Video – Transformative RPGS

Hi everyone, and welcome to this video about transformative role-playing games. We are going to start out by talking a bit about transformation. So what is transformation? Well, the way we view it, transformation is a prolonged and sustained state of change, and it is a process, or a series of processes, that leads to growth. There are lots of types of Transformations, and games can be transformative in ways we consider positive and in ways that we don’t. We really are interested in games that foster these kinds of progressive values and states of being. Let’s talk a bit about transformation and role-playing games. As I said, we see transformation as a prolonged and sustained state of change. It is a shift in one state of consciousness that has lasting after-effects: it remains prolonged and sustained long after the game has concluded. This doesn’t mean that one shifts consciousness into a character and then doesn’t leave that character, it means that this shift in consciousness has somehow transformed the way we view things when we come back out of the game. This could be things like how the player views themselves – their identity, it could be how the player views reality – that would be their paradigm, how the player views others and interacts with them – so their relationships, how the player views society, including its structure and their place within those structures and the roles of others within it, and finally, how the players view cultures, subcultures, and countercultural movements. This shift can help players to build towards greater awareness peace and Justice. As Jonaya Kemper put it: “Role-playing games allow us to weird the self, consciously transmuting our identities through intentional play”. And this intentionality that we are talking about is also called steering. So sometimes these effects that we are talking about here are more accidental, and sometimes we can actually steer towards them consciously in play. So we are consciously trying to learn and develop through steering our play.

Role-playing games hold the potential to provide a vehicle for change-processes to occur for all participants, and, this includes also designers and Facilitators. What is a transformative experience and what do we mean when we say vehicle for change-processes? Well, any activity, including leisure role-playing games, can be educational or therapeutic in some way, often accidentally or as a side effect of participation. Some participants may be primed for transformation based on what is happening in their lives and then the role-playing experience acts as a catalyst. In this case, the game itself is not what is causing the change but it sort of activates processes that were already there but dormant and they just needed a little push. So just like you can learn something from, I don’t know, seeing a carrot, that doesn’t mean seeing a carrot is a learning experience in itself. We prefer the term transformative here as a broad term, like we said, for long-term change also after a game. Edu-larp scholar Michal Mochocki, he said: “I’d argue larp doesn’t transform people – it opens for transformation. A well-designed game can be a great beginning, but no more than a beginning. It has to be followed either with more role-plays in order to make it a repeated, not single, experience – or with equally well-designed reflective and creative activities.” And this is what we mean with a vehicle for change. You can’t transfer knowledge into someone else, but you can design a learning experience that opens up for learning. And you can design a larp that holds space and open up for change. And then this process of reflection and creation afterwards is part of what keeps that spark of transformation going which can then lead to long-term change. Part of the goal of transformative game design is figuring out how to more intentionally create these spaces for transformative experiences. Just like with designing education and trying to create spaces for learning to happen.

There are some different types of transformative role-playing games and we are now going to talk about those. We further distinguish between leisure, educational, and therapeutic role-playing games. Leisure role-playing games are designed and played for a variety of reasons, mostly personal and individualized, even if the game has a specific goal in mind. It’s voluntary in one’s free time. Then we have educational role-playing games. They are designed and played with explicit and or implicit educational goals in mind. They may be voluntary, but they are often mandatory, for example, being run in a classroom during school time. The third one is therapeutic role-playing games. These are designed and played with explicit therapeutic goals in mind. They are facilitated with emotional support from a mental health paraprofessional or professional, so that could be a coach, a therapist, a social worker, a mental health first aid worker, a community healer, etc. So it’s people that have some sort of background in helping people through processes like these. Therapeutic role-playing games may be voluntary, but they can also sometimes be mandatory. For example, they might be required by parents or the court system. There may be crossover between these types of games. For example, a leisure larp having onsite support from a psychotherapist, a therapeutic larp that is also guiding participants to learn social skills and emotional intelligence through practice, etc.

Let’s look a bit closer as these three categories. Let’s start out with leisure. Leisure is often distinguished from work as an activity a person does in their spare time and does not get paid to do. Leisure is also often associated with playfulness and seen as a counterpoint to work. However, some leisure activities are associated with states of flow, so an energised hyperfocus on a particular action that is very challenging and requires skill. For example, in one’s leisure time, one might be learning to play the violin, and that is a very difficult hobby to have, but it is still considered a leisure activity. In addition, many role-players engage in labor in order to make games happens, and this is both designers, facilitators, and players. The types of labor we are talking about here can be physical, emotional, or creative, and include things like: doing set design, costuming, cooking, helping players process emotions, reading up on subjects their characters should know a lot about, creating lore, designing special scenes such as in-game rituals, etc, etc. Some people even perform their daily jobs in role-playing games, such as real life teachers that are instructing fictional students at a wizard school. So what we can see is leisure versus work quickly becomes a bit muddled here. What then distinguishes leisure role-playing games from professional ones? Well, that varies, but in general we can look at a few things. When we look at goals for leisure games participants engage in their free time and they have various reasons for doing so. The goals can range from entertainment to social connection, or to self-actualization. These goals do not always over overlap. Some players insist that games are just “fun”, or “entertainment”, or “escapism”, kind of downplaying their meaning, while other players find profound meaning in these experiences and intentionally use them for personal and social development. Even players only intending to experience “fun” often engage in learning and practice skills as necessary parts of the structure of the games. This could include learning how to sew to be able to make a costume for your character. We can also look at settings for leisure games. They are often played in non-professional spaces. It could be homes, hotels, hotel conference rooms, rented vacation locations such as a castle. When it comes to social roles, leisure games are often played as one’s “off-work” leisure identity rather than as part of the responsibilities as a professional. So the players aren’t necessarily invoking their responsibilities that they have as a professional. If we take the example with teachers playing teachers at a wizard school, that we mentioned earlier, some of those teachers enjoy playing bad teachers in the larp, because this is somehow cathartic or fun for them. However, many of the benefits of role-playing in a professional context are often experienced in leisure ones. There are lots and lots of benefits of role-playing games but we will just look at a few today. And since we talked about leisure I want to mention professional a bit more than we touched upon it. So professional, or applied, role-playing games take elements from leisure activities and apply them to specific settings. Often work with practicing specific skills through experiential learning and behavior rehearsal. Applied role-playing games focus on particular educational, therapeutic, professional, or wellbeing goals. These goals may focus on one or more of the following levels: personal – one’s individual experience, the relational – one’s connection with other people, structural – how one connects to the structures of society, or cultural. Here are some examples of settings where role-playing activities already take place: professional training, educational interventions, crisis management, health care, therapeutic interventions, personal development, community outreach. Here I want to share an example about graduate scholar students from George Mason’s University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. They role-play peacebuilders providing aid to civilians during a Civil War in a scenario designed by the Forage Center. That is a particularly interesting scenario because the students may have thought that they were there to, for example, provide food for civilians, and then instead they end up doing CPR and first aid because this is a crisis situation. Let’s go into some of these parts. So, the next part. We talked about leisure and now we’re going moving on to educational role-playing games which is a type of professional role-playing game. These are games that are specifically designed for educational purposes. Here we will not have as much focus on tabletop role-playing games, we will mainly focus on edu-larps. The term “edu-larp” is used to describe many different live action role-playing activities for students of all ages. Here are some examples: a larp by Center “POST” that is designed to teach adults about the experiences of Belarusians during the World War II; a peace demonstration larp for a history class held at Ãsterskov Efterskole, that is one of two Danish schools that is taught almost entirely through edu-larp. These two schools are a type of boarding school and they both use larp as their main modality for education; we also have a science fiction game by LajvVerkstaden in Sweden, designed to help students practice English; We have a role-playing game to help young adults design their careers called SingaLand in Singapore and IdaLand in the US; and we also have a collection of five small larp scenarios to help researchers develop skills in interdisciplinary collaboration created for CIRCUS, that is the Center for Integrated Research on Culture and Society at Uppsala University. Using role-playing games in education can take many forms: You can start by playing an existing role-playing game in an educational setting without any adaptation. So that specific game may not have been designed to be an edu-larp but it’s being brought into this educational setting. And even if the game itself isn’t changed, there are these framing activities around it that make it more educational. It could, for example, be prompting students to think about specific content during the game. But we will talk a bit more about these framing activities a bit later; You could also adapt an existing role-playing game to fit into new educational structures and curricular learning objectives. So you take an existing game and then you make some small changes to the game design so it works better with your class’s goal; You could also design a new role-playing game to target specific learning objectives. One example of this is the edu-larps in the Stars curriculum. Thay are 16 larps in German schools for various subjects. For example, they had a game in social science called “Europe, the band”, that was for ages 14 plus about democracy, European history, and conflict solving. They have a game in physics called “Time agents” for ages 10 to 14 about gravity and recoil. They also have a game about geography, “The party”, ages 14+, it focuses on argumentation strategies and conflict solving. So as you can see, this is not only a large range of classes, but they are also learning multiple things simultaneously. And given the right design, role-playing games can be adapted to teach virtually any subject, training multiple skills at once. But good to know is that edu-larp is good for putting knowledge into a context, but when it comes to learning new fact-based information, that is better done before or after the game rather than during the game. Because during the game, the participants are often focused on taking decisions or having a discussion. So the method can be used to teach virtually any subject, but it’s not as strong in all types of content, just like any other method. One way of organising skills that can be learned through role-playing is through the three categories: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. These three categories overlap quite a bit and they are also, to a certain extent, artificial, but we find that they can be helpful to make sense of this. To give you a sense of some of the skills that can be trained in edu-larp we will here give you some examples. So if we look at the cognitive skills. Here we find things like: engagement, motivation and self-determination, creativity and imagination, critical thinking, decision making skills, complex problem solving, self-reflection, and perspective taking. If we then look at the affective skills we find things like: agency/empowerment, empathy, personal development, emotional regulation, coping and adaptive skills, self-esteem and self-confidence, to get a sense of accomplishment, and feelings of belonging. And then, finally, we have the behavioral skills. So here we find: pro-social behaviors and social skills, communication, balancing self-interest with community responsibility, debate/persuasion, conflict management or conflict resolution or conflict transformation, practicing democratic skills, collaboration and cooperation, and self-advocacy. Now we talked about educational games, so let’s look a bit at therapeutic role-playing games. A therapeutic view of role-play games acknowledges the self as psychodynamic, so composed of parts or configurations of self. This can be a bit challenging for some people to consider, the idea that the role-playing character is actually a part of themselves. And certainly, we absorb things from our environment, and our characters can kind of be imbued with those things, such as pop culture or people we know. But we can only portray a character with our own body and based on what we know and parts of ourselves. So through play we can have parts of ourselves emerge that we usually don’t show or even are fully aware of. We frame therapeutic role playing as: A transformational container. So it’s something that can hold a transformational process; It’s a secure enough holding environment. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it needs to feel secure enough to not break; A space of playful experimentation where authentic expressions of self can emerge; And it’s held by professionals or paraprofessionals who help participants process the experience. So it’s going further than you would in a lot of leisure games or even educational games. There is that expectation, and often agreement, of processing the experience after, during, and/or before. There is a goal to have some sort of emotional growth as a result. Therapeutic role-playing games are grouped according to the goals of the client and the therapist, including: The types of activities expected to take place. That could be the ratio of playfulness to processing time, the degree to which therapeutic modalities will be introduced in play or supplement it, etc. So is the play itself the goal, or is it about getting to a certain spot where you can introduce a therapeutic modality? Maybe playing to get a to a heightened state of emotion, to then pause and try to practice mindfulness before moving on instead of just getting caught up in that emotion; It’s also the types of support agreed upon between the therapist and the client. So the amount of processing between therapist and client that will occur before, during, or after the game. And it’s sometimes established by a legal contract and/or an ethical code. Here are some types of therapeutic role-playing games. There are a lot of crossovers between these and many therapist and therapist groups engage in all three of them. The first one is centered around therapy itself. These are games designed to support therapeutic goals, such as trauma processing and other mental health challenges. They may be run by the therapist themselves, or in collaboration with the client’s therapist. These games have high expectations of emotional processing before, during, or after. One example would be the Bodhana Group, a non-profit in the U.S. that has run interventions for therapeutic treatment of sexual abuse, and trauma from grief, etc. They are working directly with people from these backgrounds and, in some cases, with agreement between the client and the therapist. They are using the fiction to process these things, which could be things like helping children move through loss through these narrative structures. The second group is centered around social skills. These are games designed to support social development goals, such as learning how to make friends, communication skills, conflict resolution, and other forms of behavior rehearsals. They may be contracted from an outside group as an adjunct to therapy or be run by a therapist. Here we have medium expectations of emotional processing before, during, and/or after. So this could mean that you after a session talk and get feedback about how a player presented themselves in-game through their character, and a conversation about how other people responded to that. But it doesn’t necessarily take up a large amount of time. An example here would be Game to Grow, a non-profit in the U.S. run by trained therapists that often focus on social skills within groups, including working a lot with neurodiverse populations. They have their own role-playing system called “Critical Core” that guides players to: build social confidence, communication and collaboration skills; and to develop frustration tolerance, emotional tolerance, and caring for others. The third group is centered around recreation. And these are games designed with an emphasis on the importance of the activity itself as therapeutic rather than specific goals to achieve or skills to learn, so it’s closer to recreational therapy. Here there are low to no expectations of emotional processing before, during, and/or after. Because the activity itself is the point. One example would be RPG Therapeutics, a U.S. company that works with clients with a variety of disabilities and psychological challenges (they also run the other two types of therapeutic games that we just mentioned). For example, they are running larps for children with muscular dystrophy to improve physical and psychological well-being, and they are also traveling to various sites with a wheelchair-accessible trailer to run tabletop games for disabled children, etc. So those were our three types of games. Now let’s talk about some things that are important in relation to transformative role-playing games. The first thing you need to think about is to have a clear goal and a desired impact. So all designed components of the game should consider the desired impact or goal, and components that run counter to the desired impact or goal should be removed or reframed. The impacts will likely extend beyond your initial expectations or goals, you need to embrace the chaotic nature of the form. Then I want to talk a bit about framing that we mentioned before. Role-playing games have these three phases: we have the before – which could be things like workshops, briefings, lectures, costuming, different ways to prepare for the game; Then you have the game itself, that is during – it’s an in between phase where social identities within a community can shift; and then, after, we have derolling, debriefing, processing, and integrational practices. The before and after creates a frame around the game itself. Sometimes we have some of this also during by taking pause, pausing the game and then running things there. Let’s look at a few of these framing exercises. First, I want to mention safety. This is about establishing and maintaining psychological safety. This is super important in all three stages. Role-playing games have established methods for this including: safety mechanics, consent discussions, postgame debriefing, etc, So safety goes over all these three different parts. Then we have workshops. In a workshop all activities should prepare the participants for a play with the transformative impacts in mind through practice. So a workshop is not about giving someone a brief and just briefing about information. You can have briefs also, but that is not the same as a workshop where you actually practice what you’re doing. This could be: character creation, or building relations between characters, learning names, or practicing the safety techniques. Now, let’s look a bit about the parts that we often do after the game. The first is derolling. This is about stepping out of character and the game. Here, having a clear transition can be very helpful, this could be doing a round where everyone get to say “I was [their character’s name]” and then “I am [your ordinary name]”. So “I was Leona, I am now Josefin”. You can also talk about the experience in third person. So instead of saying “I walked in there and I picked up the rock”, you would instead say “Leona walked in there and then she picked up the rock”.

Now let’s talk a bit about debriefing. This allows players to process the experience, and it is crucial for reinforcing educational goals – the game itself is not enough! Debriefs can be structured, through facilitation, or unstructured. But structured is recommended to give everyone a chance to speak and help them process.

A debrief should consider the following three parts: emotional processing – that is processing the emotional experience, sometimes according to goals. It’s common in leisure and therapeutic settings; intellectual processing – that is processing according to general intellectual concepts or themes related to play. We find it very often in both leisure, therapeutic, and also educational settings; and finally, educational processing – this is processing according to specific learning objectives. And this is mainly relevant for educational settings. Let’s move on to integration practices. Lasting change requires integration of takeaways into your daily life, and not just temporary engagement. There are many different forms of integrations, and how to work with this, and to help this transfer to happen. We want to give you some examples here: we have creative expressions – that could be things like journaling, doing studio art or performance art, working with game design, fiction writing, or storytelling; we also have intellectual analysis – these are things like contextualisation, researching, reframing experiences, documentation, theorizing, applying existing theoretical lenses, reflection, and distilling takeaways; we then have emotional processing – and here, of course, the debriefing is part, we can also have individual or group therapy, you can work with validating one’s own experiences, identifying and acknowledging needs/desires and fears, you can distancing your identity from undesirable traits or behaviours that are explored in character, or you can work with incorporating personality traits and behaviors; Then we have interpersonal processing. This is something you do by connecting with co-players or reestablishing pre-social dynamics and connections, negotiating relationship dynamics, sharing your role-playing game experiences with others, etc.; And finally we have community building. This could be networking, collaborating on projects, sharing resources and knowledge, establishing safer spaces, and creating implicit and explicit social contracts. Regardless of the type of transformative role-playing game, the most important parts for a successful transformative process are reflection and processing. Goal setting can also be helpful, but keep in mind that role-playing games are unpredictable in their impacts as a result of the emergent play. So even if you design a game with a specific goal in mind, players might take it and just run with it in another direction. And sometimes this is a good thing because players can focus on things that are important to them, and other times, you might need to steer the game back to get back on track. It’s also very important with intentionality at all stages, in both design, implementation, and play, and this can help groups steer towards transformative impacts. Then we also have the perception of safety that is very important to establish and maintain in role playing games communities. Because safety allows players to lower their vigilance and surrender more deeply to playfulness as a central part of the transformative process. If you are not feeling safe it’s very hard to focus on anything else and learn or explore. But if you feel safe, you can fully take part and opt-in. Safety necessitates enthusiastic consent, so you need to have some kind of ability to opt-in or -out, as well as calibration and other forms of negotiations and self-advocacy. So having ways of opting in or out of the game, or parts of the game, and having ways to negotiate for one’s needs. Role-playing games also add these extra affordances that are very important. And these terms they come from role playing theory. The first one is Alibi. Alibi is permission to behave in ways that might otherwise feel risky or socially unacceptable Alibi allows participants to feel more confident taking risks and even failing as part of the learning process. This is the idea that we can do something because it was our character and not us, or because it was “just a game”. And even if we are the character actually doing the action, it still can feel more safe because we put this layer on it. The social contract that we have other rules in play here give this alibi. This social contract is sometimes also talked about and called the “magic circle”. Inside the circle there are other rules at play then you would have outside of it. This is something you also see in relation to, for example, to a carnival, or a hen- or a stag-party, where you all of a sudden can do things you wouldn’t normally do, you get an alibi. You can see there is someone walking downtown doing something strange and you’re like “what is going on?”, and then you see it says “I’m getting married”, and you’re like “Oh, okay”, and that’s fine all of a sudden. Then I want to mention bleed. Bleed is the spillover from the player to the character and vice versa of emotions, thought processes, physical states, relationships, personality traits, etc. So if I’m coming to a role-playing game being a bit upset because I had a fight at work, then there is a chance that my character will be more easily irritated than usual. So my feelings as a player is bleeding over into the character. Or if I played best friends with someone that I don’t really know, but during the game we are best friends. Then I might come out of the game feeling a connection to that person even though we don’t really know each other, and this might lead to us being friends outside of the game. Then a relationship from the character has bled out of the game to the player. Bleed can be very intentional, but it can also be something that happens without us aiming for it. We don’t always know why it is happening or when it will happen, but we can try to steer towards it, and we can use it when it happens to learn from it and bring those takeaways with us. Now I want to talk a bit about how to envision role-play as a transformative container. And for this we have a lovely picture. So if we start at the left side, you will see the self, or your daily identity. And then you have goals, you have agreements, you need transparency, consent, safety structures, and community support. And all of these things helps with creating the alibi, the social contract that we are setting up. We have this social contract, this magic circle that I mentioned, that we step into, and we get an alibi. And here we might have bleed-in. We might bleed in things, we might bring in intention, we have playfulness, into the alter ego or the character. And then we can get bleed out, we can get transfer from the character alter ego out to the self, into the daily identity, back out again. So important is that one’s identity can shift, our sense of self can shift, as a sense of these transformational experiences. And to help support these you want to have goals, you want to do processing and reflection, and you want to take meaningful action on your goals. It’s not enough to just have had an interesting experience, you need to also move forward and do something with it. And this is supported then by the safety structures and the community support. So, now we have covered the whole transformational container. Let’s finish up with a short summary. For us transformation is a prolonged and sustained state of change, and a process, or series of processes, that lead to growth. We have three types of transformative games that all have specific desired impacts: we have leisure, and they have transformative impact; we have therapy, or therapeutic games, and they have a therapeutic goal; and then we have educational games, and they have learning objectives. The key to success for any type of transformative process are reflection and processing, intentionality at all stages, and safety. Here are our references. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed it.