Uncovering the Learning Practices of Tabletop Roleplaying Game Communities: The Affordance of Play and Non-Digital Media for Learning and Identity

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Recent research enthusiastically points to the possibilities that videogames provide in supporting academic learning. However, despite this enthusiasm and an explosion of commercially produced educational videogames, there are few studies that look at the principles of gaming and the affordances of play in digital and non-digital contexts. It is likely that the value of videogames can also be derived and more sustainably distributed in non-digital formats. Conducting an 18-month ethnographic study of two gaming communities, this project highlights the learning and literacy practices that emerge in non-digital tabletop gameplay. Through transcribing and coding hundreds of hours of fieldnotes and interview transcripts, this study seeks to better understand how individuals learn, collaborate, and strengthen literacies in an extracurricular environment. This project contributes a needed empirical corpus of data that highlight how learning within games occurs. By exploring this out-of-school context of non-digital gaming, this work contributes to needed gaming research and offer practical strategies for the use of non-digital games within schools. This study offers findings that support additional in-school research on the use of games, bolsters pre-existing assumptions about the educational validity of videogames, and highlight how 21st century learning principles are supported without digital tools and primarily through face-to-face interactions.

Taking a sociocultural approach to understanding the multimodal literacies and collaborative learning, this study is organized around the following questions:

• How are literacies enacted within these mediated tabletop gaming communities?
• Without computer code or scripts that govern play, what are the language practices that govern how narratives are presented and explored within these tabletop games?
• And, ultimately, how can these forms of collaboration, play, and production support 21st century learning within school spaces?

This project speaks to the need for a better understanding of learning in non-digital gaming communities. Empirically understanding the robust forms of social learning, literacy development, and language practices that come from tabletop gaming can better illustrate new modes of student engagement in schools and better support the existing digital games that are in use in schools today.

Author

• Antero Garcia, Colorado State University