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I'm going to outline a few scenarios that do not absolutely  require instruction, but good instruction makes these situations far more worthwhile: Learning Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for the first (or first in a long while) time. Not just learning about disciplines like chemistry, physics, and statistics as a base for understanding natural phenomena, but directly applying them. Learning a creative art-making skill such as sketching with charcoal or learning how to do 3D modelling. Interlocking Morasses D&D is a morass of systems that interact with one another in order to develop a coherent story from the combination of three things: the motivations of its players (including the Dungeon Master), the statistics and attributes of its characters, and the resolution of conflict through randomness via dice rolling. Clearly they influence each other outside of the probability space where dice determine the outcome, if you don't attack the guard you won'...

I was recently reading this article by Rock Paper Shotgun 's contributor Sin Vega. I was suddenly reminded of the numerous struggles I've had when trying to convey any sense of history or meaningful presence as a Game Master in various tabletop role-playing games. Surely video games have an advantage in this arena as they offer a real physical place in relation to your character(s), which is simply impossible to maintain beyond small arenas in the tabletop realm. However, the elegance and effectiveness of purely using imagination to fill in the holes you didn't even know were present in a setting is pretty spectacular. A person... ...in a place. It's totally acceptable if a game has idiosyncrasies all over the place, but hits just enough marks to convince your brain that its setting is a real enough place. Fallout 4 is a game full of "jank" on multiple levels. In terms of believability, the skeletons that litter its world only make s...