Review of Gratitude Guardians
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Taget audience for Gratitude Guardians
Gratitude Guardians was made by a therapist working with neurodivergent youth to create a fun way to recognize and create moments of gratitude, and it can be used for anyone who wants to focus on their own gratitude practices as well.
Gratitude Guardians is kind of like a tool that you can use in your games to add a traveling buddy to an existing character or create a playable story around the helper mechanics here. There’s no set story requirement or overarching game mechanics, so you can set and choose those to all match your player’s needs.
As a note, while the game does have therapeutic benefits, facilitators should not try to use this for therapy unless they are a trained therapist. If you are not a therapist, you can totally still use this game and have fun with it, allowing players to pick up some intrinsic benefits and practice gratitude skills, but you still shouldn’t try to “treat” something specific unless you have training to do so.
Setting for Gratitude Guardians: freeform and full of wonderful creatures
Like I said above, Gratitude Guardians is more like a mechanic, so it doesn’t come with a whole setting, however, it does add to the world-building for your existing adventures or a new setting that you come up with to incoporate the guardians!
For example, maybe you’re playing a medieval fantasy game already… so you discover that these guardians exist and pop into being when a character needs them most! This could spark all kinds of new adventures with you studying them, protecting them from a danger in the guardians’ realm, and so on.
You might also create your own setting where you play in a world where each character is bonded to a guardian that grows with them and lends them their powers – this could be the whole base for an entire setting on it’s own!
It’s all up to you! You can fit this into something you know or create something new!
Your character in Gratitude Guardians… is you! and maybe also a player character!
There’s two sides to your particular character with Gratitude Guardians.
First is the game character. In the game, you might be playing as a character who has a guardian with them. That character would be going on adventures in the story and exploring the world you’ve created with your friends. They can use the guardian’s abilities to help them overcome challenges in the story.
Second is you as the player. In order to activate your guardian’s super special ability, you need to feed it gratitude by stating things that you’re grateful for, like having a warm bed at night, a book you got from the library, or seeing friends at school. In this sense, you, in the real world, are also a character in the game since you’re using real-life events to power your character.
This also means that you could also just play as yourself! It’s quite possible to image your character with you in real life or play out a LARP where you are you!
Mechanics in Gratitude Guardians based on real-life
In Gratitude Guardians, the core of the whole instrument is that you have a companion who sticks around and helps you on your adventures and stories. This companion can be made up on your own or have characteristics rolled from the tables provided with the game. You’ll assign them a few abilities that players can also learn from and use in real life, and you charge your guardian by stating things that you’re grateful for!
The three abilities that you pick are related to the element for your little buddy (i.e. ice, earth, water, etc) and help players to practice skills like deep breathing, finding self-regulation tools, and creating a safe place (physically or in their mind) that will be used while playing the game.
In addition to having these mechanics present, there’s explinations in the document about WHY they were chosen and are present and how they can help players. For the breath ability, it explains why doing a breathing exercise can help. For the unique ability, it gives examples of several self-regulation/state change techniques that could be used… and I really appreciate that. It gives the facilitator background as to the intentions behind the specific game mechanic and helps them to understand the importance of using this tool. It builds a toolkit for both the players and the facilitator.
Overall thoughts on Gratitude Guardians
I think Gratitude Guardians is a great supplementary mechanic to add to games and essentially create a mental gratitude journal as you play. My kid (and I) both love having pets and helper companions in our adventures since they they teach responsibility and empathy and give your character a bit of a boost sometimes too. This takes that several steps further! And it is immensely creative! You can make quite a few different guardians and pick the one you’d like that day or maybe have a whole team, like in Pokemon, and explore how different techniques can play out. It’s open and flexible, and I really enjoyed checking this out and getting to make some fun characters for our games with it!
Find a copy of Gratitude Guardians
You can find a copy of Gratitude Guardians on the TheraPLAYtic itchio here!
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