I love it when Terri Gross interviews Stephen Colbert on Fresh Air. It’s the only time I ever hear him drop the character, who is so effective I sometimes find myself hating him (not because he’s conservative, but because he’s “aggressively stupid” as Colbert the actor puts it). With John Stewart it’s much easier to know how to feel, because John is playing an exaggerated version of himself, which is essentially what I do when I’m in the classroom, or on the show. It’s me, just turned up to 11.

This particular interview was relevant for us because Colbert was describing the process of getting a superPAC, of getting permission to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising, in very scientific terms. He had no idea what would happen if he did this, so he did it, just to find out what would happen, how the process worked, what he could legally get away with.  Much like the way my friends approach role-playing games -- some for the narrative possibilities, but many of them just to find out how to beat this new system, how to engineer the most dominant set of combat statistics.