Storytelling Games Now
For the Pratt Center for Teaching & Learning’s 2023 Fall Forum, I led a workshop titled “Storytelling Games Now.”
Responding to the Forum’s theme of “Teaching Now,” I engaged participants in exploring tabletop roleplaying games as a source of inspiration in curriculum and lesson design, and led a short roleplaying activity that put into context consent practices and roleplaying safety tools.
Teaching in 2023 is about collaboratively telling new stories. Taking inspiration from independent tabletop roleplaying games, this workshop will explore how these games can inspire innovative pedagogies that resource students to tell these stories: pandemic trauma, hope in the face of climate grief, and tumultuous, evolving relationships with institutions, ecologies, and one another. In this workshop we will explore examples of tabletop roleplaying games from queer, independent designers, and look at designs from tabletop game developers for safety tools that aim to support groups of players in exploring ways to encounter and cope with tragedy, grief, and oppression without harming players in the process. When are these tools the most effective, and how can we borrow them for use in creative classrooms? After exploring and discussing the games themselves, we’ll roleplay together, telling pieces of our own stories, and imagining how this structured form of play might inspire equitable and transformative storytelling across disciplines.