We are all actors. We all have to change the way we behave according to our current circumstances. Whether we’re playing the role of a mother, or son, or friend, or stranger, we know instinctively how to adjust our behaviour to accommodate for the other person. Things get less intuitive with regards to our jobs. Generally we know how to be the boss or the employee. And certainly, some people fit their occupations perfectly – they’re “made for the role”. But for most, we have to learn how to play our part.
When we are children, we spend a lot of time role playing. In many of our games of imagination we are assuming the identity of someone else; a hero, a villain, a monster, an alien…
This is how we learn to empathise, and also how to be malleable, to be less fixed in our characters. Think about starting a new job. You feel nervous and awkward. Why? New people, a new environment, new challenges, yes. But it’s more than that. You have to change. You have to actually become somebody else, at least while you’re at work. You have to actually inhabit your role.
I’m embarking on a whole new career at the moment. For many years I worked as a ski instructor. That was the part I played, and I was very comfortable with it. But now I’m back at college, doing a degree in traditional Chinese acupuncture, and will shortly be embarking on a new journey as a healthcare professional.
Many of the skills will be transferable. I’m used to quickly establishing a trusting relationship with new people. I’m used to adjusting my language to communicate with people from many different backgrounds. I’m used to reading people’s body language, and analysing their posture and gait. I’m used to being welcoming and reassuring. But even so, I will have to adjust in many ways. I’ll have to talk to people about often quite intimate problems. Physical issues. Emotional issues. I’m not used to that.
As part of our training, we do simulated consultations with professional actors. These are incredibly useful, as they serve as the equivalent of those games of imagination we used to play as children. We can try out our new roles in a safe environment. Even if it goes terribly wrong, nobody gets hurt. It is simply a useful learning exercise, an arena in which to test ourselves and see how we respond to a situation, and how others respond to us.
Next year I will have to lead treatments in our student clinic. I will have to conduct consultations with real, paying customers. Even then, there will be the support of colleagues and an experienced clinic supervisor. And having done these simulated consultations, we have been given that little steppingstone across the water. We don’t have to make a giant leap. We can test out our roles and know we’re not going to drown. It’s a really great way of smoothing out the learning curve and sliding into our new roles as easily as possible.
Despite this, I know many of my peers are terrified by this aspect of the course. It’s hard for them to try out a new character. It’s hard for them to play. They’ve forgotten how. I make no pretence at being able to take on my new role and act it out perfectly. I know I’m going to make mistakes. Probably lots of them. Yet I find myself looking forward to this challenge. I enjoy the simulated consultations, and while I’m sure I’ll be nervous doing it for real next year, I think I’ll enjoy that, too. It feels like a game.
Why such confidence? At first I couldn’t answer this. I’m not a naturally gregarious person. I’m introverted and quiet. But then I realised my secret weapon. It might sound ridiculous, but my biggest asset is the fact that every couple of weeks or so I spend several hours sat around with friends playing fantasy role-playing games. Yes, my secret weapon is Dungeons & Dragons!
Not everybody is aware of exactly what a role-playing game is. Essentially, it’s a game of cooperative storytelling. One player, the Game Master, presents the fictional setting, its inhabitants, and the situation or challenge, while the other players take the part of the heroes. When the outcome of any given action is uncertain, dice are rolled to determine what happens. Then the Game Master plays out the consequences, and the players respond to the newly configured situation. In essence, it is a regulated version of a child’s game of imagination.
In our game I am the Game Master, and as such I have to be able to improvise and play the part of many different characters in the fictional world. My skill levels fall far short of a professional actor’s, of course, but it’s a huge amount of fun inhabiting another person or creature – their voice, their body, their motivations, their personality, their idiosyncrasies. And because I do this regularly for pleasure, taking on the role of an acupuncturist doesn’t feel like such a massive jump. I mean, I was a conniving dragon last week, or a jealous god, a cruel demon, or a fearsome orc warlock, so a simple human acupuncturist isn’t such a departure!
This leads me to thinking, what else are role-playing games good for? What other skills do they help us to develop? The more I think about it, the more I realise they teach us an awful lot. Apart from allowing us to acquire and play out a new persona, by inhabiting an unfamiliar role we can develop our sense of empathy for others. We get to imagine what it might be like to be another person, and to look at life from their perspective. How are they like us? How are they different? What are they scared of? What do they want? And why are they the way they are? Where did they come from? What formed them? And how did their formation lead them here, now, to this treatment room? This is surely a crucial skill for real life, and will certainly be of huge value for me as a prospective healthcare worker.
What else? Well, role-playing games (RPGs) require us to improvise, to think on our feet and respond to whatever presents itself. Good improvisation requires good, active listening skills, and that’s another essential quality for a healthcare professional.
This is especially true of Chinese Medicine, where much diagnostic value is placed on looking at a person’s mannerisms, speech patterns, facial expressions, complexion, aura, and presence. Are they open or guarded? What are they not saying? What do they seek from their treatment, and does that align with what they really need? When we are really attentive, we see so much more.
Of course, to demonstrate that you are listening fully encourages the patient and makes them feel valued and cared for, too. This alone has a great amount of therapeutic benefit and is an important aspect of the treatment. You have to establish a connection. You can do this via the needle, or via massage, but most effectively and naturally you can do this via listening.
There are many other qualities that RPGs help to train in us. We can try our hand at leadership, or at problem-solving and spatial reasoning. We have to learn cooperation and teamwork, compromise and social etiquette. RPGs build social skills and confidence. We learn to think quickly under pressure, and we learn that there are consequences to our actions. They improve our linguistic and communication skills, our descriptive vocabulary, our mental arithmetic, and our ability to imagine things in detail.
We are given opportunity to try out different dialects and to experiment and find inventive solutions. We learn to win and lose gracefully, to accept our fate as determined by a die roll. We learn to follow rules, and we learn to bend them. We learn that one set of rules can never adequately describe reality; there are always going to be exceptions. And we learn to ditch the rules that no longer serve us; we learn that things change.
There are other, more peripheral benefits, too. RPGs can spark our interest in mythology, history, science, and nature. They encourage reading and storytelling, an appreciation of writing and drama, insight into human interactions. And they also provide access to other absorbing, creative and concentration-honing hobbies like painting and crafting miniatures and dioramas.
Unlike video games, RPGs do not have preset choices and outcomes. Anything you can think of, you can try it out and see what happens. I personally derive a huge amount of pleasure out of inventing histories, cultures, people, and places, then injecting some element of conflict or drama and seeing how things turn out. The results are invariably surprising. The players never do what you’re expecting. You very quickly develop a sense that life is not yours to control.
Perhaps that is one of the greatest benefits of role playing games: an acceptance of the spontaneity and unforeseeable nature of reality. Accepting this, and not being fearful that things are out of your control. When we can be comfortable with being spontaneous and improvising our way through life, without being too dependent on plans or being too set in our mindset, then our lives become much more fruitful and enjoyable. One of our greatest assets is our capacity to let go. Precious few of us know how to do so. Too many of us hold on far too tightly, and we suffer for it.
When we take part in a role playing game, or experiment with a new role in the real world, then we are letting go, if only temporarily, of our own fixed and self-limited selves. We are remembering how to play. And we are forced to be truly present with whatever is occurring right now – and that is a wonderful place to be. In fact, here and now is the only place to be.
The Azure Dragon 