Video – Safety in Educational RPGs

Hello and welcome to Erasmus+ ROCKET project. Today I will be talking about safety and educational role-playing games. My name is Sarah Lynne Bowman from Uppsala University. So what is psychological safety and role-playing games? Psychological safety is a felt sense that one can surrender into the experience without judgment from others. Now, when we say surrender, this doesn’t mean that somebody gives up their willpower or they’re in some way being tricked, but it does mean that they feel comfortable enough to lower their vigilance with other people.

This is due to a belief, hopefully, that [our] facilitators and co-players will care for us if difficult emotions emerge. So this is actually quite important to role-playing games. You will likely have students that maybe don’t feel super safe in the classroom for various reasons. Maybe it’s because of a marginalization that they have, or maybe they’re very shy to speak in public or to try new things.
These are all quite normal things. And, we can create conditions where they feel more safe to be able to engage. One of those ways, for example, we talked about in a previous video on facilitation — modeling role-playing for them. So if they see the facilitators doing it, maybe they might feel more comfortable trying it themselves.
Okay. So it’s important to understand that safety is a perception, not a fact. Risk is inherent to any activity. And completely safe spaces do not exist. Anything can happen basically in a situation. However, we can make them safer, meaning we can have safety structures, we can have ways to communicate with each other. And we can establish that we will care for each other in this space.

Also, enacting conflicts, even very brief ones, can pose inherent risks, especially when dealing with content related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as we do in ROCKET. Issues of power. There are definitely power dynamics within these scenarios. And so this kind of thing can activate people in ways that go beyond the scenario. So a little bit of emotion is good, but if they’re unable to engage, that might make them feel unsafe.

So our goal is to create what are called zones of acceptable risk within learning contexts. So the idea being that we understand that there will always be some risk and we find that to be acceptable as a group. So safety must not always be established, but also maintained, meaning that if a rupture occurs, then in the container of the classroom and of play, we can not only establish safety in the beginning, but also reestablish it later and maintain it throughout the game.

Meaning that we should always address such issues meaningfully as facilitators rather than sweeping them under the rug or minimizing them. There are various ways to do this. Sometimes it can be challenging as a facilitator to attend to someone’s emotional needs while also, trying to run a scene, for example. In which case you might want to have a mental health professional from your university join who’s always available in a breakout room to talk to somebody if they need it.
Or you might want to have, one of your facilitators stay in the in the main room in case somebody needs to talk, for example. One of the major things that is tricky with educational role-playing games is the difference between mandatory versus voluntary engagement. So role-playing games as learning experiences can be run in both mandatory and voluntary settings.

For example, you might go to a museum or take part in an after school activity. You might go to a community center. And these spaces are more voluntary, meaning that the students usually have signed up for that experience, or maybe their parents have signed them up, in which case it’s a little less voluntary, but it’s still something that happens in their free time, and likely there is a certain degree of existing buy-in for the people who have arrived, meaning that this isn’t a mandatory part of their normal classroom activity.

Especially in primary and secondary education, classrooms are often considered mandatory. In fact, in some places, there may be consequences for not having students in the class. For truancy, for example. In which case, all of our activities in those types of classrooms are mandatory, including role-playing. However, there are ways to make role-playing games, a little bit less coercive, I guess, is one way of putting it, or pressuring, and we’ll talk about those in a moment.
But, it is sort of the way of things that often educational experiences are considered mandatory even when the activity is optional. Students may feel pressure to take part. So, sometimes there’s pressure from the teacher, there’s a power dynamic there. Sometimes it’s pressure from other students. And some pressure is inherent to all learning activities. Learning itself is very difficult.

It consumes energy and we have natural resistances to learning. For example, if we’re learning something that might challenge our worldview in some way or get us to think about uncomfortable things like conflict situations, we might have a resistance to it. So, one of the reasons we try to establish safety, even in mandatory settings, is to try to help people feel a little bit more agency of their experience.
In ROCKET, we have an opt-out mechanic, meaning that players can opt-out at any time by saying the words Opt-out. This is sometimes called The Door is Always Open, meaning you can leave whenever you want to, but please come back and let us know later, if possible, that you’re okay. This might not be possible in some classroom settings.

For example, if you’re working with younger people and they’re not allowed to roam the halls freely, then you can’t really say The Door is Always Open. So maybe there’s another space that they can be, for example, the library or a corner of the classroom where they’re not going to be disruptive to the activity. When using the term Opt-out, players are not required to disclose why.

So they don’t have to explain themselves. They can just say, Opt-out. In some situations, they can sit quietly and watch. And that can actually be quite, potent, like having an observational experience. So, for example, in some cases you might have a scenario of three characters, but you have five players in a group because you don’t have enough facilitators to have three-person groups.
In those cases, somebody might opt-out, but then they can be an observer. And if they don’t disrupt the scene and usually it can be quite illuminating to watch other people role-playing as well. That being said, we do recommend, if possible, giving everybody the opportunity to have the embodied play. Sometimes it’s not always possible, for logistical reasons, but also potentially for safety reasons.

However, if the individual is quite disruptive, it may be better to not have them observing.

Because that might negatively impact the activity for others.

So tips for creating more consensual mandatory learning environments. Use your best judgment when considering how to manage these opt-out experiences in the classroom. For example, consider whether or not you’re breaking any laws by permitting players to leave. Which may be the case. Like I said, providing another space for players to go can be helpful. In a virtual exchange setting where we’re online,
it could be the main room away from the breakout room. It could be a side room with a facilitator that might be able to help with any kind of emotional needs that occur. If you’re in a computer classroom, perhaps you allow them to turn off their camera and just listen. Or maybe they can do another activity within the classroom.

As I said before, sometimes it’s good to have a mental health professional. This is not always possible, and it’s a high bar to expect. But, you know, you might have at your institution a counselor that is available for these kinds of activities. Or somebody even who is trained in Mental Health First Aid (MHFA), who can handle situations like this.

Another option is to provide an alternative assignment if the learning objectives that you’ve set can be achieved in other ways. So, for example, you might have them watch a video of role-playing or watch, the demo of the other facilitators role-playing, and have them note down what they think the positions, interests, feelings, and needs are or what conflict styles were used.
Maybe there’s some other way to meet some of those goals without physical role-play. That being said, the embodied practice is really important to cementing certain kinds of skills that can’t be simply observed, but observing is better than nothing. So think about what kind of alternative assignments you might provide. It could also be the case that someone opts out in the first scene, but then they want to play the second scene, so giving them another option if they decide to stay and observe can be very helpful.

Maybe they feel more confident when they’ve seen their peers do it.

In role-playing games, we have this concept called bleed. Bleed refers to the spillover between aspects of the player’s consciousness and the character’s, and vice versa. So aspects from the player that affect the game, and then aspects of the character that affect the player in some way. Examples include emotions. This is one that is very common in these scenarios.

We’re actually hoping for heightened emotion relationship dynamics. So maybe, somebody is already the leader of the class and someone else is feels like they’re subordinate to that person. That might play out also in the scene. Or somebody has a higher rank, for example. Like if you’re playing a role-playing scene with your department chair, maybe you might feel a bit inhibited or you might defer to them even if your character wouldn’t.

So that can happen in these scenes. Physical states, we won’t likely get that too much in an online scene, but it can affect the play and one s experience outside of play. Ideologies, thoughts, and other mental constructs can affect play. So if you’re playing somebody who is really not much aware of DEI issues, for example, but you yourself are highly informed, that might influence how you play the character.
Personality traits. So aspects of yourself that get linked to the character, or maybe aspects of the character that linger long after play. And then even entire complexes of identity, unlikely to happen in a 3 person or 3 minute scene. But it can happen, certainly with longer play.
So even though we are playing, these short scenarios, bleed can occur and we’ve seen it happen. And in fact, we actually hope it does. We want there to be some sort of bleed, particularly from the character to the player regarding their emotions, their thought processes, their ideologies and, and vice versa. So the goal is to give players an embodied experience of conflict.

And these short scenes allow for us to shift rather rapidly from the player to the character to the player. And then we have a very quick direct reflection through the debrief. So the idea is for them to maintain that embodied state, and be sort of half in- and half out-of-character so that they can reflect on what their character felt and thought during the scene.

Because the players are practicing conflict transformation skills, it’s best for them to be in states of heightened, though fictional, conflict. Meaning that it’s easier to be in conflict with your peers, obviously, if it doesn’t feel like it’s real. That doesn’t mean that the emotions and the thoughts and the experiences aren’t drawn from real life, and they might actually be quite powerful.
Hopefully they can practice these skills through role-playing in a space that feels safer in daily life than conflicts can feel in real life. So ideally, the player still experiences the character’s emotions strongly. And it should be strong enough that the scenario is difficult but not too difficult. And this is where you, as a facilitator can use tools like Softer, which we will talk about in a moment that is used to de-escalate, slightly — or rather to lower the intensity of the scene.

So, while bleed is neutral as a psychological phenomenon, some players may experience discomfort or negative emotions tied to bleed. So it’s important to realize that this experience, could be really illuminating, but it might not feel super comfortable in the moment. So bleed processing and management are important processes for us to facilitate when possible. So if you notice someone is having a really hard time processing their play experience for some reason, or they’re very emotionally overwhelmed, learning to help them through that can be important.

Again, sometimes you might not be able to do that as a facilitator as you’re running a scene, but you might have someone in the in the main room or in a side room that can help. The processing can happen in the after-game debriefs. So right after the scene. It could happen in the big room if they feel comfortable talking about it when they’re meeting with all of the other participants.

Oftentimes they may not. It can happen in discussion, post-game journal entries. We highly recommend having journals that only the facilitators can read, so that the players can speak freely. Bleed management can occur when the player is able to notice and moderate intense bleed experiences, so this takes time. If they’re a new role-player, it might be quite difficult for them, but it’s much easier with your assistance and with scaffolding.

And we’ll talk about some techniques for that in a moment. But importantly, learning how to help players work through bleed in a meaningful way, including how to do bleed management, is an important responsibility in facilitation, and actually an important life skill for them as well. Learning emotional regulation. So we have some safety techniques we use in ROCKET scenarios. And these are, meta techniques.
They are meant to communicate with the players on a meta level, meaning the characters are not using the techniques, the players are. So we don’t react to them in-character.
You may hear these methods called safety techniques, tools or mechanics depending on where you are, but the important thing is they’re meant to assist with psychological safety. As I mentioned before, there’s “The Door is Always Open”. This principle reinforces that players can opt-out. They can leave at any time, but encouraging them to check back with the facilitators to make sure they’re okay.

This might look like them turning off their camera for a few moments and then, letting us know when they’re back or when they’re ready to re-engage. Or they may need to leave the room. And again, you’d have to think about your context and how plausible that is within the legal frameworks. But ideally you have a backup option for them.
And players can just verbally say “opt-out”. So having them practice these techniques is really important. We don’t have a ton of time to do that in the workshop before these scenes, oftentimes, especially in classroom settings, we have very condensed time frames. But what you can do is when you’re explaining the mechanics, you can ask them to repeat them after you.
And sometimes you might have some sort of physical manifestation of it as well. So for example, you might have a timeout and say Opt-out or something like that. Similarly, you can use “Cut”. The facilitators will say Cut or Scene when they want to finish the scene. But players can also use this for any reason.

They should not need to explain why they Cut. So don’t put any pressure on them if they don’t feel like communicating. But you can check in with them and ask if they’re okay. We trust that they needed to do so to Cut the scene. Honestly, cut doesn’t happen very often. When it does, and when any of these techniques are used, it should be celebrated.

Because that means that people felt safe enough to communicate their needs. Oftentimes just having the safety tools explained can help players feel safe enough to engage. So if you’re concerned that these tools will get in the way of the experience, generally, at least in our view, they help people feel safer to engage rather than interrupt.
We’ve tried to keep them as few as possible, while still acknowledging that there are certain things that need to be communicated. Hence there are a few of them.
Another option is the Pause Check-in. And so if you use Pause, which you can do for any reason, you can say, Pause Monologue as we describe in the facilitation video, which is a different technique that’s not related to safety. It’s a technique that allows people to share their characters inner thoughts in the room and the other characters can’t hear it, but the players do.
You might also use “Pause Check-In”. This is how both players and facilitators can pause the scene to check in with other players at any time. If a player is not able to respond verbally for some reason, sometimes that can be the case if they feel quite overwhelmed. Consider sending them a private message and seeing if they can type something to you.
And the online classroom actually has some really nice affordances that are more difficult to do in the regular classroom. For example, passing a note to a student is much more obvious than sending a private message. So utilize the aspects of online technology that can actually be good for these sorts of situations.

Another technique is “Softer”, and so I will usually ask them to put their hands down, like putting a hand on the brake pad. For softer. This is when you’re asking players to sort of dial down the intensity a little bit. So let’s say I have my voice raised really loud and someone says Softer. And then I adjust to the here I’m still in the conflict, but I’m not as intense in the scene.

There’s also the X-card, so players and facilitators can type or say X at any time to ask for certain content to be removed or avoided, no questions asked. So for example, they you can say X-card for content around death if you maybe recently lost someone and you don’t want to play on that content, but you don’t have to explain why you use the card, you just say, Please remove this from the game.
If it’s part of the scenario itself, it might be very difficult to remove. So you should also be clear with your participants what can be changed and what can’t. It could be possible to negotiate certain parts of the scenario, but sometimes that might take longer than, than you have for the exercise.

We use Zoom for our ROCKET trainings, and it actually has a built in X emoji. So you can actually use that essentially.
So why are these techniques needed? Role-playing games are improvisational, meaning that players will generate new content spontaneously in the moment. This is very different than, for example, watching a lecture or even certain workshop activities that are highly scaffolded. While there is quite a bit of facilitator control, you are also inviting them to play characters, and they have this thing called alibi when they engage in fiction, meaning, It wasn’t me, it was the character, which means that they may decide to play rather aggressively, for example, or to play very vulnerable parts of themselves.

You never really know what’s going to come up. And especially when talking about issues related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, they may bring in parts of their identity that are quite sensitive, for example. So this improvisational nature means that especially with conflict, we may be up against each other’s boundaries. And so we need ways to communicate when that’s happening.

It’s not a big deal if it happens. Ideally, safety can be maintained and reestablished as discussed before. Sometimes that can take some time, but, this is the sort of thing that role-playing can do. However, exploring our growth edges is actually really important to learning. So if we feel too safe, we might not feel comfortable
actually going into territory that might be a little bit riskier for us. So ideally, you want to stay in what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development, meaning that learning growth edge zone where with scaffolding, which the role-playing and the facilitation and the other players provide, you’re able to learn the skill. So role-playing means that some content or emotional intensity might take others by surprise.
So, it may be that person misunderstands something or even feels offended by something. There could be any number of reasons why there might be a reaction. But having these meta techniques allows us to adjust in the moment. For example, players may lean on stereotypes for characters, especially if they decide to play someone very different from themselves.
This can be quite problematic, particularly when playing characters from marginalized backgrounds. If they have a marginalization that the player doesn’t share. Or, for example, if they’re from a culture that the player doesn’t know a lot about, they can also appropriate aspects of culture that are very important to people from that culture. This can lead to players from diverse backgrounds perhaps feeling less safe, or even harmed, in this scenario.
So it is really important to acknowledge that this can happen. One thing that you can ask players to do, before the session starts, is to try to play characters that are relatable to them, even if their character has a position that might be different from theirs or a job, for example, that they don’t have. You can ask them to come from a similar cultural background, for example.
So there are ways to mitigate these risks. However, the safety tools are there if things happen in the moment, for people to communicate that at the time.
For this reason, we avoid designing ROCKET scenarios in such a way that the student will likely play someone from a vastly different background. Ideally, all of the scenes feel relatable enough. Students may have difficulty playing someone who is in a different job than they have had before, for example, but they’re not playing somebody from a vastly different background.

So we’ve experimented a little bit with trying different kinds of roles that are maybe more related to popular culture, for example. And we ended up sort of staying with these rather mundane scenes that are related to university life because it can often be most relatable for the students and most likely to be similar to conflicts they may experience in real life.

Instead, we hope they will bring in aspects relevant to their own diverse experience. So rather than playing someone quite different from themselves, we hope that they will — using certain techniques such as the Hot Seat where we ask them questions from their character’s perspective — we hope they will bring in aspects that are relatable to them or share about these in the debrief.
So related to DEI, we don’t tend to ask them to play different demographics than themselves for the most part. But they can bring those things in if they really want to, or they can bring aspects, ideally from their own experience, that they want to. For example, there may be a scenario where a student hasn’t been turning in their work on time, and maybe they have caring responsibilities at home for their siblings.

And so they bring that into the character — that the character also has these caring responsibilities. We haven’t asked them to play something different than themselves necessarily in that scenario, but they can bring that in. And importantly, we do not pressure students to share anything that they do not feel comfortable sharing with the group. If there is an uncomfortable silence, sometimes the facilitators can come in and share and talk about how they perceive the scene or an observation they made, and that can make things a little bit easier.

So even if you’re asking people to debrief, for example, after a scene, if they don’t feel comfortable doing so, you can just go to the next person.

In serious cases, the player may get emotionally activated or triggered. Activation can happen for any number of reasons. Triggers are usually connected to trauma of some sort. Such states usually mean that higher level functions like reasoning are very difficult, or even in some cases not possible. So for example, the player might go into fight, flight/flee, or fawn.

There’s these different, code words to help us remember, but they’re basically responses that the more animalistic brain has to conflict situations that feel out-of-control. In the moment while learning can occur in such situations, for example, having experienced flight and then coming back to the group and feeling supported by the group may be a powerful learning experience, but we ideally don’t want to push our students into such situations.

Because the chances of it backfiring are high. We’re not doing therapy at all here, and we’re certainly not doing exposure therapy. So while we are dealing with conflict, we’re not going to hopefully deal with things that are too personal for the students. And you never know what might be activating or what might trigger someone. There’re some predictable things that tend to be triggering, but triggers can be of any kind.
Basically, the mind, can make associations of all kinds. So the important thing is just that we have the tools to handle it if it comes up.

Ideally, safety techniques allow players to calibrate with one another before they get into that state or address the situation if they do. So, for example, having Pause Check-in to say, Is this a little bit too intense for you? Would you like to change something? Do you need to end the scene? or any number of other ways.
And sometimes they might not be able to verbally respond, which is usually a pretty good indication that maybe they can’t continue to engage. And maybe you need to Cut.
What’s very important here is, as I said before, sometimes these techniques are never used, but their very presence and going over them in class can signal care and concern for one another. So this is a way that we set intention in the classroom and make it clear that we’re here to support each other through difficult times.

Here are some citations for you.
Thank you very much.