RPG Challenges: training skills to prevent and treat drug use among adolescents

BOOK REVIEW

RPG Challenges: training skills to prevent and treat drug use among adolescents

Renata Araujo

São Paulo, Vetor, 2009

Maria Isabel Timm

Journalist, PhD in IT in Education. Coordinator of Research and Development in Educational Technologies and Distance Education of the National Center of Supercomputing, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (CESUP/UFRGS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.

Correspondence

Some people say that adolescence is a trick natural selection plays on individuals so that those who are really competent can survive that disturbing phase and enjoy maturity. Others, who are less prone to make deep analyses, coin new terms such as aborrescentes (annoying teenagers), which show both the uneasiness of the relationship with adolescents and the distance that the speaker wants to keep from a past period of time or a portion of what certainly made part of his/her own personal history. Renata Araujo came out with an original way of representing adolescence, respecting its complexity, risks, flexibility and the huge — positive and negative — unknown potential of each adolescent, which therapists, teachers, parents and friends are often not able to deal with because they lack objective instruments of analysis and action.

Renata was able to imagine and represent this explosive and dynamic situation in a clever, realistic and, at the same time, affectionate manner. And because she was successful in doing that, she created an instrument for diagnosis, intervention and self-guidance that is also innovative and full of potentialities. The set composed of representation and instrument is a kind of multiple and interactive graphic object, which surpasses the expectations of what could be merely a book or a simple game, to become almost a survival manual for the daily life of adolescents who need to chose between realistic or magical strategies, objectively evaluating the cost-benefit relation of each one of these choices by measuring their impact on areas of the adolescents' own profile, such as courage, charm, strength, intelligence, health or empathy.

It features a box containing an instruction manual of a RPG game and several graphic elements — characters, cards of challenges, strategies, places and notes — so that youths are able to see themselves as the main characters and those who surround them in the settings that are part of their daily routine, being capable of acting interactively in situations involving family, school, and social events, etc. The set is called RPG Challenges: training skills to prevent and treat drug use among adolescents (publishing house Vetor, 2009). But even then the game surpasses its initial intended goal — use of drugs — and it includes situations that distress youths in this age group, either if they are involved or not with the drug culture (both legal and illegal drugs).

In order to play, participants must choose among a set of characters between 14 and 16 years through cards that describe each one of their profiles, by means of wonderful drawings and short informal texts. Choices include characters' likings, behavioral characteristics and preferences (one enjoys studying, another one hates fancy clothes, the other one is a surfer, another one wants to be a researcher when she grows up, among other examples). Such descriptions, in addition to covering a wide range of personalities and social behaviors, measure the differences among them by assigning scores to the above mentioned characteristics (8 for courage, 9 for charm, for instance, and these scores are different for each one of the characters). Thus, the first window is open so that the player can peek through it and see himself/herself and his/her friends with their peculiar characteristics, their set of good, fair and bad things, which therefore acquire a measure and, consequently, a degree of importance in the definition of potentialities to be developed or difficulties to be faced (by the way, this activity could even be used by adults who still want or need to recognize the multiple facets of their own personalities and work on their behaviors, whether it is social, affective, etc). Actually, such identification of different sides of oneself and others can immediately be used as a tool of self-knowledge and observation of other people, regardless of the causes, guilts or socioeconomic, ideological or religious conditions.

The dynamics of the game consists in leading the participants to face daily challenges, while vested with the persona described in the characters' profile charts and, probably, with their own feelings and behaviors. All those who somehow elaborated and became aware of the experiences of their own adolescence know that these challenges might seem commonplace, but they mobilize many defenses and anxieties against lack of self-confidence about their own abilities, fear of the unknown, self-assertion, curiosity about sexuality, etc, all of which are potential triggers of magical solutions such as drugs (which are presented in the game as drenches that turn on/off or that are capable of making a person more charming and making life pleasant). For instance: for challenges like "being threatened by a classmate," or "being punished," "presenting a class project to the whole class," or even "friends that try to convince you of skipping classes," each character must evaluate strategies such as: "find new friends," "remember that the problem will not last for ever," "take Viajolin (magic potion that makes people feel as if they were walking on clouds)," or "go for a walk while thinking about the problem." And before one thinks that it is a simplification of this dramatic existential equation of adolescence based on instructions such as if-this/do-that, it is important to explain that: each challenge — and each solution strategy — suggests a variable accountability for each one of the characteristics of the character's profile (courage, charm, etc.). In addition to this sum up of variable scores for each side of the personality, each strategy also offers positive or negative bonuses, which are concrete and dynamic instruments for each calculation of losses and gains in each part of the dynamic set of that specific individual. To add value to this calculation, the points gained are exchangeable for prizes that can be chosen by the player (trip, surfboard, etc.).

Renata transforms the adolescent's decision in a quite complex system, in which it is possible to identify dynamic variables, some of which belong to the challenge, others belong to the strategy chosen to face the challenge and others belong to the adolescent who has to deal with his/her multiple and conflicting sides that fight for more space in a mind/brain that lacks experience to be able to know them and deal with them. A humanist person, educated according to the main schools of psychology and psychoanalysis of the 20th century, would revolt at this point of the text and protest against what could be a computational view of the human decision making process, against the loss and gain strategies description of human subjectivity, or even could miss references to more deep analyses about the role or responsibility of education or culture in the choices. For such readers, besides cognitive psychology, specialty field of Renata Araujo, one can suggest finding out more about contemporary authors such as the biologist Richard Dawkins,¹ the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker^2,3 or the philosopher Daniel Dennett.⁴ All of them include the study of the human mind and behavior within the scope of evolutionist psychology, philosophy and biology, observing human mental process in its natural form, as a species, beyond cultural paradigms. One can also suggest the heresy of trying to understand this human nature from the point-of-view of an artificial intelligence researcher like Marvin Minsky,^2,3,5 who describes intelligence and decision making processes using the necessary machinery to make it work in robots or software (some of this authors' works and a work about these authors by the commentator are listed below).

In addition to the straight — and maybe involuntary — dialogue between Renata Araujo and scientists that have extended the approach about psychology and cognition, it is important to consider the opportunity provided by this work to enlarge the field of cognitive research (including not only clinical practice in psychology, but also educational needs), since it may produce several approaches and modes of observation, including theses and dissertations, with different possibilities of research methodologies and data management (direct observation, simulations, cuts by gender and social class, among many others).

Finally, the cherry on the cake is that the author's work is an almost ready script for the development of a virtual version of the game, which can, itself, become a research object in the field of IT in education, or educational technology applied to the health areas (both fields of study now structuring academic standards in the main universities of Rio Grande do Sul). One of the big challenges to develop educational or therapeutic virtual games is exactly the extraction of content from specialists and its adaptation to the increasingly promising virtual universe of games, with its areas for interactivity, choice, data generation, sharing, in addition to the practice that has started to be studied under the name of augmented reality,⁶ which simply is a mix of the virtual game (in computers, palmtops, cell phones or interactive TV) with the player's personal reality, a task that the robust multiple and interactive graphic object created by Renata and her team is able to accomplish.⁷

References

• 1. Dawkins R. Selfish gene. Great Britain: Oxford University. 30th ed. 2006.
• 2. Pinker S. Tábula rasa. Săo Paulo: Companhia das Letras; 2004.
• 3. Pinker S. Como a mente funciona. Săo Paulo: Companhia das Letras; 1998.
• 4. Dennett D. A perigosa idéia de Darwin. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco; 1988.
• 5. Minsky M. The emotion machine: commonsense thinking, artificial intelligence and the future of human mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2006.
• 6. Kopfer E. Augmented learning. Research and design of mobile educational games. United Kingdom: MIT; 2008.
• 7. Timm MI, Rocha ACB, Schnaid F, Zaro MA, Chiaramonte M. A virada computacional da filosofia e sua influęncia na pesquisa educacional. Cięncias & Cogniçăo (UFRJ). 2007;11:2-20. Disponível em: http://www.cienciasecognicao.org/pdf/v11/m327161.pdf Acessado mar 2009.

Correspondência

Fernandes Vieira, 317/203, Bairro Bom Fim

CEP 90035-091, Porto Alegre, RS

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 Aug 2009
• Date of issue
  2009