Roll an Essay Check: Gaming in the Classroom

“I think my character is … a cat.”

“A cat?”

“Yeah, but, like … a talking cat.”

“Why a talking cat?”

“Well, so he can learn all the secrets of the town. Everyone just sees him as a cat. But he’s a key witness in the murder. The sheriff is gonna need his help to solve it.”

“Has he seen the ghost?”

“Oh, of course. He knows everything that goes on in town. Everything.”

Everyone shuffles nervously as I call for volunteers. No one will quite look at me. There’s a stiff deck of cards in my palm, adorned with strange, whimsical images of bull skulls; swords caught in a tangle of thread. I’ve explained the game, and how to play it. Looking over it was the only homework for our class today. Finally, a hand. They pull a card. Scrunch their nose. Maybe there’s a little hum as they ponder.

This is how the games in my class tend to start out. Hesitation, nerves, a general air of awkward solidarity that their new composition teacher is making them do something so off-the-book. One brave soul finally caves and agrees to participate, then another. It’s usually about ten minutes, sometimes less, before there’s the Wait, wait, wait! What about’s and the I think it would make sense to tie these together-isms that make games like this tick. The new ideas, the collaboration. The synergy that overtakes a class of formerly disparate students when they’re engaged in an act of mutual play and exploration.

The games in my classroom come in two categories: the ones we play together, and the ones my students play on their own for homework. I like to imagine what they go back to the dorms and tell their roommates about my class. Yeah, I have to pick a game to play to write my essay about. Yeah, I can be a trucker or a witch. Or, I don’t know, maybe I’ll be the lighthouse keeper in space.^[1] Many of the games we play are not well-known, little gems I found buried on the “for free” pages of Itch.io or on niche listicles. Some of them are known enough in indie tabletop spaces, with their successful Kickstarters and shiny, full color spreads. They may as well be the same to my students, who frequently come to me saying, “Like in Stranger Things?” and know little else about the big, wide world of tabletop roleplay.

For those who, like my students, have seen a Dungeons & Dragons book in the bookstore on display one time and have never thought to touch one themselves, a tabletop game has some key differences from your probably-more-familiar video game. First, all of the rules of the game are contained in text. There may be art, or fancily-designed tables, but a tabletop game takes place in the imagination, not on your computer screen. Some of them (many of them) have you roll dice to determine the path of the story or accomplish your goals. Others may have you draw cards, or flip a coin. You might control a single character, with their own personality, backstory, and skills. Or you may oversee a whole community and explore how it changes over the course of a year. Tabletops get stranger, of course: maybe you play as a dying language^[2], maybe you play as an evolving myth^[3], maybe the players collectively play as a single fish with a knife^[4] (yes, I’m serious. I, Luka Brave, the author, do not endorse finding and playing this on school property. Don’t do it).

In the examples above, somewhat fictionalized from actual in-class games, we play a game called The Family Tree (achillobators 2023), collaboratively deciding a time period, genre, and then several generations of characters who fit together into the world we’ve created. In a reflective discussion board after the game, they’re asked questions like: Do you think this story fit into the genre we agreed on at the beginning of class? What is something you think is happening behind-the-scenes in this story? What’s something bigger that’s happening in this world? Sometimes the answers back are, no, the mad scientist and vampire didn’t quite fit with the Arthurian setting we agreed on. Or, I think the murder in this Wild West town is just a distraction from the war. Students are asked to think critically about the boundaries of the story: What fit into it, what didn’t? What do we expect from our genres? What tropes are we building off of when we make characters like this? We could read a short story or two to do the same things, I suppose. But we would miss out on the opportunity to collaborate, explore, and flex our creative muscles.

There is growing evidence for the benefits of tabletop roleplay. Tabletop roleplaying games, or TTRPGs, can expand and strengthen your social circle (Meriläinen 2012; Daniau 2016; Orr et al. 2020; Kilmer et al. 2023). Mikko Meriläinen’s 2012 survey found that 87% of people who identified as roleplayers found important relationships through roleplaying, and around 70% said that playing roleplaying games with friends was a big part of their social lives (56). Roleplaying can help develop players’ empathy, especially when playing characters that differ from themselves (59). One participant in the survey said, “I’ve taught myself to relate to other people by attempting to see life from different points of view. I think it’s because of this that I’m not completely obnoxious today” (61). In my own classroom, students bring characters that differ from themselves to the circle of desks right off the bat, completely without my prompting. Some of these may verge on the silly side, like talking cats, shunned vampires, or old lady ghosts. Others—serious and loyal knights, gruff old ranchers, cunning former spies—may explore popular tropes my students have encountered in other media and draw from in our stories with a spark of sudden inspiration. In one case study, a TTRPG player named Aidan said, “You can play so many different types of people in those games. Like, in one game I’m a female character who is a warrior and in another game I’m a small little gnome wizard” (Orr et al. 2020, p. 78). Though it is less nerve-wracking for many to start off playing a character who is more similar to them, over time, the vast majority of tabletop players will explore characters who differ from themselves physically, mentally, morally, and in core personality traits (Meriläinen 2012, p. 59)

Now, you may ask, what is the benefit of exploring other personalities, experiences, lives, in a composition classroom? You’re meant to be writing with your own voice, ain’t ya?

“[TTRPGs are a] hands-on, self-insert approach to story structure—how to get your point across”.

Sierra Phipps is a professional game master—the person who guides the world and progression of a multiplayer tabletop game. You can find her at the Stillwater Public Library, guiding groups of teens through “Strength of Thousands”, a Pathfinder adventure path where the teen players pretend to be students at a magical university.

The reason Phipps likes this adventure in particular is that it gets the teen players away from what she calls “video game logic”—that they can just kill everything in their path or overcome every obstacle through violence. The university students, player characters of the teens in the Adventurer’s Academy library program, are rewarded mechanically by the game for learning about rare forms of magic, figuring out ways to help their community, and even telling good stories. Lethal force, unless the students are in extreme peril, is banned at the university.

Phipps takes a sip of their coffee, waving with their free hand. “It’s really, really cool to see,” they say, as we sit in the crowded downtown coffee shop. She’s describing how quickly her players, despite having never played tabletop roleplaying games before, go from trying to hack-and-slash their way through problems to instead thinking outside-the-box and showing rapid development of critical thinking skills. Phipps, who has been a game master since 2016, largely running Pathfinder 1st and 2nd edition, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition and 5th edition, and smaller, independent games, said that even her very creative adult players at her home games struggled at first telling a collaborative story like the ones demanded from a tabletop. They thought that fostering those skills from a younger age would be really beneficial.

Phipps found roleplaying online during the pandemic invaluable for keeping hold of her social circle, and said they can see a big difference between the teens that gamed collaboratively online through the early Covid years and those who didn’t. “The ability to still feel connected to people who you didn’t get to see in person anymore […] the ability to still have that to ground you during all that stuff [was] really important.”

When I asked Phipps if they saw roleplaying games being helpful for composition classrooms, their answer was immediate and impassioned. “It’s access to a way to fundamentally understand by relating those concepts to yourself.”

In an essay discussing TTRPGs and their great potential for fostering more civic-minded players, Susan Haarman says TTRPGs are “autotelic narrative experiences” (2022, p. 57)—that they have “the experience of playing, not the outcome, as the goal of play” (62). Tabletop game rulebooks, she says, focus around “cooperation, compromise, intentional direct action, consensus building, and imagination as explicit goals and outcomes” (56-57). In the essay, she explores a concept called “dramatic rehearsal”, first conceptualized by 20th century American scholar John Dewey. Dramatic rehearsal is the process of taking a problem and acting out a possible road for tackling it all the way until its conclusion—not only wondering the immediate ramifications, but trying to get into other mindsets and points of view to understand the broader impacts and implications of a course of action.

Tabletop games are particularly adept at this, Haarman argues. And it’s true that many studies support the idea that tabletop games foster creative problem-solving abilities and collaborative creativity (Meriläinen 2012; Daniau 2016; Dyson et al. 2016; Orr et al. 2020; Kilmer et al. 2023). Phipps stressed that this was something they saw consistently in their teen players—a rapid development of creative problem-solving skills and out-of-the-box thinking. In their 2020 essay, Felix Rose Kawitzky says that tabletop games “can present fluid conceptions of audience, character, self and world, creating space for exploratory performative exchanges”, going on to say that this murky space between what the player brings to the table, what the character wants to do, and the intersection of the real world and the game word, allows the processes that prepare people in the world—the exploration and rehearsal—to exist “at their own pace, and for their own sake” (134). This exploration of other points of view allows players—and potentially students who share these experiences in their classrooms as well—to decouple their usual methods of problem-solving from their one, singular life experience. By practicing different methods of approaching problems, players unlearn bias and think more creatively.

As Haarman says,

Role-play within games allows a person to intentionally take on a different role or traits, and, as a result, become more aware of the ways in which they unconsciously do so in normal life. Players cultivate a differing theory of mind and may intentionally try to think as though they were someone else. This both expands a player’s imagination and builds skills around critical problem solving, as they may become more aware of their own bias in thinking or gaps in knowledge. (61)

During our talk, Phipps said that the teens who had played TTRPGs before—often being raised on them by parents who were similarly into the hobby—came to the table ready with a character with a big personality and their own unique voice. Those who hadn’t played were more unsure. Their characters were not quite developed, and when they spoke in-character, it was with their own, usual speaking voice. Over my own seven years of tabletop roleplay experience, I’ve played nearly 30 characters across many game systems, from wizard babies to Tennessee park rangers, from shy boar-girls to nonbinary cowboys, from young Shakespearian actresses to praying mantis alien cult leaders. None of that is including, of course, the dozens of lives I’ve inhabited in my non-player characters (or NPCs), which flesh out the world of the games I run for my own players. A werewolf’s wife. A white hat assassin. A rich zombie dandy. A god who would really prefer to be a mortal child, thank you very much.

For my students’ first major project, I ask them, as per the curriculum of Oklahoma State University’s Composition I classes, to write a personal narrative essay. Something where they are the expert on the subject—their own experience and thoughts.

But with a twist.

As a tutor in the writing center, I’ve seen a lot of personal essays come in from a range of prompts. I’ve read about family vacations, first cattle shows, the first time reading a really impactful book. These are all well and good; I don’t intend to talk down on these kinds of personal narrative assignments. Reaching back into a student’s own past, finding something that speaks to them, finding why it speaks to others—this is an important set of skills, and it makes sense to me why this is the project we start with at OSU. But, harkening back to the words of Haarman and Kawitzky, and the experiences of Sierra Phipps, before my students are allowed to reach back into the safety and comfort of their own experiences, first, they need to step out of them.

Playing The Family Tree is often my students’ first experience with a TTRPG—a guided, collaborative in-class play session where only a few volunteers have to participate, but often the rest of the class will gain courage and pitch in their own ideas on where to guide the story and what characters we can weave into the web. Their second experience is for their personal narrative project.

Their assignment for the personal narrative is to play, and then reflect on the experience of, a solo-journaling game. That’s right—some TTRPGs can be played by yourself, too! In a solo-journaling game, the sole player will sit down with the rulebook, some method of record keeping like a pen and paper or voice recorder, and the game’s chosen method of guiding the story, referred to as an oracle. In Long Haul 1983 (Cain 2021), players use dice and playing cards to tell their story as they try to survive a cross-country road trip directly after the apocalypse. In Last Tea Shop (Spring Villager 2022), players roll dice to brew tea and share stories with the recently deceased before they continue on their journey to the afterlife.

Solo TTRPGs cover an exquisite breadth of genres, tones, and gameplay experiences. Some—like Long Haul 1983—play up the suspense and lean into the potential horror. Others, like Last Tea Shop, offer a quiet and meditative experience. Out of the big, wide world of solo TTRPGs, I select five^[5] for my students to choose from (wouldn’t want to overwhelm them right off the bat!) when they sit down to plan for their personal narrative project. I offer to them a secondary choice: you’re free to play these games as a fictionalized version of yourself, but you can play as any character that you think fits in the narrative of the game.

The responses to this choice vary. Plenty of students play as themselves. Others play as family members, or people the game makes them think of. Others still inhabit entirely new characters, with names, backstories, families—professional athletes, hard-working single fathers, magical talking cats, weathered explorers, former soldiers, kindly and wise shopkeepers. For many students, this is their first time developing a fictional character: one who they understand, can guide the dialogue of, can think their thoughts. It’s often the most resistant students to this exercise that form the most meaningful experiences from it; those that rigidly resist the nontraditional assignment find themselves moved and grateful for even a brief glimpse into another life, another mind.

In our discussion, Sierra Phipps said that often in their teens, tabletop roleplay brings an “appreciation for other people’s opinions in a way that doesn’t feel like criticism”. During the game Snow (Sampetto 2022), one phase of the game is “Another Perspective”, where your character, whom you are guiding through thinking about a difficult challenge, takes the perspective of someone else in their life who might have something interesting to say about the trouble that’s on their mind. It’s a double-layer effect—first, you put yourself in the mind of a character. Then, that character puts themself in the mind of someone even more removed, even more fictional. However, this is often the stage of play that stands out the most to the students who play it. They start to see the benefits of this game not only to their assignment, but their broader lives as well. The next stage of play, “Gratitude”, seems to come all-the-easier for it. In their essays, my students reflect, I really didn’t think I would get much out of this, but I didn’t even realize I felt better about this real problem I was having until the game was done. Tabletop games can be powerful forces of creative collaboration, but they also house an incredible engine for deep thought and reflection. Phipps remarked that after months of roleplaying with other teens at the library, her players were more open-minded, open to critical discussions, and had a deeper ability to understand concepts past just their surface level.

Dr. Bengt Nijre, a Swedish disability scholar, did extensive work on the concept of self-determination. While he was mostly focused on the disabled population of 1960s and 70s Sweden, his work still remains important and broadly-applicable today. Modern disability scholars still uphold his values—normalization, autonomy, and respect. These are things all of us need, disabled and abled alike. And, his research on self-determination can be just as easily brought into discussions about college classrooms.

Nijre, in his research, identified some key features of self-determination to include “making choices”, “self-management”, and “self-knowledge” (Ward 2005, p. 108). Expanding on this framework, Mithaug et al. developed the Adaptability Instructional Model to teach students with disabilities how to regulate themselves and their own behavior. This model included, “(a) teaching students to identify and set goals, (b) engaging in independent performance through self-monitoring, (c) evaluating their performance in terms of an existing standard, and (d) learning from their mistakes and adjusting their goals” (109). To me, this sounds like something that can be perfectly mapped onto gameplay in the classroom. Both Nijre and Mithaug et al.’s work goes back to the concept of self-efficacy—the ability to face challenges, feel confident in facing them, put hard work in, fail a few times, and then accomplish your goal. And, according to Dr. Jane McGonigal, director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future—games are perfect self-efficacy-building machines. According to her own research, and the research of leading neuroscientists like Dr. Judy Willis, when we play a game—setting goals, taking on increasingly difficult challenges, failing until we succeed, and then immediately moving on to the next slightly harder task—the self-efficacy that this builds in us is “hardwired into the brain” (2015, p. 89, emphasis removed). This means that, even outside of gaming, gamers are more likely to put hard work into challenges they’re faced with in the real world (pp. 86-87).

A lot is asked of our little first-year composition classrooms. But is this—for our students to be self-determined people, to be able to make choices for themselves and follow through on them, to not only be able to take on challenges, but be eager to do so, and confident they can eventually succeed—not an important goal? Composition, on paper (get it?), is about writing. But, more than that, the students who leave our comp classes should feel determined that college is something they’re prepared for, even when it gets tricky. They won’t roll a critical success every time, but they know that if they fail a particular challenge, they can get back up and try again.

Finding ways to play gets ever-more important as you get older, more distant from the days of mud potions and playground wars. It’s a vital ingredient in living a good and fulfilling life. But it’s also a powerful tool of development, expression, and inner strength. As developmental psychologist Dr. Karyn Purvis said, “Play disarms fear, builds connectedness, and teaches social skills and competencies for life” (Parris & Hernandez 2020). The students who game together in my classroom are not just classmates—but a party. Collaborators and allies.

Through tabletop roleplay, I was able to learn new skills, make new friends, and process my experiences in order to grow as a person. I’m far from the only one. Games are reflection-prompting, empathy-evolving, self-efficacy-building engines that can bring people together creatively, sparking unique ways of thinking and developing more paths to solve challenges, all in collaboration and joy. College is tough—and that’s not a bad thing. But by bringing games into the classroom, we can make that challenge all the more engaging, and give students new ways to learn and grow. Sometimes writing that final paper can feel as tough as fighting a dragon. Why can’t they be one and the same?

Works Cited

Achillobators. The Family Tree. itch.io, 31 Jan. 2023, https://achillobators.itch.io/the-family-tree, Accessed 4 Feb. 2023.

Cain, Sean P. Long Haul 1983. itch.io, 22 Mar. 2021, https://spc.itch.io/longhaul1983, Accessed 19 Aug. 2023.

Daniau, S. “The Transformative Potential of Role-Playing Games—: From Play Skills to Human Skills.” Simulation and Gaming, vol. 47, no. 4, Aug. 2016, pp. 423-444–444. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878116650765.

Dyson, Scott Benjamin, et al. “The Effect of Tabletop Role-Playing Games on the Creative Potential and Emotional Creativity of Taiwanese College Students.” Thinking Skills and Creativity, vol. 19, Mar. 2016, pp. 88–96. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2015.10.004.

Haarman, Susan. “Dungeons & Dragons & Dewey: The Potential for Dramatic Rehearsal and Civic Outcomes in Tabletop Role-Playing Games.” Philosophical Studies in Education, vol. 53, Jan. 2022, pp. 56–70. ERIC, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1366548.

Kawitzky, Felix Rose. “Magic Circles: Tabletop Role-Playing Games as Queer Utopian Method.” Performance Research, vol. 25, no. 8, Dec. 2020, pp. 129–36. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1930786.

Kilmer, Elizabeth D., et al. Therapeutically Applied Role-Playing Games: The Game to Grow Method. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023.

McGonigal, Jane. SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient*. Penguin Press, 2015.

Meriläinen, Mikko. “The self-perceived effects of the role-playing hobby on personal development – a survey report.” International Journal of Role-Playing, no. 3, 28 Dec. 2012, pp. 49-68, https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi3.224.

Orr, Matthew, et al. “A Qualitative Exploration of the Perceived Social Benefits of Playing Tabletop Role-playing Games.” International Journal of Role-Playing, no. 10, 9 Nov. 2020, pp. 70-83, https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi10.277.

Parris, Sheri and Christian Hernandez. “The Benefits of Play in Cognitive Development.” Karyn Purvis Institute of Childhood Development, Texas Christian University, Accessed 20 Apr. 2024.

Sampetto. Snow, a meditative TTRPG. itch.io, 4 Oct. 2022, https://sampetto.itch.io/snow, Accessed 30 Nov. 2022.

Spring Villager. Last Tea Shop Complete. itch.io, 17 July 2022, https://springvillager.itch.io/last-tea-shop-complete, Accessed 15 Aug. 2023.

Ward, Michael J. “An Historical Perspective of Self-Determination in Special Education: Accomplishments and Challenges.” Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, vol. 30, no. 3, 2005, pp. 108–12, https://doi.org/10.2511/rpsd.30.3.108.

This resource is no cost at https://open.library.okstate.edu/goodthingstoread/