Seattle-based Game to Grow released its simple, therapeutic tabletop game Critical Core in October. (Game to Grow Image)

A new whitepaper from two Seattle organizations exhibits research into how tabletop roleplaying games, such as Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons, can be used to help children and teenagers develop their social skills.

The January whitepaper is the result of a collaboration between Foundry10, an educational research organization, and Game to Grow, a nonprofit organization that focuses on using games as therapeutic aids.

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) such as D&D are essentially collaborative storytelling exercises for three to six players. One player takes the role of a game master (a.k.a. referee or Dungeon Master), who sets up a scenario, while the other players create characters and play through that scenario. When a player takes an action, game mechanics like rolling dice are used to see whether or not those actions succeed.

The COVID-19 lockdowns led to a boom period for TTRPGs, as the games are necessarily social, and are easy to run via video text programs like Zoom.

Dungeons & Dragons in particular has been on a cultural upswing that predates the pandemic, thanks to live-play shows (Critical Role, Dimension 20), appearances in popular TV programs (“Stranger Things”), and high-profile players who range from Vin Diesel to Stephen Colbert. A major D&D motion picture, Honor Among Thieves, made its public debut earlier this month at the 2023 South by Southwest film festival.

“These make-believe worlds [in TTRPGs] are useful spaces for youth to develop these [social] skills,” Foundry10’s whitepaper hypothesizes, “as the ludic game space often has more concrete, easier to understand rules than the complex ecosystem of the ‘outside’ world.”

In its exercise, Foundry10 aimed to see what group problem-solving behaviors were exhibited by children and teenagers while they played an online tabletop role-playing game, both spontaneously and when prompted, and to see if those players made any progress on their social and emotional learning (SEL) skills over the course of the experiment.

Over the course of 10 weekly play sessions, Foundry10 and Game to Grow concluded that TTRPGs can be a helpful tool to aid young players’ SEL development. Since the game’s events are separated from players by a layer of imagination, it can provide a “sandbox” where players can “practice their regulation, collaboration, planning, perspective taking, and pretend play skills.”

This isn’t to say that TTRPGs by themselves are a therapeutic tool, but rather that trained professionals can use a TTRPG as a useful guided exercise.

The study employed four Game to Grow staff members as “facilitators,” a term that encompasses “game master, referee, storyteller, and teacher.” They weren’t there to simply run the game, but to make sure the game was a potentially useful experience for its young players.

“The game itself is a delivery system for learning therapeutic interventions,” said Dr. Raffael Boccamazzo, a Seattle psychologist and the clinical director of the gaming-focused mental health organization Take This. “The examples that [Foundry10 and Game to Grow] included in this report did an amazing job of showing the direct interventions by the facilitator that created the spaces for growth.”

The use of role-playing exercises for therapy goes back over a century. H.G. Wells’ 1911 non-fiction book Floor Games is sometimes cited as an early example of the practice.

Using more regimented TTRPGs as a psychological exercise or tool is relatively new, however, with little outstanding empirical research on the subject. Much of this can be traced to the controversies that surrounded the TTRPG hobby in the 1980s, when parents and lawmakers accused D&D in particular of being Satanic.

“There’s been a lot of stigma around Dungeons & Dragons, and the limited research that existed before the last five or 10 years was largely driven from a moral panic perspective,” said Boccamazzo.

Boccamazzo is a public advocate for the use of TTRPGs in therapy spaces.

“There was research done in the ‘80s and ‘90s that looked to see if there was a link to criminality in D&D players,” Boccamazzo says. “Getting past that and into a more nuanced take has been a goal for a long time, and I’m glad to see it’s happening.”

Foundry10’s research involved running four groups of players, ages 10-14, through Game to Grow’s Critical Core modules, above. (Game to Grow Image)

For the study, Game to Grow staff members ran weekly 90-minute tabletop gaming sessions for four groups of young players, ages 10 to 14, via Zoom. The games used 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons, running adventure modules from Game to Grow’s Critical Core gaming system.

Critical Core is a standalone RPG with its own unique setting, which Game to Grow released in October after a successful Kickstarter campaign. Game to Grow executive director Adam Davis described Critical Core to GeekWire as a “’beginner’s box for TA-RPG’ [Therapeutically-Applied Role-Playing Games], with a ruleset similar to D&D.”

“[Critical Core] is very similar to D&D 5E in a lot of ways, but it’s simplified a little bit to highlight those SEL skills,” said Caroline Pitt, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Washington and a co-author on the whitepaper. “It puts a lot of focus on engaging with the imagination, creativity, and problem-solving.”

Each challenge that came up in the game, whether it was a mystery, a puzzle, an obstacle, or a fight, was presented by the Game to Grow facilitator as an opportunity to practice social and problem-solving skills. Players who had big breakthrough moments might be given in-game rewards, such as a point of inspiration.

Notably, Game to Grow’s facilitators did not actually try to avoid causing conflict between players or their characters over the course of each game. Instead, they treated arguments as a necessary part of the exercise, because those could lead to resolutions, teachable moments, and the development of the SEL skills, such as the ability to productively express emotions, that were the point of the overall exercise.

The Game to Grow sessions included additional TA-RPG mechanics such as a bonus token, which one player could give to another to enable them to retry a failed roll. Each session also ended with three check-out questions, which asked participants to share predictions for the next game, reflect on the challenges they’d just faced, and focus on another player or their character.

The limitations of the study, according to the whitepaper, included the relatively short-term nature of the games; the small, relatively homogeneous group of players, who were 70% male and 94% white; and a need for more thorough interviews with the study’s participants after each session.

Foundry10’s whitepaper is, at time of writing, available to read for free on its website via Google Drive. Additionally, Game to Grow has written a book on its TA-RPG approach, Therapeutically Applied Role-Playing Games, which is scheduled for release on April 5.

The whitepaper authors include Caroline Pitt, Katharine Chen, Jennifer Rubin, Dominic Gibson, and Sam Bindman.

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