Thus Spake Zargrabowski/WritingAndReading

>>>According to a lot of research that she's been doing on inference-making and other developmental issues, most adults (65%) don't reach the 'Formal Operations' stage of cognitive development (defined as 'intelligence is demonstrated through the logical use of symbols related to abstract concepts') ... which is what RPGs ARE. Kinda makes you wonder a bit on the whole RPGs For The Masses campaign.<<<

It makes me believe that if gamers want gaming to be more generally popular, they should focus their time and effort working to educate the populace and remodel an educational system that can, at least according to the sources your wife cites, only provoke 35% of the population to develop this level of abstract thinking. Gaming will not teach the ignorant to reason, but it can give them something to do once they get there. There are plenty of youth and adult literacy and mentoring programs out there, not to mention your local PTA or school board.

For what it's worth, I generally structure my prose to be a little challenging. I keep the grammatical acrobatics to a minimum, but I deliberately use idioms and vocabulary the reader might not be familiar with. Aiming for a text that everyone is certain to understand is a disservice to the reader and to society, at least outside of washing machine instructions. People conform to expectations through mechanisms direct and otherwise; if the bulk of the society's creative actors assume mostly everyone in the society is incapable of relating symbols to abstract concepts, I think that will shortly be the case. It certainly will not magically become otherwise.

Geoffrey C. Grabowski\\ Writer / Teacher / Activist\\ raindog@raindog.org\\ Not On The Clock