Role-playing in child psychology is a specific kind of pretend play in which children enact what people might say or do in a given situation ... which, as it happens, the child usually doesn't understand. For example, when a child pretends to be a mother or father, they have little understanding of those roles. But they have seen parents, and know what parents say, and what they seem to be doing ... so a child-as-mother putters around a play house, moving "pots" around on a "stove," telling the children, who are sometimes dolls, to sit at the table because dinner is ready. If a doll begins to cry, this is usually because the "mother" imagines the doll is crying, and tends to the doll accordingly, in the manner that children witness. Because of these mannerisms, when a real baby cries, or one day when it is time to make real food on a real stove, the child has already developed processes that enable them to go through the process. Thus, "pretend" is a learning ritual, one in which children practice to be an adult, helping them to BE adults when the time comes. If a child doesn't get this practice, for a variety of reasons associated with conflict, violence, discouragement, what have you, where a parent shouts at a child to "stop wasting their time with that play," the child grows up to have troubles handling even simple daily tasks.
We can take this argument a step further: in pretending to speak with dolls, invisible friends or others involved in the same role-play, the child gains insight into the perspective of others. For example, when the child puts words into a doll's mouth, there is a "thinking for the doll" going on, in which the child presupposes what the doll might think, or ought to think, or is presumed to be thinking in that situation.
Take the example I used yesterday. The child holds up two soldiers and makes the sounds of each talking. For the first soldier, the child says, "I'm scared Sarge; I don't want to die." The child gives the soldier a voice tone that sounds scared, usually some sort of weedy high-pitched timbre ... because this is the tone that's recognized from films, TV shows, read-aloud children's stories and so on. Then the child speaks for the sargeant, automatically choosing a different tone: a gruff, deep, unforgiving resonance: "You got to fight, kid; you're a soldier. That's what soldiers do."
Look at what's going on. The child has no consciousness of these adjustments; they are perfectly natural to the situation, which the child has learned from a hundred sources, none of which enter the child's mind when picking voices or words for the soldiers to use. The child employs the age difference between the two soldiers automatically; uses the nomenclature easily; and in turn, empathizes with BOTH characters, neither of which represent the child's point of view here. In the child's imagination, there are three persons at play; after all, if asked, the child would certainly deny he or she was either soldier.
Evidence supports the idea that children learn perspectives through play outside of themselves, and that this gives them a better sense of what other people think when speaking to them later in life. Your social intelligence, in other words, is directly related to both these ideas: that you practiced doing things that adults do, and that you also practiced thinking in the way that other adults think.
These processes acquire an understanding of conceptual relationships — the same sort that take place in any human activity, though of course we're going to talk about role-playing games. Our ability to DM depends greatly on what DMs we've watched and are able to learn from, just as children learn how to "cook" or "play doctor." If Matt Mercer is the entirety of our visual observation, we'll emulate his facial expressions, his voice acting, his hand gestures, whatever it is that makes us feel we're being a DM just like Matt Mercer. Children most often do not grow up with one version of a mother or father; they see them in their friend's houses, they see them on TV, they see them at the supermarket and so on. With role-playing games, I was lucky enough to witness half a dozen DMs in my first two years of play; and at least two score by the time I reached my ten-year mark. Moreover, I was lucky enough to find DMs of different ages, sexes and cultural origins, so that I had different outlooks and styles to observe while finding my own style. At first, that style was very reflective of others: if Asif, one DM I had, was cold and aloof while presenting one sort of situation, I would be likewise be cold and aloof. If Shane was creepy and shady when describing a dungeon, I'd be creepy. I learned to be zany, threatening, ponderous ... until like a child not thinking about the process, I fell into inventing voices and characterisations unconsiously while yet being appropriate to the situation. I "pretended" to be a DM and then I was a DM, with no noticeable line between the two.
The more social situations available to the learner, the more opportunities there are to observe, replay and ultimately learn from the situations available. In performing the structure of the game repeatedly, we also continuously reconstruct the game, like the endless reconstruction of conversations and situations that a child invents continuously for a period of years. The child plays with toy soldiers, dolls, firetrucks and sandboxes not once or twice, but for hours a day, for multiple summers and after school, exploring different "disasters" the firetrucks can rush to, that the tiny firefighters can discuss and burn to death in, or different conflicts the dolls might argue through over empty cups of "tea," pursuing all the gossip that can be invented about Mrs. Nesbitt and Mr. Fairfax.
Both running and playing D&D, and role-playing games, is a practice of situated learning and apprenticeship. The more time spent at the practice, the more reconstruction is done, the more learning is done from the reconstruction, the more the apprenticeship is advanced — even when we are apprenticing ourselves without the presence of a master beyond one we create in our imagination. Consider the manner in which crafts are invented at all: one tailor teaches the next, but going back in time, who teaches the first tailor? In the beginning, tailoring is all guesswork, as each generation learns more about how to make cloth, how to cut it, how to sew it and shape it, etcetera. There is no "right way," but there is always a better way, found through methodical experimentation with a view towards the trajectory before every innovator. The basic idea is that practice reveals ideas, which motivate, which inspire more practice, creating further ideas, so that we construct our own pathway of complex learning ... even about things that no one really knows anything about.
This expands the proposal I made with the last post in the metaphorical two words, "digging deeper." We're not really digging, we're not really exploring, we're not really on the edge of something physical ... yet these visualisations help us understand how manufacturing something entirely from our imagination enables us to create concrete, physical products and remembered social events that are held and remembered, thus altering the present and the future as well.
All the magical, mystical, hard to grasp manifestations of human conquest begins with the simple act of picking up a block, calling it a "pan," putting it on top of a larger block we call a "stove," and then proceeding forth from that point. Do not disparage "pretending." It is how everything gets made.
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