This presentation, “Agents of Empowerment: A Role-Playing Game in Service to Cultivating a Soulful and Sustainable Academia,” was prepared for the Gamification for Sustainable Development international symposium, December 15, 2021.
Abstract:
Our research group is developing an analog role-playing game entitled Agents of Empowerment. Based upon research on the Batman Effect (White et al., 2017), sustainable transformational leadership (Sharma 2017), and role-playing communities as transformational containers (Bowman and Hugaas 2021), Agents of Empowerment guides participants to develop a superhero alterego that can help them feel more empowered in common stressful academic situations. First, participants engage in a workshop involving somatic experiencing, meditation, character design, and relationship building. Players develop a superhero alterego, as well as a power phrase, symbology, imagery, archetypes, and somatic emotional states that help them activate their “superhero power” within themselves. Importantly, they also construct fictional relationships with other player-characters who have supported them in the past.
Participants then participate in a short educational live action role-playing game (edu-larp) within which they play a version of themselves that has activated this superhero alterego. A benevolent agency tells them they are candidates to form an Avengers-like supergroup that can infiltrate academia, provide support, and cooperate within it. They are led through a series of simulations in which they face typically stressful academic situations with a non player-character (NPC) Antagonist placing either internal or external pressure on them. Participants are asked to activate their superhero — i.e. to slip into somatic states and personality traits conducive to empowerment in these situations — as well as receive support from other characters in their superteam.
As with other forms of educational role-playing, thorough debriefing follows the larp. In its current form, the larp also includes an additional hour-long integration session a week later. Throughout the week, participants are asked to try to “activate their superhero power” in stressful life situations or practice it when relaxed. The integration session is intended to further distill and reinforce the takeaways from the larp in order to concretize learning (Bowman and Hugaas 2019, 2021). On a meta level, the game’s design is intended to facilitate non-fictional relationship-building among the players as a means to build sustainable support networks within academia. To date, in addition to the researchers, the game has been playtested by a 2 groups consisting of 7 graduate students, who showed a great interest in continued play. Ultimately, additional play sessions may also be added to this structure, further reinforcing the goal of sustainable well-being, as such skills take practice.
Bios:
Sarah Lynne Bowman, Ph.D. is a scholar, game designer, and event organizer. She is an Associate Professor for the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University Campus Gotland and the Coordinator for Peace & Conflict Studies at Austin Community College.
Josefin Westborg has a background in game design and pedagogy and is one of the founders of Lajvbyrån (previous LajvVerkstaden Väst). She now works as a Research Assistant as part of the Transformative Play Initiative with focus on analog games at Uppsala University’s Department of Game Design.
Kjell Hedgard Hugaas is a northern Norwegian game designer, organizer, writer, theorist, and trained actor. He is currently a Research Assistant at Uppsala University’s Department of Game Design.
Josephine Baird is a lecturer at Uppsala University’s Department of Game Design and a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna. She is a game designer and game design consultant, as well as a writer and visual artist.