Thursday 28 January 2021

HELP ME PUT MYSELF INSIDE A CHILD

Ok I have reached a pause point with Goose-Gold & Goblins. I have spent.. well its coronatime so I have no idea how long I have actually spent doing this but it feels like I have spent quite a while filling out the bestiary with concepts for fifty non (or less) violent 'monsters'.



I have been doing that for so long that I feel like I lost my grip on the larger project somewhat. There is a lot to do, I intend this ultimately to be a pretty big book, or more like three books, D&D style.

Future topics to include building a 'household', magic, treasures, food and cooking, describing circles of familiarity and making friends, stuff about Strange Dangers like sickness, poison, curses, weather and seasons, magical events and poverty, a whole section on building dungeons/mazes, treasures. There is a lot to do.

But a key concept for the project is to have the best possible advice and ideas about running games for families, between generations, with children of different ages and with parents and children. 

I also need to know about child psychology, education and development to work out how to arrange rules and concepts in the book.

I know nothing about any of this so I am opening the Dread Portal, and asking for book reccomendations, and priority analysis of the books I have already listed to buy.



Does the background intellectual capacity still exist in the OSR diaspora to even address this? And if it does is anyone still reading this blog who gives a damn? We shall see.

 If anyone in my audience knows much about the subjects in question then I am asking for advice about where to start, so I need advice on;

- Books or articles on Child Psychology, especially decent (sane) overviews of the topic.

- In particular, stuff about family games and playing games across generations and age groups, how children and adults of different ages play with each other.

- Games and entertainments which work well for children of different ages.

- Games which work with parents and children.

- Analysis about what children are like at different stages of development.

- What motivates them.

- What they can handle intellectually and emotionally.

- General howling at me about families, children, how I should or shouldn't be doing this, culture war stuff, yeah lets culture war it we may as well and its going to happen anyway.




39 comments:

  1. I'm a parent who plays lots of games with my kids and has tried to get them to play osr games too of various sorts. I've also been following this blog and very much enjoying your ideas. I've been toying with making my own setting for my kids so it's been really awesome following this.

    I also write kids books for a living, and have some experience with various aspects of what you're discussing. Happy to share what little I know.

    I don't really feel I can pontificate here on WHAT I THINK, but would be very happy to discuss anything with you either by email or even a conversation. As you prefer!

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  2. Hiya,

    I've been avidly following this blog. I'm a parent who plays lots of games with my kids and also some osr rpgs too. Have a bit of an idea what works with them at various ages. I'm also a kids book writer so have some experience with some of your other questions too.

    I'd be delighted to discuss this with you if that would be helpful. Not sure I want to just write out what I think but happy to email or chat, if that works.

    Very keen to help in any way I can.

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  3. Replies
    1. You could have gone for four...

      What books have you written? (if you don't want to comment here you can get me at pjamesstuart@ the google mail dot com

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  4. I used to study the cognitive neuroscience of language. I did not study clinical psychology or developmental psychology specifically, but I did learn some stuff.

    This is not so much about child psychology specifically, but I read this book in my clinical psychology class in undergrad called The Family Crucible which really stuck with me. It's a bit dated and references stuff like Freudian psychoanalysis a bit, ignore that stuff, but the stuff about thinking about cognition and families as a system is something I strongly agree with.

    I forget how old the children were, but it basically follows the family therapy of a family with two children. May or may not inform your thought process on this too much, might be too out of the way of what you're looking for, but nonetheless it's a good book.

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  5. You've already mentioned my blog in this series where I talk about running games for kids. I'm in the education and psychology fields so I've been trained in this stuff, but I still think the best teacher is experience. Just run games for kids and see what sticks. All this stuff I've written has been from actual play, not school/book knowledge.

    https://dreamingdragonslayer.wordpress.com/tag/playing-with-youngers/

    That said I'm interested to see what you glean from your research.

    The geese alone should make this project worth seeing through to the end.

    Forget the kids. Do it for the geese. :P

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    Replies
    1. Gaining access to children will be the challenge..

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    2. Depending on where you are, you can do Outschool. The game would be online, which would definitely impact design: https://dreamingdragonslayer.wordpress.com/2021/01/23/so-you-want-to-make-money-online-by-running-rpgs-for-kids/

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  6. I hate to downvote books, but you should probably just playtest some games with actual, flesh-and-blood children. If you can't find any on the darkweb, you could check the local library.

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    Replies
    1. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) both the system and the plague make it quite difficult for strange men to get close to random children.

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  7. free gov docs should have all of this
    for childcare workers
    no one department - healthcare might be seperate to education
    1000 plus pages of law i was expected to know

    but covid killed my studies and work

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  8. could you have phrased the title literally any worse???

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  9. That title really has me considered reporting you to FBI

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    Replies
    1. I'm in the U.K. so the NSPCC might be a better bet

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  10. If I were you, I'd reorient my question inwards and ask myself ¿Why do I want to make a game for kids? is it because you want to tap into that market for profit or do you want to tap into the childish fantasy because you miss it? if its the first you will never do something remarkable. If its the second, just try to narrow down what is what you miss most.

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  11. And If what you want is to have parents and grandparents have a good time with their children, dont overthink it: just make a fun game and let them deal with the pedagogic part themselves; they do it all the time with every other game and activity and they already know what to do. And if they dont, no manual will ever teach them.

    Sorry for the triple post but thats how I roll

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    Replies
    1. there are already many family games that didn't overthink it, I want to overthink it

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  12. Ben Milton and Joseph Manola might have interesting advice / stories.
    http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/search/label/Gaming%20with%20toddlers
    https://dreamingdragonslayer.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/ben-milton-interview-part-i-early-days-and-running-for-kids/

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  13. Okay how deep down the rabbit hole re. Developmental psychology do you want to go? I studied psychology with a specialism in developmental psych, albeit some time ago. Then taught for... lets say a long time. Happy to go through these topics in detail if you would like to.

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    1. Is there any single reasonably chunky source you would recommend as an introduction to child development and family play?

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    2. Child development is fine - just look at any of the BPS accredited books on developmental psychology. Play was until recently not considered an appropriate topic for investigation and so psych books on the matter are few and mostly focused on it's role on development.

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  14. D. W. Winnicott's "Playing and Reality" is a really interesting and rather sweet discussion of the role of play in children's psychic lives. As child psychology literature goes I imagine it's quite dated but it gave me a lot to think about.

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  15. First time caller, long time listener. I've been dming for my son and his friends for a couple of years now (ages 10-12) and more so during the plague online. Having talked to others that dm for kids, read others thoughts on guiding children through games, I don't think it will do you nearly as much good to hear strategies and observations (prep less to none, expect gonzo shit at the gate, they wanna be friends with everything, they like voices, they don't give a fuck about the history of anything that is not directly related to them personally, and- as they are often powerless in their everyday lives- they revel in the power to make consequential decisions in the narrative: in short, they are very good gamers) as it would to actually conduct games for them. So, since you need that experience, I could likely round up some children for you and stick them in front of screens and chaperone to ensure comfortable parents. Reach out if that interests you.

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  16. I have not yet read these myself, but I am very interested in Jean Piaget's books. He is remembered as a developmental psychologist, but his project was actually to try to understand where morality came from and how to square it with modern science, so he ended up studying kids and the games they played. From what I've heard, the top choices would be: "Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood" and "The Moral Judgment of the Child".

    Perhaps of especial interest, Piaget traced the ability of children to 1) engage in play with other kids at all, 2) play organized games with rules with other kids, 3) be able to articulate the rules of the game if asked, and 4) understand the rules enough to create new rules and/or new games.

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    Replies
    1. Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your question, but I think he addresses those topics in the two books mentioned:
      - Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood
      - The Moral Judgment of the Child

      Both appear to be available as either kindle or physical books on (American) Amazon, and I'm sure plenty would show up used bookstores, as Piaget was writing in the 50s and likely isn't as popular these days.

      I found out about him and got an overview of his beliefs by listening to Jordan Peterson, but I know he's not everybody's favorite person, and even if that's not a problem, he's very hard to get started with/point to a specific talk that sums things up.

      Did any of the above hit what you meant by "recommended sources"?

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    2. Piaget is a good recommendation. As general research advice a good way to go about building a reading list is to google “topic + syllabus” and look for graduate level (usually 3-400+) syllabi from respected institutions.

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    3. Here are two that look good and a book. I searched “child development play syllabus”

      https://ehs.siu.edu/ci/_common/documents/syllabi/fall-2015-1/CI317.pdf

      https://cehd.gmu.edu/assets/docs/syllabi/2015/syllabus_23319.pdf

      https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/scope-report-learning-play-liliana-web.pdf

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    4. I would recommend staying away from Jordan Peterson though. If you want to learn actual psychology, you need to situate the object (child, person, mind, etc.) sociohistorical as a product of the specific context in which it develops, rather than transhistorically as the product of assumed invariant processes, especially those dubbed "human nature."

      Piaget isn't great at that himself. Neither is Freud, and modern psychology is only beginning to address it. Of course, this expands the research horizon beyond psychology as such, so it's an understandable crutch to naturalize the conditions that lie outside of one's discipline.

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    5. Piaget wasn't very empirical though, right? At least from what I vaguely remember, which admittedly could be incorrect. I get that people tend to think about Freud and Jung and all of that when they think about psychology, but most of that is not reflective of psychology as a science, as it mostly exists today. I may be doing Piaget a disservice with that comparison, I genuinely don't remember very well offhand. There have been a lot of reasonable-sounding hypotheses over the decades, and many of them were wrong not because they were bad ideas necessarily but because that's just not how the universe works. Look for data, for proper research methods, hypothesis testing, statistics, etc.

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    6. Hmm I think Vivian Gussey Paley didn't like Piaget very much either.

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    7. I realized I was getting Piaget mixed up with Vygotsky. I vaguely remember Piaget now, but can't really speak to whether his theories are still considered empirically valid. Anyway, I stand by the rest of what I said though about the importance of empiricism.

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