Full disclosure: I'm a nerd in so many senses of the word. But one of the nerdliest is D&D, or Dungeons and Dragons. I started playing in college when I met my good friend Jake, a wordly DM (Dungeon Master, which is a weird way in D&D of saying the person who runs the game). I had experimented with other role-playing games (RPGs) in high school, like White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade and Mage: The Ascension, but D&D combined my love of fantasy with an open-world game system. Quite literally, you can do anything in D&D, and with fantasy components like magic and dragons and demons and all the tropes, that really did mean ANYTHING.
I've been playing since then, off and on, with teachers and friends, and I've converted many a non-player. But more recently, I've been getting more into the teacher side of things. On the OFFICIAL DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS PODCAST (! It's a thing!), Dragon Talk, there have been a few episodes about the use of D&D as an educational and therapeutic tool. I've also been talking to my friend Kristin, who is a therapist that works with people with special needs, and she sees role-playing games as a great way to codify and simulate social interactions for kids with autism, for example. In education, like with the other games, I like that games like D&D provide a simulation and a chance to play with concepts and in a world that might mimic our own, or one that has systems like our own. But what I really like about role-playing games is what drew me to them originally: you can do anything. They are far more open-ended. And with that comes the narrative aspect of the games; you get to play a character within a world and really have the capacity to think, "What would I do?" and then do it.
For my Government class, I stumbled upon a really cool game called Kingdom, which is a simplified RPG. Unlike D&D, there are no dice and stats, and there isn't even a DM (sigh). You make a character, and then collaborate with the other people and their characters to create the world and the situations you encounter within it. There are other systems that are decentralized like this (Fiasco being a personal favorite!), where no one person dominates or decides on the game, which I like.
The other thing I like is that Kingdom has a government-focus. The rules that are there are focused are examining communities and how they deal with issues that are important to them. For example, there are 3 roles that each character takes on. The most direct and obvious one is Power, which means that the character is the decision-maker in the community. In mechanical terms, it means that when the group comes to a Crossroad and has to make a decision in the game, the Power character makes that decision. The Perspective role knows stuff. That means they add consequences to those decisions ("If we vote, 'Yes,' then this bad thing might happen...") and then those things come true when Power makes that decision. And the Touchstone character knows what the people think and feel about the issue, and they can cause things to escalate quickly, especially if the other characters aren't listening to them. It's a fascinating interactive system focused on group dynamics, it's simple, and it's very adaptable to any group and issue facing them.
So I decided to experiment with this system in my Gov classes. I gave each group a copy of the rules along with some print outs and cheat sheets to help with things. I also developed Group Roles to help facilitate play: one player was the Leader and kept the progression of play moving, one was the Rules Lawyer who learned the rules best, one was the Topic Expert, and one was the Note Taker. I told groups that they would choose one contemporary issue (we had just done a Current Events assignment) to base their game on, and that their community would be ours in real life, either Los Angeles, California, or the United States. As a group, they decided on the issue, made characters, and then the next class, they played!
It was a kind of wonderful chaos. Some groups definitely took things to a different level. For example, one group decided on climate change as their issue, and there were talking penguins, and things got a bit weird. I decided not to reign in things to see what they came up with. It was an experiment, after all. Other groups took on more serious issues, like the Church abuse scandal, immigration and deportation, and the women's march. It was interesting, most everyone had fun. But afterwards, there were a few points that came out of it for further review.
First, students were a bit unclear about their purpose. While they knew it was about a contemporary issue, they weren't sure why they were doing it. To that point, I think that more clear learning objectives might help. If the focus were more narrowed, say a few scenarios and/or roles to choose from. An open world is fun to play in, but absolute freedom can be intimidating.
And some students were frustrated because they didn't know how things ACTUALLY worked. For example, one group was dealing with immigration and a character that was detained at the border, but when they played things out, they didn't know how to accurately portray this situation. In other words, they wished they could learn more about this topic. As a teacher, this is music to my ears! Can we learn more? Yes, please! But this did make me think of how to better structure the game next time to maximize our learning from it.
Next time, I think I will use the game as an extension activity on our unit of study. After we've reviewed information, I will assign the game with set parameters based on our previous unit of study. For example, there might be a few scenarios based on what students are interested in going into more detail about. One group will go into interactions between the President and Congress, one might do linkage institutions and their effect on the legislative process, one might look at the bureaucracy of the Executive branch, etc. Then, after the group sets up its issue and its characters, they do research that is pertinent to the game, like about the issue or about how court cases work, so on. Then they'll be ready to play.
I still love the idea, and I think it's viable in a classroom setting. But it's a bit of a process figuring out how to do it best. We just started another, more directed roleplay on the Constitutional Convention from Zinn Education that I've done before and really like (it's probably the inspiration for these kinds of projects, like their Columbus and Reconstruction roleplays, which are also top notch!), and I like that there's more definition to them. But I want to keep pushing on more modern ones, and I like that Kingdom is messy. Too often, assignments are clean and neat in school and don't exemplify the real world. It's like a science lab, where you are expected to do the exact same experiment to get the exact same results. It's informative, sure, but it's not real science. And it doesn't necessarily fuel true inquiry.
I've been playing since then, off and on, with teachers and friends, and I've converted many a non-player. But more recently, I've been getting more into the teacher side of things. On the OFFICIAL DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS PODCAST (! It's a thing!), Dragon Talk, there have been a few episodes about the use of D&D as an educational and therapeutic tool. I've also been talking to my friend Kristin, who is a therapist that works with people with special needs, and she sees role-playing games as a great way to codify and simulate social interactions for kids with autism, for example. In education, like with the other games, I like that games like D&D provide a simulation and a chance to play with concepts and in a world that might mimic our own, or one that has systems like our own. But what I really like about role-playing games is what drew me to them originally: you can do anything. They are far more open-ended. And with that comes the narrative aspect of the games; you get to play a character within a world and really have the capacity to think, "What would I do?" and then do it.
For my Government class, I stumbled upon a really cool game called Kingdom, which is a simplified RPG. Unlike D&D, there are no dice and stats, and there isn't even a DM (sigh). You make a character, and then collaborate with the other people and their characters to create the world and the situations you encounter within it. There are other systems that are decentralized like this (Fiasco being a personal favorite!), where no one person dominates or decides on the game, which I like.
The other thing I like is that Kingdom has a government-focus. The rules that are there are focused are examining communities and how they deal with issues that are important to them. For example, there are 3 roles that each character takes on. The most direct and obvious one is Power, which means that the character is the decision-maker in the community. In mechanical terms, it means that when the group comes to a Crossroad and has to make a decision in the game, the Power character makes that decision. The Perspective role knows stuff. That means they add consequences to those decisions ("If we vote, 'Yes,' then this bad thing might happen...") and then those things come true when Power makes that decision. And the Touchstone character knows what the people think and feel about the issue, and they can cause things to escalate quickly, especially if the other characters aren't listening to them. It's a fascinating interactive system focused on group dynamics, it's simple, and it's very adaptable to any group and issue facing them.
So I decided to experiment with this system in my Gov classes. I gave each group a copy of the rules along with some print outs and cheat sheets to help with things. I also developed Group Roles to help facilitate play: one player was the Leader and kept the progression of play moving, one was the Rules Lawyer who learned the rules best, one was the Topic Expert, and one was the Note Taker. I told groups that they would choose one contemporary issue (we had just done a Current Events assignment) to base their game on, and that their community would be ours in real life, either Los Angeles, California, or the United States. As a group, they decided on the issue, made characters, and then the next class, they played!
It was a kind of wonderful chaos. Some groups definitely took things to a different level. For example, one group decided on climate change as their issue, and there were talking penguins, and things got a bit weird. I decided not to reign in things to see what they came up with. It was an experiment, after all. Other groups took on more serious issues, like the Church abuse scandal, immigration and deportation, and the women's march. It was interesting, most everyone had fun. But afterwards, there were a few points that came out of it for further review.
First, students were a bit unclear about their purpose. While they knew it was about a contemporary issue, they weren't sure why they were doing it. To that point, I think that more clear learning objectives might help. If the focus were more narrowed, say a few scenarios and/or roles to choose from. An open world is fun to play in, but absolute freedom can be intimidating.
And some students were frustrated because they didn't know how things ACTUALLY worked. For example, one group was dealing with immigration and a character that was detained at the border, but when they played things out, they didn't know how to accurately portray this situation. In other words, they wished they could learn more about this topic. As a teacher, this is music to my ears! Can we learn more? Yes, please! But this did make me think of how to better structure the game next time to maximize our learning from it.
Next time, I think I will use the game as an extension activity on our unit of study. After we've reviewed information, I will assign the game with set parameters based on our previous unit of study. For example, there might be a few scenarios based on what students are interested in going into more detail about. One group will go into interactions between the President and Congress, one might do linkage institutions and their effect on the legislative process, one might look at the bureaucracy of the Executive branch, etc. Then, after the group sets up its issue and its characters, they do research that is pertinent to the game, like about the issue or about how court cases work, so on. Then they'll be ready to play.
I still love the idea, and I think it's viable in a classroom setting. But it's a bit of a process figuring out how to do it best. We just started another, more directed roleplay on the Constitutional Convention from Zinn Education that I've done before and really like (it's probably the inspiration for these kinds of projects, like their Columbus and Reconstruction roleplays, which are also top notch!), and I like that there's more definition to them. But I want to keep pushing on more modern ones, and I like that Kingdom is messy. Too often, assignments are clean and neat in school and don't exemplify the real world. It's like a science lab, where you are expected to do the exact same experiment to get the exact same results. It's informative, sure, but it's not real science. And it doesn't necessarily fuel true inquiry.
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