These are important skills that we use throughout our personal lives and our careers. How do we develop these? How can we develop them?
Role playing games provide enourmous opportunities to develop these skills and more in a fun game setting where you also get to kill some evil goblins and be the hero of the day saving a village under attack.
How can a geeky table top game achieve these outcomes?
Video above does an excellent job of providing answers to this question and explaining the benefits of the game for real life. It is really worth a watch.
Ethan Gilsdorf who gives the TED Talk above is a journalist, poet, critic, teacher and last but not least, a geek.
This is an extract from the video description:
The quintessential nerdy pastime of Dungeons & Dragons (also called D&D) can actually be the secret to life success. How? Ethan Gilsdorf shows us how this groundbreaking game involving communal storytelling, dice-rolling, and imaginary adventures in lands filled with dragons, quests, elves and evil wizards actually gives us powerful tools to combat the perils and challenges of reality.
Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplaying games have a lot of merit to be used in an education setting as well as a fun game to play with friends. A lot of curriculum areas can be incorporated into the game. This provides and espeically useful tool to engage those students who have given up on school and learning and give them a setting where they can learn litreacy and numeracy skills with purpose.