Acting Like a Dibbun
Suggestions about child development for those RPing dibbuns (or children).
Lots of people out there like to play dibbuns, which is great, children are usually care free and very explorative making for lots of fun times; but it can get tedious when some people think their dibbun characters should be able to explain the process for making wine at two seasons old. Like many things on the MUCK, the easiest way to learn how to role-play what you want to role-play is do a little research on it. Luckily, there is tons and tons of research that has been done on what is called developmental psychology, or the study of how the mind develops over the life. The majority of this research was done in the early 1900s by a guy named Jean Piaget, who divided mental development into four categories. Simple enough that I can outline them here for all you aspiring dibbuns, or just people who want to know how a dibbun should act in case you come by one of those ‘master dibbun swords beasts’.
1. Sensorimotor Stage Human: Birth - 2 years Redwall: Birth – 1 Season
Ahh, the first years of life are, truly, the wonder years; this is basically because just about everything a child does during that time is a new experience. This stage is called the sensory – motor stage because a child mostly uses their sense and physical interaction with the world to understand it; the touch, listen, smell, suck, and look at everything they possibly can, moving it around, exploring their environment. At this stage, a child really doesn’t have a good grasp of the complex ideas like variation, motives, or speaking. This is why most children run around at top speed unless their parents stop them, or yell at the top of their lungs; additionally, these children can’t really figure out other people, why they do anything at all.
2. Pre-operational Stage Human: 2 - 7 years Redwall: 1 – 3.5 Seasons
When the kid hits this stage, they now have a good idea of how things work in the world around them, if you let go of something, it falls, fire burns, running into something hurts, etc; through this they start to have very rudimentary ideas about how other things work, the starting of true, all out, logical thoughts. At this point, most children can talk (and do so with much enthusiasm!) and have a good grasp on symbols (a stop sign tells you to stop your movement), but they can’t think in a straight line to save their lives. This stems as part of their imagination, it is very strong and developed, but they don’t have the ability to see that something they imagine doesn’t make any logical sense. On top of that, they don’t understand how to reverse one of their own ideas, if you tell them to pour water from a vase, in a glass, they wont understand that you can get the same amount of water back by pouring the glass back into the vase. Lastly, children in this stage are about as egocentric as you can get, everything is about them and they are not capable of understanding that other people have feelings and wants besides the ones that they have. While these children might have friends, their love is fickle if their egos are not stroked enough.
3. Concrete Operational Stage Human: 7 - 12 years Redwall: 3.5 – 6 Seasons
This is where quite a few Redwall dibbuns fall under, and it is a very exciting stage of development for teachers since they can finally talk about real things instead of using complex metaphors to get their point across. The Concrete Operational Stage of mental development is characterized mainly by the development of the ability to use concrete logic; in other words, children can talk about real things logically, water stays the same where ever it is poured, we walk through a gas filled environment, etc. They can do math, have a great grasp on what symbols mean, and will pretty much understand most subjects if explained down to they have learned. The characteristic they lack is the ability to process the abstract: they don’t understand things that are not right real like zero being a non-value, morals, philosophy, or spirituality as it is usually meant to be understood. Around the middle of this time period, their egoism starts to vanish and the child can understand more of why other people act the way they do.
4. Formal Operational Stage Human: 12 years – Death Redwall: 6 seasons – Death
At this point in their lives, the child reaches cognitive or mental maturity (albeit not emotional or physical). They have the full ability to reason logically about things real or simply deduced mentally, this is, of course, limited by their range of knowledge or what they know. At this point, the child can understand most philosophy, given enough ground work, examine higher mathematics, understand people’s reasons for acting in history, become fully aware of other people’s needs and feelings around them, and operate as an independent intellectual.
Revision 1.00 by Naco of Redwall Muck
