How have TTRPGs impacted you? 

I ascribe my going to and graduating from college to an early D&D obsession.  The hobby is so social, creative, and text heavy and it came to me at a time that I was really struggling with school and life.  This was around 6/7th grade and my family had just gone through a bankruptcy and a move from Chicago to the upper peninsula of MI.  I think it was first through Baldur’s Gate 1 on PC, and then subsequently finding AD&D and finally 3e books in a local bookstore.  The books were so captivating right from the get go, the illustrations, equipment, characters – it meshed with my fascination with Tolkein and Xanth and other media like the Zelda series.  I found a great affinity space through D&D moving forward and developed a lot more confidence socially as I became the default GM over time.

Do you have a particular favorite moment from one of your games?

It’s hard for me to pin down one particular favorite moment from a game.  I think my favorite aspect of playing TTRPGs is the experience I get when I’m running a game – in between sessions and throughout the week, I find myself constantly daydreaming about the world I’m building, the characters who my players are creating, and the story we are co-creating.  – iIt’s an endlessly creative, hopeful, and joyful headspace to be in.  Some of my favorite moments are of course those unexpected rolls or actions PCs take, when they really bend or experiment with the scripts or constraints – or when I run a game for first time players and you can feel their excitement for the game come to life.

How did you start using TTRPGs with youth and in educational spaces?

I was always interested in using games for teaching and learning and used board games and other simple dice games in my ESL teaching in China.  These activities are perfect for language learners because they are highly engaging, repetitive, and participatory which is excellent for language practice.  But it wasn’t until I started in a masters program in instructional design that I developed a real fascination with video games for teaching and learning literacy in particular.  It was a course from Wisconsin-Madison, inspired by James Paul Gee’s What Videogames Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy(2003) that really changed the way I think about teaching and learning and had me thinking about TTRPGs as a parallel application.  

After teaching in China for six years I became fascinated with disruptive and progressive teaching methodologies, such as participatory teaching, project based learning, and student lead teaching such as those philosophies outlined by Dewey and Freire.  TTRPGs are often a model for these practices and in a way embody progressive teaching and learning principles out of the box.

What are your thoughts on the TTRPG x EDU landscape?

To be clear, full-bore, rules-heavy TTRPGs for teaching and learning (such as transplanting D&D 5e) is not for all students or classrooms.  I think most students could benefit from it, but it will not  become every student’s favorite activity.  There are applications of TTRPGs based learning that plumbs the media for certain structures and scraps onerous rules and lore that works well in most classrooms or settings. My co-author and the co-director of TabletopEDU, Maryanne Cullinnan is an expert in this style of applied TTPRG based teaching, more on that in a later article.  

Instead, I think full-bore TTRPG play is particularly effective at engaging a subset of students who are uninterested in traditional curriculum and school structures.  It probably works best for these students as a hobby or extracurricular, or a special topic course – but I’ve also used it to teach certain types of courses at the college level.  This is obviously a reflection on my own experience growing up with D&D as an orthogonal pathway into academia, but it’s also a parallel of a great paper written by Constance Steinkhuler who looked at WOW players in the early 2000s. She found that there was this subset of boys in particular who were failing ELA classes but smashing standardized test scores in reading out of the park.  They looked closer and these kids were playing tons of World of Warcraft, which actually involved a ton of literacy practice through college level reading and research – gameplay required navigating text and visual complexity like maps, forums, dialogue, lore, and chat etc.  

It turns out that when students are highly motivated to engage in an activity, even if that skill is above or beyond their current level, they find a way to practice and level-up those crucial skills.  This is where I think TTRPGs have a unique position today, when we see chronic absenteeism on the rise and young men, in particular, disengaged from school and society – yet we also see D&D as this ascendant cultural phenomenon that so many of the same folks want to play.  In many ways, TTRPGs are a better analog to academia and professional life than video games, but they also pose unique challenges, like a steep learning curve that often requires experienced players teaching other players to play or GM etc, and so finding a stable player group in your area of peers is often quite challenging.  

This is one of the problems I ultimately want to work on through TabletopEDU inc.: creating community programs through schools and libraries to help connect students who are interested in playing with peer groups, or mentored groups from college students, as a way to keep them engaged in learning.  We’re calling this plan “Big Dragons, Little Dragons” and it’ll be something we work towards after our initial Kickstarter fundraiser.

How do you see TTRPGs uniquely helping youth over typical classroom structures or other forms of media (i.e. TV, books, etc)?

There was a fascinating book that came out a few years ago called Games: Agency as Art (Nguyen 2020).  Nguyen argues that games actually exist as a unique media that reflects agency (various different ways of thinking and acting in the world) vis-à-vis other media such as TV, text, or art that reflect visual design, narratives etc.  While much of “game studies” have looked at video games through the lens of older media studies, like video games as a vehicle for storytelling or as dynamic visual art, Nguyen argues the core of games is actually the choices and actions we take within those games – and by playing we practice intentional decision making and access “whole libraries of agency” that we can integrate and transplant to other domains.  

TTRPG players understand this immediately, and it has important implications for teaching and learning.  I immediately think of another great study that looked at how D&D players, and GM’s, in particular, developed a higher sense of self efficacy;, that is a person’s belief in their ability to perform a specific behavior or achieve a goal.  And so in this way, TTRPGs actually do really powerful work: they teach us not just how to navigate the complexity of all the media that constitute the web of TTRPG gameplay (texts, illustrations, maps, charts, mathematics, dramatic narrative and social interactions) there is also this emergent phenomenon in good gameplay that invites us to take action in concert with others and try on new ways of being and doing.  

These insights begin to knock at the door of the “roleplay” aspect of TTRPGs and take us away from the “gaming” framework that often hinders our thinking about the activity.  Actually, both frames are somewhat pejorative to some parents and teachers, but this is beginning to change.

How have you seen this play out in your classes?

It’s this interactive engagement that had me returning to D&D in 2021 through the pandemic.  I saw my college students really shut down and become uninterested in learning or interactivity, both during the pandemic and after we returned to in-person learning.  I looked to TTRPGs as a way to reinvent my first-year seminar course.  And so I experimented with using TTRPGs in small groups to teach freshman composition and info literacy. 

It was a big hit overall but with plenty of caveats, which we explore (among many other topics) in our upcoming Kickstarter book: Adventures in Teaching and Learning with TTRPGs.  There’s a lot there but I’ll leave it here for this interview.  

The other recent application of TTRPGs was with 6th graders at an area charter school.  We looked at how TTRPGs might change students’ interest in STEM careers.  My wife actually helped put this together. She is a sociologist who studies gender, risk taking, and career – she is managing a large grant from the NSF that is working to recruit more women in computer science.  While this little TTRPG research project wasn’t funded under that NSF grant, I hope to seek something like that as we continue to explore more about the power of roleplay games in teaching and learning.

Thank you Garrett for sharing your XP with us, and good luck on your Kickstarter!

And… you can find more info about Garrett’s work on TabletopEDU and his upcoming Kickstarter book here at the TabletopEDU website!