Finding the Story in the Game: Playing and Modifying Tabletop Role-Playing Games

• In Event: 52.069 - New Perspectives for Serious Gaming: Games That Integrate Making and Playing for Learning

Abstract

1. Objective
The objective of this research is to better understand how modification of tabletop role-playing games can serve as spaces for instructional exploration to foster collaboration, narrative play, and identity development in learners.

2. Perspectives
For decades, research on role-playing within instructional contexts has yielded numerous opportunities for application to schooling contexts (Chesler & Fox, 1966; McGregor, 1993). The form of the tabletop, non-digital "story game" is however new to educational gaming and generally understudied in relation to play.

While the emergent field of “games and learning” (Steinkuehler, Squire, & Barab, 2012; Gee, 2003; Kafai, 2006) has created considerable interest in the potential of games to increase engagement in learning, little has been done to connect recent innovations in non-digital gaming to instructional contexts (Simkins & Steinkuehler, 2008). In this paper, I report on preliminary results from The Story Game Project, aimed at understanding the ways that players learn collaborative play in tabletop role-playing environments and explore how game modifications can be utilized for instructional purposes.

3. Data sources
The Story Game Project involves two separate six-week programs with traditional college-aged participants. The first group is focused primarily on play of multiple story games with a second six-week program with pre-service teachers focused on "modding" the games for educational applications. Games include Fiasco (2009), which relies upon tropes to create film noir-like stories, and Dog Eat Dog (2013), which models the power relationships and cultural consequences of colonialism in a collaboratively-generated story. Participants play the game during the weekly gaming session, with all video and audio of the games and all physical notes (index cards, maps) recorded. Additionally, all instructional game modifications (notes, maps, curricula) are recorded for analysis.
4. Methods
We are currently developing case studies (Stake, 1995) of each story game played and modified by the pre-service teacher group. Multiple narrative analysis approaches are applied to the collaborative-generated stories, focusing on (1) language use through the collaborative development of in-game stories (e.g., Discourse analytic approaches; Gee, 2014) and (2) approaches that capture differential narrative creation/use by individuals in the group (Bruner, 1990).

5. Results
Focusing on the play of Fiasco and Dog Eat Dog, preliminary results indicate the key role of designed game mechanics pushing players into power positions (e.g. Fiasco's egalitarian "set up," in which all players develop the initial game situations vs. Dog Eat Dog, which models the power imbalance between colonial occupiers and indigenous populations). Players see several impediments for implementing these experiences in schools, ranging from the social discomfort of children in performing characters to basic time constraints. With Dog Eat Dog in particular, players find the content of the game appealing for embodying politically-charged topics but also potentially difficult due to the prevailing participatory ethos of schools.

6. Scientific/ scholarly significance
The modification of story games holds great promise for connecting play activities to existing curricular aims. The games' rule structures effectively scaffold the performance and creation of collaborative narrative, though structural impediments of schooling serve as problematic limits on applicability.

Author

• Sean C. Duncan, Indiana University