Role Playing Games as Creative Inquiry

Tabletop Roleplaying Games (TTRPGs) are a fantastic integration of story-telling,, elegant constraint and rule systems, improvisation, and collaboration. TTRPGs can also integrate myriad ways of knowing and disciplines by being set in different realities, historical moments, or genres. They allow us to create a world together, step into it, and make choices of consequence to the world.  Like other forms of play, storytelling, and simulation, TTRPGs offer creative access to deeply human themes and questions. Our task in this program will be to inquire into the nature of roleplaying games as a means of accessing such questions: we'll make a study of the design of roleplaying games, the playing of games, and intellectual and emotional rewards of serious play in the broader academic context of gaining skills as writers, readers, and makers.

To be clear, the goal of the program will not be to indulge in any existing game-world or to linger obsessively in the collecting of game paraphernalia or the minutia of anyone's preferred game. 

Our core assumption will be that TTRPGs are a form of interactive and collaborative literature informed by broad concepts of game design, and that will be evident in readings, lectures, workshops, and credits. That said, we'll hope to create a community that loves discussing gaming experiences and connecting, perhaps to play together outside of class.

In the program, and in your weekly work, we'll investigate the myriad of ways in which we can leverage storytelling techniques for game design and vice versa. How might we put these mediums in conversation with each other, to enhance each other? We’ll develop stories, characters, and worlds in the context of rules, mechanics, collaboration, and open-ended play. We will read and playtest a number of exemplary games (M.U.D.: A Golem Memoir, Thousand Year Old Vampire, Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, We Die Here, Follow Me Down, Mörk Borg) and literary works (Frankenstein, It Lasts Forever and then It’s Over, Severance, “Bloodchild”, Haunting of Hill House, and others). Classroom activities and homework will engage us in the meeting place of literature and games; writing practices that cross between story craft and the clarity and concision of a rulebook; character creation practices that connect psychological depth with the spirit of systems; improvisational story-telling and scene structures that move toward thematic power; and world-building that gets us warmed up for the two main projects of the quarter: designing a small-scale roleplaying game (in small collaborative groups) and writing individual fictions that take place within the shared game world.
Through critical development phases, workshops, peer-critique, and play-sessions, students will develop their creative fictions alongside the collaboratively-developed, self-contained, playable TTRPGs that involve a specific "inquiry." While students will be free to design their games as they like, we’ll consider the “Apocalypse World” model as a good starting point and a reasonable scale of game system to attempt. Students have the option of learning some fundamentals of graphic design using InDesign and Photoshop so that they can produce their TTRPG as a booklet/PDF in the style of many "indie" games. Emphasis will be on printed, pen and paper-based game design using simple additional materials (dice, cards, counters, etc.).

This program is coordinated with Greener Foundations for first-year students. Greener Foundations is Evergreen’s in-person 2-quarter introductory student success course sequence, which provides first-year students with the skills and knowledge they need to thrive at Evergreen. Students expected to take Greener Foundations will be registered for a 2-credit Greener Foundations course in addition to this 14-credit program. 

First-year students who are not expected to take Greener Foundations or have been granted an exemption will register for 14-credits only. Find more details about who isn't expected to take Greener Foundations on the Greener Foundations website.

Interested Junior or Senior level students can contact the faculty to discuss the possibility of registering for this program.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

6 – Creative Writing

6 – Game Design

2 - Literature