ozarque ([info]ozarque) wrote,
@ 2006-03-10 13:54:00
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Linguistics; medical metaphors; gaming; recommended link...
Recommended, and especially appropriate in the context of our recent discussion of the Healing Is War/Combat metaphor: "The Healing Game," at http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/02/the-healing-game .

(And thanks to Wikipedia, I now know what MMORPG means.)


Note: This item was e-mailed to me, and I'd like to credit and thank the e-mailer here -- but I'm not sure I'm free to do that, and I don't want to violate his privacy. If you send me something off-LJ and you don't tell me that I'm free to identify you, I'll honor that and keep your identity to myself; if you want to be credited, therefore, please be sure you let me know.

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[info]carandol
2006-03-10 07:25 pm UTC (link)
That reminds me of a friend of mine, who once said that his ideal computer game would be flying round in a helicopter gunship, shooting sick baby seals with an antibiotic gun.

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[info]archangelbeth
2006-03-10 09:20 pm UTC (link)
Fascinating. I haven't read the post referenced in the article yet, though.

Healers are essential in the MMORPGs I've encountered. You can't do the really hard stuff without one. Someday I'll play a pure-class healer and see if I'm any good at it. (I mostly play hybrids: warrior-healers, jackofalltrades-healers, etc.)

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[info]memegarden
2006-03-10 09:34 pm UTC (link)
There are quests in World of WarCraft that involve healing: sick people, sick antelope, poisoned wells, etc.

The overall theme and metaphor, however, remains Killing the Bad Guys.

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[info]leora
2006-03-10 10:00 pm UTC (link)
Oh, the character I most recently played in a tabletop RPG is a healer. I designed her around a strong desire to heal, mostly animals, but humans too. The first time I played her, the adventure she got into was finding a sick boar. She tried to heal him, while also not getting hurt herself. Her next adventure involved looking for a particular plant, which got complicated because she had to try to talk a nymph into being willing to give it to her, since taking it by force was not an option (she's much weaker). The primary challenge I expect to have with her is that she's set in a world where magic is evil, and a lot of her healing abilities are magic. So, she needs to figure out ways to heal people without them becoming suspicious.

A lot of RPGing is focused around combat, but the neat thing about RPGs is that it really doesn't have to be. The mechanics exist to make it about what you want it to be. A lot of RPGing is focused around diplomacy instead.

I've never been part of a campaign that really was focused just around battles. Even the battle-heavy ones were battles on the way to try to do what was needed to save the land. And sometimes a battle turned out terminated partway through when you realize the people aren't actually working against you. And the best battles are the ones that never happen. Where the DM tells you afterwards, it's a good thing you were polite to him, because otherwise he would have attacked you and he's strong, but because you were so friendly, he decided to help you out. I wouldn't want to play a more battle-focused game, because it'd be pretty dull. You'd just be using raw mechanics rather than doing cooperative storytelling. And for the people I RPG with, most of the point is cooperative storytelling.

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[info]leora
2006-03-10 10:03 pm UTC (link)
And yes, I realize tabletop is different from the online games. But my understanding was that the online games were basically trying to be online versions of tabletop RPGing, and allow you to play with people around the world even if you have no one local to RPG with. I could be mistaken in this point. But anyhow, so I feel there is a connection between the two.

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[info]archangelbeth
2006-03-11 01:20 pm UTC (link)
MMORPGs... sort-of try to be like tabletop, but overall they seem a lot closer to shoot-em-up games, to me. Or dungeon crawls. Even at their best, they're railroad plots, and there is no lasting change in the world that isn't scripted.

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Allophilia
[info]kelathefinn
2006-03-13 08:21 am UTC (link)
This is not a comment to this post, but it is related, and this is the quickest way I know to get this info to you. Hopefully the internet links will also function from here. I have a friend working with Interfaith Alliance, to increase tolerance for peoples with different religious beliefs. She posted this, so it's public. I've taken out the personal bits, while passing on the relevant information.

Allophilia?: When Tolerance Is Not Enough
As a leader, how do you get beyond just “tolerance” and yet keep group identities fostered and intact? How about a two-page quick read that teaches a new framework for effective intergroup leadership? Todd Pitinsky an assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government and a core faculty member at the Center for Public Leadership has an answer. He offers a short paper on “allophilia” and emergent models of global leadership which will appear as a chapter in a book published this fall by the International Leadership Association. It is worth a read for anyone trying to get people of different faiths accepting of one another.
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/leadership/compass/2005/allophilia.pdf

and read the short article. Pitinsky says, "Tolerance promotion comprises four types of activity: prejudice reduction (trying to minimize or eliminate the prejudicial ideation), recategorizing members of a different identity group as part of one's own ingroup, increasing the contact between groups, and encouraging followers to see members of an outgroup as individuals instead of as members of a group." He then goes through the barriers to each of those strategies actually working. My favorite barrier was when intergroup contact reinforces rather than clears up prejudices...I have seen it work though. I think that the work folks have done in the interfaith movement has cleared up a great deal of prejudice between members of different religions. The problem is that people (in restrictive faiths) who do interfaith and become xenophilic (or allophilic as Pitinsky styles it) sometimes start to be estranged from their co-religionists who retain their old prejudices. And so you sometimes get a third group of "interfaith" people alongside people of specific faiths. Or what Paul Chaffee likes to call MRPers "Multiple Religious Practitioners" who embrace several traditions. Which reinforces the fear that doing interfaith will cause people to leave their old traditions. That certainly isn't universal -- many people find their relationship to their own traditions deepened by contact and contrast with others.

Pitinsky and his colleagues say their preliminary work "suggests that allophilia's components include believing that members of the other group are dependable and moral (trust), interacting with members of the other group (socializing), having a high opinion of them (admiration), feeling connected and close to members of the other group (kinship), and, finally, believing that members of the other group are intelligent and wise (ability)." The question, of course, is how to achieve situations that foster those positive feelings toward an outgroup. I'd be interested to see the instruments he and his team have created to measure people's state of allophila.

Hmm. Just found a paper of his in Word format Off to read that.

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2008-08-29 10:59 pm UTC (link)
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