TTRPG and psychology

#1

Hello,
French community JdRpourTous (TTRPGforEveryone) has this project of reaching out for professionals in the medical, medico-social and medico-educative fields. We are gathering, evaluating and curating studies and ressources to make use of TTRPG for therapeutic or educative purposes and for various accessibility needs (this last part is already well covered, as it is the community raison d’être).
Those of you who have useful resources or expertise on the subject are welcome to hit me here with whatever ideas or material you’ve got.
Thanks !

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#2

Hello! I’m a trainee therapist working on a Ph.D. Currently I am working with serious mental illness in a community mental health center. This is absolutely a topic that I am interested in, and have been thinking about doing more formal research into the field of using TTRPGs & other collaborative storytelling mechanics to assist in mental health work. In the psychodynamic work that I do, I feel like a lot of my experience as a GM/MC has been useful in guiding people through things like early-life portrayals, roleplays, understanding experiential emotions, etc.

Anyway, just dropping a line to say hello, I’m interested, and will give this some more thought!

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#3

Most of the documents we share are in french, and it’s only the first weeks of our project, but we are beginning to gather and curate a database of academic articles and amateur testimonies. The database is to be a toolbox for professionals : indications, limits, adaptations, tools and protocols.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1l9HQTD7lqvVgy3jDOeBTIg1qVGh2yB1E

The first goal is to make professionnals aware of the potential of ludo-therapy though TTRPG. Ideally, they would later contact local concerned gaming associations to schedule interventions or train themselves with online gaming communities that have medico/socio/educative expertise. This part we can only do fro france, but the database is open.

There probably are other projects like this (Analog Game Studies comes to mind) we could merge or network with.

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#4

Hello DeReel!

I am an anthropology student in the USA, and recently wrote an academic position essay arguing for the effectiveness of TTRPGs in education. I have collected more than a few resources that you may be interested. As this is my first post on this site, I can unfortunately not send any links, so I will just have to tell you the names of the studies and you will have to find them yourself. These were all well-written studies that were instrumental in shaping my argument for the educational benefits of TTRPGs.

  • Anthropological Role-Playing Games as Multimodal Rhetorical Tools: Rhetoric, Simulation, and Critique, by Petros Petridis
  • Dungeons of the Mind: Tabletop RPGs as Social Therapy, by Chris Berg
  • The Incorporeal Project: Teaching Through Tabletop RPGs in Brazil, by Carlos Klimick and Rian Rezende
  • Learning and Role-Playing Games, by Sarah Lynne Bowman et. al.
  • Tabletop Role-Playing Games and Social Skills in Young Adults, by Lily Spinelli
  • Teaching Anthropology of/through Games, by Krista Harper
  • The Transformative Potential of Role-Playing Games: From Play Skills to Human Skills, by Stephane Daniu

As far as my research shows, Sarah Lynne Bowman seems to be the most prolific and authoritative researcher on educational and therapeutic roleplaying in the USA. You may get some benefit by looking at some of other works. She has a helpful website with her publications on it, but once again, can’t link it.

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#5

Tank you for the studies and direction. Collective intellect FTW!

#6

Here’s an essay on itch that I’ve been meaning to read forever and haven’t yet:

here’s an episode from the 3BH podcast that touches the subject lightly, but my one favourite takeaway from this episode is the (mis)quote: “RPG is a lot less about leraning about the other and more about lerning about yoursef”.

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#7

Thank you!
I add these documents to our resources.

#8

Hi,
It’s on. We’re curating the list and taking contacts. You can gather and organize documentation directly here
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ox8zz6uIM0BZAuU_wUD0x_E2D3WUhcMG?usp=sharing
We welcome all languages but the project is mostly francophone. Therefore, if a parallel project sees the light in another language, we’d be glad to coordinate efforts.