By Pierre Aboukrat

My life is a role-playing game. 

Role playing games give me the capacity to occupy different identities. It can bring us to increase our empathy and know how others will react when using a stimulus. 

Therefore, my life is a role-playing game. If I consider the people, I am asking for as PNGs that will provide me a/an object/service. I can say that I am responding in a way I learned playing role play. In fact, role plays are structured in a way that you need to maintain a character to interact in the world you are in.

We put on a mask when we are at work. As a creative person, I act all day long and I find myself in need of switching characters a lot. That is why, having played a troll enslaved by a dwarf, a dictator cat oppressing birds, raccoons and mice or a train worker doing his best to connect cities. All personas described on the above are useful for my professional life. 

But it doesn’t stop here, it puts me in a position that I don’t know and that I have to embrace to play. Some will say that for them Donjon&Dragon is a game only played by geeks that spend their lives in a cave. To that, I would respond that it takes some guts to lean in a new adventure to discover something new that you will take time for. The uncertainty of dying and having to spend the rest of the night alone on the couch will probably scare you at first. 

Board games are good for logic. In fact, I saw a lot of people playing board games with Asperger syndrome. Asperger syndrome is a form of autism. Knowing where to go on a map or putting together one of the best strategy proves that it is important to have a notion of how board games work. 

Moreover, playing with someone will tell you a lot about him. For instance, I didn’t truly know my girlfriend until she massacred me in a town because she needed to control it to achieve one of her objectives. She is very driven but it is for the good of her goal.

 It taught me to be more aware of how people are. By the way, they will express themselves or by the way, they behave, I will translate that image as a character or an animal to have a clear representation of who they are. It is not something that is anchored and you can have several animals; mine is the wolf and the butterfly and I have a demon which is the lobster because I can break things easily. 

In situ learning is the best learning. If you ever been in a difficult situation and you have the power of solving it, you know it is in this kind of moment where your decision making is the most important. Those situations are the ones where you will learn the most. Role-playing games are full of them. 

Ps: I come out of thin air.