Tabletop Role-Playing Case Study: Dungeons And Dragons

Review of Literature

Drachen et al. (2009) define tabletop role-playing game (RPG) as an interactive, immersive, and storytelling system that simulates an alternate reality in the minds of its players. Role-playing is a broad activity and can be utilized to improve different aspects of everyday life such as leisure, health, or education. Conducted in the proper context , role-playing can provide a number of benefits including fulfilling social needs, encouraging motivation and perspective-taking, and fostering creativity.

Social needs

In a case study involving a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) role-playing group, Adams (2013) concluded that in-game group communication fulfilled players’ social needs. As mentioned by Lambert et al. (2013), and Koudenburg

Players essentially became new and different people (i.e. a disabled player designing an able-bodied character, a gay male role-playing as a straight female) when they could have portrayed themselves as they were (Adams, 2013). Therefore, the need to break away from the predictable and mundane can be considered as a type of motivation, according to Warmelink, Harteveld, & Mayer (2009) in their deconstruction of

Kaario et al. (2009) devised their own role-playing game to use in their service designer seminar and summarized that the game forced their players to take on the point-of-view of the user. Players considered “the service needs of the users from several angles and also outside of their own profession,” which in turn resulted in new service networks and solutions (Kaario et al., 2009). In Kilgour et al.’s (2015) study on role-playing as a tool to facilitate learning, the activity helped students visualize written history and understand the point-of-view of a minority worker. The importance of developing perspective-taking cannot be stressed enough. Surveying 13, 289 college students, Dugan et al. (2014) concluded that, with the influence of social perspective-taking, college is a critical period to develop group and eventually societal leadership skills. Lastly, because perspective-taking is a private mental state, it is strongly influenced by one’s own culture, according to Wu & Keysar (2007) in their experiment involving 20 Chinese students and 20 non-Asians; it was concluded that perspective-taking is more natural in cultures that support interdependence (East Asian culture) than independence (Western