides the rulebook, you've got a booklet of charts in the box. All the charts for a specific chapter are laid out nicely on a double-page spread in the charts booklet, so you can have them both open, take pen, paper and dice, and amuse yourself rolling up retired merchant captains, aquatic worlds with technologically advanced theocracies and 100Kg. diurnal horned omnivores, or trying to squeeze the max performance out of a 100,000 credit ship design.
In fact, the book encourages this, letting you learn the system's components while putting together stuff you can use later in your game.
Now, since most games assume you already know how to play RPGs, the didactic quality of games hasn't improved much. The last serious attempts  I recall were the solo adventures in GURPS 3rd Edition and the Champions Blue Book (or was that Fantasy Hero?).
- Dotan

[A.B.W]

Andy:  Thank you for the links!  I like those illustrations.  Man, I'd love to see something like that in a Western game.  Um, a game made in North America or Europe, that is, not necessarily Six-Gun Roleplaying.