Video – Facilitating ROCKET Educational RPGs

Hello and welcome to the ROCKET project from Erasmus+. My name is Sarah Lynne Bowman and today we will be talking about facilitating ROCKET educational role-playing games.

So what is role-playing game facilitation? Some people get facilitation and design confused. Design is the stage before the game is run. So conceptualizing certain scenarios, for example, in which conflict occurs. Whereas facilitation occurs when the game is run by an organizer during run time. In particular, it refers to player facing facilitation rather than, for example, logistics. So one person might book the room, but that’s not necessarily the person who’s running the scenario for the students. In ROCKET, the teachers running the critical virtual exchange will likely be the facilitators.
However, sometimes we may have special guest stars join us, usually other facilitators that are experienced, for example, transformative game design students from Uppsala University’s master’s program sometimes will come and join us.

So what is the difference between teaching and role-playing game facilitation? Well, as we know, sometimes we facilitate activities in teaching scenarios as well, such as workshops. There is quite an overlap in skills between teaching and role-playing game facilitation. For example, we might present key subject matter. We might engage in listening. We might guide group work.

We might experience empathy or try to elicit empathy in our students. We might ask reflective questions, trying to encourage students to think more deeply about a topic. We might encourage participation, and one of the reasons that we believe in role-playing games as a method is that it’s very participatory. We might want to teach key skills that are related to the curriculum.

So you might teach these in more traditional ways or in more experimental and experiential ways like role-playing. And oftentimes we debrief after a learning exercise, meaning we have a conversation about the takeaways that the students had from the exercise.

However, facilitating ROCKET RPGs also involves other skill sets. For example, as facilitators, we often model the role-playing for the participants before they have to do it. The reason that we do this is so they can see us, hopefully rather relaxed and feeling hopefully competent and confident playing. In order for them to feel more competent and confident playing.

So this requires some practice. It may be difficult to do the first time that you try, and so I recommend playtesting the scenarios with your facilitation group before you actually bring them to the students. Feeling into a scene. This is sort of an intuitive skill that it’s very difficult to train. For example, helping players get into character using certain techniques.

You might ask specific questions using the Hot Seat technique, which we’ll describe in a moment, that help them understand their character more deeply. You might need to activate this sense in order to know when to use the right meta technique. For example, knowing when to call for a Monologue to hear a character’s inner thoughts, or knowing when to end the scene by calling the Last Line.

And we’ll describe these in a moment. Another technique that can sometimes be challenging is learning how to cut at the height of drama, so that there’s enough scene that has been played out that the players have a sense of what these characters think and feel and have experienced that in their body, but they ideally have not actually resolved the situation.

Learning how to distinguish between character distress and player distress. This is not always possible if somebody is very heavily immersed in the scene. It may be very difficult to tell the difference between the player and the character, but these are the kinds of things that you can actually train the more that you facilitate role-playing games and knowing when to use safety techniques as needed, we do have a separate video on safety techniques that explains what they’re for and the ones that we use in ROCKET scenarios.

But part of this intuitive felt sense is knowing when it might be important to use the safety technique, and also when maybe the scene will be fine without it.

In fact, some facilitation guidance and role-playing games might actually go against other teaching practices that you might have. For example, sometimes we cut people off in the middle of a scene to let another person in, for example, saying Pause – Monologue to the other person. That would be incredibly rude to do in class. But sometimes it is necessary.

Whereas in a role-playing session, we will tell the participants ahead of time that we will do this so that they can expect that that will happen. Encouraging the players to escalate conflict in the scene. This might feel quite counterintuitive. Normally in the classroom, we want to de-escalate conflict. But in this particular case, we want the conflict to be heightened enough that they can actually feel what’s happening for their characters.

We can give you some guidance on how this works, but ultimately, practice makes competent. You’re not going to learn how to facilitate role-playing from a video. It’s something that you actually have to experience to become competent at. Just as there’s no such thing as perfection in teaching. There’s no such thing as perfection and role-playing game facilitation, although there are people that are quite skilled at it and others who are still learning.

Just as we want our students to engage in embodied practice, we recommend that you also practice in order to get more competent in these skills.
ROCKET has several meta techniques you will use to guide the play. Sometimes meta techniques are called mechanics, so you might also hear that word. A meta technique is directed at the player, not the character. So it’s a way for us to have meta communication that the character doesn’t hear but the player hears. So, for example, I might want to communicate something to the player, that does not affect the scene per se, or that maybe will affect the scene, but the character doesn’t hear. I might say, Off-game —

Just as a reminder, we agreed not to play on death in the same way. And then you play the scene again.
So these different techniques that I’m going to tell you about, are used to communicate from player to player or facilitator to player, not from character to character. Some of these techniques are geared towards psychological safety. For example, the use of the X-Card, which is a way to remove certain content from play. For example, X-card — death, or the term Softer, which is a way to kind of decrease the intensity of a scene by saying Softer or as I just demonstrated, there’s the Pause and you can even do a Pause Check-in, checking in to see if the other players are okay.

Again, these are covered in the safety video, but we thought we might mention them here. Others of these techniques, these meta techniques focus on the narrative. So they’re methods for helping the player connect with their character and with the fiction. So that is what we will explore in the rest of this video. One technique is to have them choose separate names and pronouns, and also to choose their character, which can be quite powerful.

So allowing them, for example, if we have three characters in the scene — Student A, Student B, and Student C — asking them if they want to play Student A or another character in the scene. When they choose names and pronouns, you can ask them to put in the chat, which will be available to you if you’re playing online, for example, in a critical virtual exchange.

Or maybe you write them down if you’re playing in-person. But this helps the players differentiate themselves from the character by having what we call alibi. So even having just names that are different can provide a sense that, it wasn’t me, it was my character. And that can help players feel more safe engaging. There’s also the Hot Seat.

So this technique involves asking the player questions before the scene begins that they will then answer as their character. So in ROCKET, these questions refer to how their character relates to the current conflict. For example, we cover positions, interests, feelings, and needs, so we cover what the character wants, why they want it, the feelings that are attached, and the needs that are underlying what that want. And how potentially we might get those needs met is something that we can debrief around, but usually will not happen during this scenario.

Otherwise we resolve the conflict too quickly. We also practice conflict styles, so we practice, different ways to engage in conflict. For example, a competing style versus an avoiding style so that they can get a felt sense in their body of what that feels like and also realize that they have a range of possibilities. And we also ask them to practice using I-Statements to each other and ask them to reflect on how it felt to actually receive an I-Statement from another person, and also how it felt to use the I-Statement.
So this feeling is not just, sort of ephemeral, it’s also in the body. So asking them to locate in their body what it felt like. If they say it felt good to hear the I- statement, Where did to that happen in the body and what does it feel like? So maybe it was a warm — felt like a warm hug on the heart or something like that.

So learning how to have a sense of their embodied experience, not just intellectual experience. During the Hot Seat, the player answers the character’s, thoughts when you provide these questions. So they are learning to practice getting into character. And this may seem really scary at first, but actually they come up with things super fast, and can get into character quite quickly once they feel comfortable enough to try.

And I find the Hot Seat to be a very reliable tool for this. So the scene hasn’t started yet. They’re answering the questions as their character, and we are all learning about their character as they move on. The other characters do not hear these replies. Only the players do, so it might inform their play. So for example, if I say, Oh, I’m really stressed out about this situation because I have caring responsibilities at home for my siblings.

And then somebody in the scene maybe uses that information by saying, It’s not like you have other responsibilities, right? Which helps escalate the drama because the player knows very well that the character has other responsibilities, but the character doesn’t.

In ROCKET scenarios, we start with a start phrase. So the facilitator very briefly plays an extra character in the scene, and then they say a start phrase, then leave the scene right away. And this helps to let the players know how to start. Sometimes it can be super awkward and people don’t know who should speak first. So having that start phrase can help them feel a little bit more comfortable.
So for example, if you have a scene with the department head, the administrative assistant might say, The department head will see you now and gesture towards their office, in which case the scene is taking place without the administrative assistant present.
There’s also the Monologue technique. So when a scene has started, the facilitator can call for a monologue. This technique involves the character revealing their inner thoughts. So this is very similar to the Hot Seat, but it happens in the middle of the scene. They reveal what the character is thinking in the moment the players can hear, but the characters do not.
Again, this can be a very helpful technique when inviting quiet players to participate in the scene. Some players may feel very introverted, and this can invite them to give them space to actually share, which might be more challenging when there’s two very dominant personalities in the scene.

Escalate. So again, this can feel a little strange to do in a classroom setting, but the facilitator can ask players to escalate the intensity of the conflict and remind them not to resolve it too quickly. If they’re being too polite or coming to solutions too quickly, this is a good technique, so you can say, Pause — escalate, and then play the scene again.

Or continue playing the scene. There’s also Last Line. So this is a way to signal that the end of the scene is coming. So the facilitator can ask one character to have the last word in the scene, signaling to everyone that we’re wrapping up. Again, similar to Monologue, it might be good to let the person who hasn’t spoken as much have the last word, and it could be super funny or profound.

Or it could just be, I’ll see you later. It’s up to them what they want to come up with. And then there’s the word Cut, which sometimes can be Scene, and this indicates that the scene is over. When facilitating in ROCKET, it’s very important to jump straight to the debriefing questions immediately, rather than going into a lot of description of different things you noticed in the scene that might not be related to the player experience as the character.

We can have plenty of time later to write journals about that or even talk in the big group sometimes. But, we want to capture the felt experience right afterwards. So cutting when the intensity is high and then immediately asking “How did it feel as your character to experience this?” And that way the player can still have a sense of their character, and even though they’re technically themselves, they still are having this sort of bleed effect, the spillover between the character and the player.
That can be very informative.

Here are some citations for you, and thank you very much.