RPGs, Time, and an Unsolvable Problem

 This morning on Facebook, I saw it was the birthday of a friend who I haven't seen since I was in high school. I thought about the fact that I'd recently seen that he'd gotten married (and by recently, I mean at least a year and a half ago, because I remember it being at least a few months before the plague.) My brain reacted to me thinking of him being married with that's not right. 

And it got me thinking about how we see time when it comes to people we don't interact with very often.

For people we don't interact with, we expect time to remain stationary/we don't expect their lives to progress.

We know that this isn't the case, but it's a phenomenon that I've had multiple people mention to me. They (we) are surprised when a cousin who they have only seen at family gatherings is grown up, or when they find that major life events have occurred for old friends.

I think that, because we don't see the change in these people's lives, our brains don't consider that it's happening. So, when our brains learn about it, they go 'oh, I didn't know about that!' People we see more frequently, we might consider more often and think of how their life is progressing even when we're not around. But for people farther out in our sphere of influence, it would take up more time than we have to be considering what every single person might or might not be going through in their lives.

Video Games may make this problem worse

Studies have actually shown that our brains don't distinguish between fictional and real people, so when we spend a lot of time watching a tv show or playing a video game with the same characters, our mental/emotional being bonds with those characters in a way similar to how it would being around real people. Through this, our interactions with fictional characters help to teach our brains about how connections to real people work, even if it's not realistic at all.

In my rabbit hole of thoughts, there are two (or maybe three) reasons/ways that video games reinforce this way of thinking. (Note that I'm not trying to attack video games or say that any of these things should be changed, I am just observing how they relate to the problem. I realize a lot of MMO games are likely exempt from these observations.)

The first way that I was thinking of is that characters in a video game don't usually advance beyond the player character's actions. You can interact with a character, go across the world questing, and come back, and that character likely won't have changed/advanced much. Nothing will have happened to that character except maybe plot advancement things tied to the player character's advancement. In general, people and things the player ignores won't change.

Some games offer timed quests where the player character has a limited number of in-game days (or some other factor of time) to complete the quest before things change. These can't be ignored without the world changing, but they are still player-character centric. Regardless of that, we (or at least I) hate these quests because I hate the idea in a video game of losing the opportunity to do something.

A part of why we don't like the rest of the world advancing beyond us is that we don't want to lose opportunities in real life. We don't want to lose chances that we could have interacted with people, or we don't want them/their circumstances to change in a way that changes the opportunities our relationships have with them.

The second way that video games reinforce this problem is just by being able to save and come back at will. The game world literally does not progress while we're away. And we (or at least I) would hate it if they did. I remember my wife telling me about Star Wars Galaxies, a massively multiplayer game in the star wars universe, and she had said that you have to pay rent or something on your character's house (based on time passing in real time) or else it would be taken away. Even though I wasn't playing the game, this idea frustrated me a lot. Why should a game mandate I log on every so often or lose things? No video game is our real life (nor should it be), so it shouldn't make demands upon our real life. So, I'm not saying that the worlds of video games should advance while we're away, but I am just saying that it does reinforce the idea that other things don't as well.

The third way that video games reinforce the idea is in their replayability. You never lose opportunities, because you can always start the game over and play it again. You can experience the same things over and over again and you can visit the same characters at any point in their story as many times as you want. I've often wished that I could revisit parts of my real life like this, or to combine elements of different times in my life, but that's not how real life works.

Much of this would also apply to art, music, books, tv shows, movies, or any other form of media that one can interact with without it changing while they're away.

Tabletop RPGs can help against this problem, but should they?

Lately, I've been listening to Raised on DnD, a podcast about introducing kids to roleplaying games and the benefits thereof. One of the things that comes up regularly on the show is that tabletop roleplaying games give kids (or players in general) the opportunity to learn about choices/consequences in a safe/fictional setting so that they can then apply those lessons to choices/consequences in real life.

I think that you could similarly use RPGs to help teach players about the idea that other characters have lives aside from the heroes' journey. By having changes happen to towns or people that the players interacted with in the past be displayed when players return, it helps to set in the idea that everyone is an individual and that life doesn't revolve around the players (which, I think, can help to make the players learn to realize that everyone in real life is an individual and that life doesn't revolve around their own actions either.)

Of course, there are ways that this could go badly and one has to be careful. I played in a campaign once where there were different evil terrible things going on in any direction, and that we couldn't deal with any one of them without neglecting another and that any of them would cause bad things to happen. So, with that, the world seemed dynamic and real and like it would advance without us, but it was also disheartening because even if we could do some good, things would get worse somewhere in the world without our intervention. And even then, all of the things felt central to us as the player characters and our action/inaction, which ties back to reinforcing the problem.

I think that it's important to have it be the case that a) some problems in the world can be/are resolved without the PCs intervention (to show that they aren't the only important/good forces in the world), and b) to have regular change that is positive as well as change that is negative. Change in NPCs or the world has to be decentralized from the player characters to teach this lesson. This isn't to say that the players can't change things or have a sphere of influence in the world, but just that the lesson itself is related to the areas of the world that they aren't focused on advancing/changing without them.

As another note for this section that I didn't know where to insert: I know some games use "clocks" or measures of events and their advancement if the PCs don't get involved/change things. I think this is good at showing that the world advances without the PCs, but it also still puts the attention on PC action/inaction, which isn't what the lesson is about.

What do you think?

Is this a problem that needs addressed? Do you think that using tabletop games is a good way to address it? Have you had good or bad experiences (either in real life or in tabletop games) related to this issue?