Episode 130 Christopher Stuart on Applied TTPRGs
Christopher Stuart on Applied TTPRGs
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Experience Points, Dr. Christopher Stuart, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at UNC Wilmington, delves into the transformative role of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) in education and facilitation. Christopher shares insights from his research on game dynamics, player engagement, and the collaborative art of facilitation. He discusses how TTRPGs foster systems thinking, play, and failure as essential learning tools. Reflecting on his academic journey, Christopher explores how gaming language and frameworks can create inclusive, engaging classroom experiences. He also highlights the impact of design, accessibility, and playful pedagogy on student engagement.
Christopher Stuart
he/him/his
Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
University of North Carolina Wilmington
Christopher Stuart is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His current scholarship largely focuses on tabletop roleplaying games and the dynamics of game facilitation and player investment. He has also worked on several micro TTRPGs and is currently working on his own TTRPG system.
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartphd/
(Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/christuartgamer
(TikTok): https://www.tiktok.com/@christuartdm
(Website): https://wwww.christuart.com
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com. On today's episode, we'll learn from Dr. Christopher Stuart. Christopher Stuart is an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His scholarship largely focuses on tabletop role-playing games, and the dynamics of game facilitation and player investment. He's also worked on several micro TTRPGs and his currently working on his own TTRPG system. Chris, welcome to the show.
Christopher Stuart:
Thank you so much for having me today, Dave.
Dave Eng:
Great. I'm glad to have you here, Chris. So, I want to talk a 0little bit more about facilitation and player engagement. Because I know whenever I talk to other educators or just other players about using tabletop role-playing games in the classroom, often one of the elements that prevents from doing so is really taking on the role of a good facilitator and engaging players. So, I'd like to know for the first question, can you delve into how your research on tabletop role-playing games, that we'll call TTRPGs, has highlighted key dynamics of game facilitation and player investment? And a follow-up, what have you found are the main factors influencing player engagement and how do elements like gamer identity, collaborative world-building and language around facilitation and character creation contribute to this experience?
Christopher Stuart:
Yeah, Dave, I really love this question because it goes into everything that I do. But even before I started researching, these are the things that drew me to tabletop role-playing games. So my research has really been a great personal and academic journey because I started playing and facilitating tabletop role-playing games in grad school about 10 years ago, and I couldn't figure out if I wanted to actually do research on it or not because I was doing a lot of things on video games and a lot of different work on playing in the classroom, but tabletop role-playing games always intimidated me because they are quite large. So bringing them into the classroom was not something I quite figured out yet.
But I started researching theories of communication when I was hired in my current position. And the more that I started reading about communication theory, the more that I was thinking about my own facilitation style as well as the players that were at the table. And it really did help me teach others about good facilitation practices, but also how to be a better facilitator and be more intentional and inclusive as a facilitator. And this expanded way beyond just the gaming element when I was facilitating workshops, being in a classroom space, et cetera, it really helped be more intentional about those things. So I really operate on the assumption that everyone deserves a seat at a table, but not every table is a good fit for all players. And I think this is part of the intimidation that people have with bringing tabletop role-playing games either to the table or classroom.
So facilitation styles greatly vary just like player styles do. Bu in addition to the facilitation style, you also have player dynamics. You have different systems that you have to choose to play. The setting of the game, the tone of the game, introduction of home-brewed rules that are not written in the system document, all of that changes the way that we experience play. So when it comes to thinking about facilitation and the players, we really do have to kind of narrow down our style. Just like a writing style, there's a facilitation style.
So for facilitators, we typically have really prep-heavy and script-heavy plotters world builders. They do a lot of the heavy lifting. They really build everything out before the players even experience that world. Some would say that's more akin to a video game, that's a role-playing game, where everything is really fleshed out. But the opposite, not meaning that it's good or bad, there's no value statement here, but the opposite of that would be much more of an improv-heavy facilitator. As one of my players describes it, it's kind of like facilitating with some hopes and dreams and you just kind of jump into it.
And that spectrum has so many different elements that shape the experience at the table, both for the facilitator and the player. So if we think of it from a lot of different angles, you can kind of start shaping with communication theories, with rhetorical theories, with pedagogical approaches. You could really see how all this stuff kind of ties together. But if we think of everything from giving a player the opportunity to create their own non-player characters from backstories, maybe locations and items and all different kinds of things that they can engage with either loosely or strictly planning those things out, that's a very different style of engagement than just waiting for something to come up and then interacting with it.
And the way that I like to talk about facilitation, facilitation largely we think of it as being more horizontal outside of the play space. When we talk about facilitating workshops or good facilitator practices, it's largely horizontal. But there's also the more top-down approach at the gaming table where you do a lot of the world building, you do a lot of the heavy lifting and then you interact with the players as you go. So if everything comes down to restrictions of play and character customization, then we really have to look at more of the communication practices at the table because a lot of that is governed both by what the facilitator allows, does not allow or communicates at the table as well as the system documents. So one of the research projects I'm working on right now with my students, we are looking at game books and the language around facilitator and player.
So all of this ties into what influences player engagement, what influences who may or may not want to bring this to their table or classroom. And it really does change the experience if you are solely looking at that system document. So an example, typically a game facilitator for a tabletop role playing game is called generically a game master. Master is the operative word here. So, master has the connotation that you are the master of something, you own something, you have absolute power, all-knowing, almost like God-like Biblical ways of thinking of this all-seeing being. But the meaning of ownership is something that I really have a hard time with. When I sit at the table to facilitate, I don't own anything. Physically, I might own the books, but I don't own the story, I don't own the players. So to me, master and facilitator are kind of at odds with each other. And most system books will say master of some kind.
There are some more thematic ways of thinking of facilitation, like Dungeons & Dragons uses Dungeon Master, but it still hinges on master. I look at everything as a collaborative effort. So I like the systems and there's not too many of them, but I like the systems that lean on some more neutral language, like guide. You are guiding players through an adventure. You're not telling them what to do, you're not restricting on what they can do. You're just the guide. So if we're really leaning on this kind of language in the Dungeon Master's Guide for D&D, it says that the DM is a creative force. They're a mediator. They're an architect of a play space. I think all of that is true, but when it gets into all the different roles of Dungeon Master, I don't think that they actually align well with the term master. Because you don't have to be the all-knowing person at the table for the rules or the world or anything like that. You don't have to master anything. So that's just one of many examples of how I look at the language that shapes experience at the table.
Dave Eng:
And I think something that really resonated with me was when you're talking about facilitation, you very much emphasize it as a collaborative effort. And I think that whenever I think about a facilitator in general, it doesn't even have to be for a tabletop role playing game, but they're a person that, quote unquote, "facilitates the connection" between one person and the other people or between one person in the group. And I think at the very basic level, that is what that person is supposed to do. I think when it comes to TTRPGs, there's very much like world-building and interactive element, but I think it's at its base level, if I were talking about competencies, the facilitator needs to be able to create that connection between everyone at the table. And like you said before, sometimes it might be the right person at the wrong seat of the table, and it's up to the facilitator to make it so that that connection is as smooth as possible.
Christopher Stuart:
Absolutely, and I like to think of a facilitator as a connector. You are connecting plots, you are connecting stories, you're connecting characters, you're connecting experiences both at the table and outside the table. You're doing a lot of this connective work and you're weaving those things together. And I love that framing of it. And you're right, I mean a facilitator say of a professional development workshop of making sure that people have connections to what you're talking about. So we see live action role play all the time in those kind of workshops. We don't call it gaming. We don't call it playful, but there's all these role scenarios that they go through to try to ground those connections in the material. And the facilitator should have contingency plans for if something's not resonating well and trying to make those connections. But yeah, it's a much more horizontal approach, and I think that the collaborative element of facilitator needs to resonate really strongly when it comes to tabletop role playing games.
Dave Eng:
So I know with that first question, we took that deep dive into tabletop role playing games overall, but specifically for this one, I'd like to learn more, Chris, from your perspective about TTRPG elements and education. So specifically in your past work, you've incorporated those elements into the classroom setting, particularly during your PhD studies. So what insights do you have from using TTRPG frameworks to support skill development? And have any of these ideas influenced your current approach to teaching branding and design?
Christopher Stuart:
Absolutely. I miss using game-based pedagogy in such a detailed, profound way that I used to do in my PhD studies when I was teaching writing classes, composition writing, advanced composition, where I could really dig into game-based pedagogy and use all the different terminology of gaming. I truly loved that and my dissertation explores that as well. But when it comes to really thinking about all of this in different classroom spaces, even meetings, workshops, everyday life, et cetera, there's so much scholarship out there on different theories of gaming and play and whatnot. I like to boil it down to two things, two very easy, concise ways of articulating gaming frameworks and systems, and that's play and failure. So when I'm thinking of the more elaborate game-based pedagogical approaches, they all still go back to play and failure because we're using playful language where we're enacting different types of play and all different ways to define it.
And then we also make space for failure, and we talk about what failure is. So at its core, I really lean heavily on Miguel Sicart. He wrote a book called Play Matters, and I absolutely cherish that book, and he explains that play is an act of being human. So when I talk to my students about play, I try to get rid of that binary, that dichotomy of play versus work. Play as childish, work as serious and adult. I try to break that down by just framing it as being human. And he articulates play in some of these really beautiful ways. Some of my favorite kind of expressions that he has is that play is a dance between creation and destruction. So when I'm teaching my students, and we use the five canons of rhetoric, so we spend a lot of time talking about the importance of invention or brainstorming and the kind of iterative approach through drafting and grading drafts and getting feedback, peer review feedback and everything else.
We talk about those approaches as being playful. And he explains... And this is how I think it connects a little bit more directly with tabletop role-playing games, but he explains that play is fragile and it's also a tense activity that is prone to breakdowns and all these myriads of fragile states. And collective play because it's a collaborative way of engaging with the world, collective play is a balance of ego and interest and purpose and intention. So if you're facilitating or you're in the classroom, it doesn't matter what you are doing, if you're in a facilitation role, there's always going to be different egos that you have to balance, group dynamics.
You have to think about what personalities are in the classroom or the workspace and how you're going to balance those and what people are interested in, what the purpose of the session is, what my intentions are, what their intentions... All of that is play, and it is a complicated mix of play. And I try to use a play to talk about brainstorming and drafting, but also interpretation. So interpretation of instruction perhaps, or the world. I talk about it as research, like Alice jumping down the rabbit hole. And I try to combine all those elements to talk about just instead of the single line approach of dedication, perseverance, whatever you want to frame it as, play can be all those things.
But play is a way of having a safety net under you, which leads to failure. So failure is just as important as play, especially in the academic context because students are terrified of failing. Because when they hear failure, they think of absolute failure. They think of getting an F on an assignment or failing a class. They think of their GPA instantly. And I try to remove failure from grades and say that there are ways to talk about failure that have very little to do with assessment, with GPA and everything else. But I explain to them that if we move away from this idea of absolute failure, we can reframe it as maybe not meeting our own personal expectations or the expectations a group made of the facilitator. We can talk about it of trying to interpret lessons that we're not familiar with and we have a playful kind of disposition to it, and with the expectation that you might get it wrong and that's okay.
But every instance of failure, whatever gravity it is, it's all a lesson. And we can learn from that lesson and we can approach in a different way to then try it again. It's like those mazes that we see on children's menus all the time. Sometimes you hit a wall, but you could always turn around and try a different path and see where that leads you. So when I talk about branding and designing in my classes, I teach different classes on desktop publishing, message design, campaign design, storytelling, digital storytelling from a marketing perspective, I talk to them about playful interpretations of a client brief or playful understandings of a brand or a brand guide. I try to think of them as designing assets in a playful way.
Use shapes and typography and color in a playful way to convey your ideas, knowing that it might not stick, it might not land on somebody may criticize and not like it or whatever, and that's okay, but you still tried something, you still learn something. And instead of just trying to speak or do something directly to the expectations of who's on the other end, I try to get them to open up your perspective and the perspective of whoever you're communicating to by having a more playful interpretation and a playful understanding of things. So giving them that safety net is really helpful. And the easiest way to articulate safety nets with these kinds of projects is iterative design. So drafts, revision opportunities, and really ask them to push their understanding and push their abilities in a lot of different ways. So really the things that I bring into everything from tabletop role-playing games or gaming in general is play and failure.
Dave Eng:
And we talked a little bit about this prior to just recording, but we were talking about different forms of media. And you bring up a really good point, Chris, in that virtually all media is consumed. But I think games are a unique form of media because we don't refer to people as consuming games, but we refer to people as playing games. And that play aspect, to your point, is very much part of that core loop, that sort of experiential feedback that learners get from the process. And I think that feedback is a really essential part, the educational process, and you've exemplified it in your answer. So thank you, Chris.
Christopher Stuart:
Yeah, and there's some brilliant work by... I'm drawing a blank on her first name, but Kafai is her last name, K-A-F-A-I. And she has these ideas of connected gaming, gaming fluency, and all these other things that are directed towards the lower end of K-12, but they're applicable to everybody. And a lot of what she explains is that you need a feedback loop. That's why we go through alpha beta testing for software, for games, et cetera. We want that feedback and we approach it in an iterative way so we can have moments of reflection, so we can have moments of assessment, and then we can create a new plan, a new plan of action. And I don't think we give enough space to that outside of the composition classroom, the writing classroom, because that's usually where we see more iterative approaches. Even though it causes significantly more work for me, I think having drafts and feedback and the opportunity for revision really embodies that kind of playful, and maybe you want to call it fail-forward approach to teaching.
Dave Eng:
So I think that is a really good transition into our third and last question, specifically playing and student engagement overall with TTRPG elements. So reflecting again on your experience in the past as a PhD student and then now as a professor, how have students responded to the inclusion of TTRPG elements in the classroom? And the follow-up is when you incorporate these games, especially in areas like layout, accessibility and organization, what feedback or engagement do you notice from your students overall?
Christopher Stuart:
Yeah, great question. So I periodically teach a large lecture class on the introduction to integrated marketing communication, which is one of the areas that I teach in. And it's kind of a history of persuasion from a marketing perspective in the United States. And the book that we use goes into video games as a medium and as a marketing tool towards the end. And I really despise that chapter because it leads with addiction. It focuses on how addictive gaming is and how that is used as another marketing tool and everything else. So I have one slide that kind of summarizes that chapter, and then I very quickly go into play and failure and talk about the importance of play, my personal journey with play from being a child to today and what that looks like, digital, analog, imaginative things with my children, et cetera, all of it.
I kind of cover it all. And it's a very kind of vulnerable but very, very open lecture. And at first when I talk about gaming, there's a couple male students that might perk up. There's a couple female students that might just kind of look up when I mentioned Mario or Minecraft or something like that. But by the end of that lecture, so many of the students are paying attention because I use... Jesper Juul came out with a really cool definition. There's a six part definition of what a game is, and I put that a slide and I explain each one, each condition of what a game is. For instance, meaningful outcomes, being invested in the outcome, a rule-based system, et cetera.
And then I say, "Okay, all of you are very familiar with this detailed definition of games because you're all in education. You may have a job, you may have all these other things. These are rule-based systems." So we talk about the game definition that Jesper Juul has, and I kind of lay on top of it the rules of the university. And when they start seeing those connections, we say, "Okay, so you see how this is important to understand the definition of a game and how all that works? Well, this is just a systems approach." So then in communication studies, we do talk about systems quite a bit, and organizational systems, communication systems.
So I get them to understand it in another very kind of a roundabout way of talking about systems. And they say, "Okay, so how does play enter all this? How do games enter all of this stuff? How can we talk about this in the classroom?" And so they start as skeptics and then they see the value of it. And then when I have them in other classes, because kind of like the first level that you would take in this track. So then when I get them in the next classes and I'm like, "Hey, remember we talked about play? Remember we talked about failure and games and everything else? So let's understand this assignment or whatever as a system." So I use games quite a bit, and in the message design class that I teach, they actually create their own gaming companies, partially because most of them have no idea how the gaming industry works.
And another part of it, I explained to them, "You're going to work on projects and in disciplines or fields that you don't know much at all. You really don't know how it functions, so you're going to have to do that research. So this is a safe way of researching something that you don't know much about, and we're all doing it together, and I'm going to guide you along the way, and it's okay if you make some mistakes because this is a safe space to do that." So I kind of bring those concepts back. We directly talk about the gaming industry. And at first a lot of them are like, "What am I doing here? I wanted to create a beauty brand. I wanted to create a fashion brand." But then by the end, they're really proud of the fictitious companies that they created and what they stand for because they get to write the mission statements and all different kinds of stuff.
So that's one way. But then from a design perspective, I've been bringing in tabletop games because they are long form system reference documents. So I bring them into the classroom and they largely don't have standards for publication. So I have them compare that book to say their textbook or a novel or whatever. And we talk about color, we talk about accessibility, so we talk about contrast and text sizes, organization systems, all different kinds of things. But I have them looking at the gaming systems because they're so complicated and so many of them have been like, "Hey, this is more interesting than I thought." I have PDFs and physical books. Some of them have even asked to borrow them to read them, or, "Hey, I think my boyfriend would be interested in this. Maybe I'll talk to him." "Hey, my girlfriend has mentioned something about D&D."
And it's really fun to see that curiosity peak. So they've done analyses from a design perspective and from a system perspective, thinking of how do you articulate such complicated ideas in a way that your specific audience could pick it up, whether that is pre-teen, an adult, all audiences, whatever. And then we even compare D&D, which is more teenage/adult to ones that are meant to be played with pre-teens, and how do they accomplish the same goals and how are they doing it in a playful way or is it all work and no-play kind of mentality of articulating systems, the language that governs the stuff. So it's been a lot of fun seeing their judgment, their skepticism, kind of break away and understand this medium.
And also when I talk about the gaming industry as being the second most lucrative entertainment industry in the world, well beyond movies and TV shows and everything else, and sports, they're in shock. They don't really understand that. And then of course, I bring in the ESA reports and other things that talk about what does a gamer look like in the United States and in the world, and they're shocked to see that it's kind of 50/50 representation, that it's not just a male-dominated space. So it's been really fun kind of bringing those elements in. And to kind of circle back to the start of your question about when I used to teach this in the PhD, in my PhD program, when I would say, "Hey, you're going to be leveling up. You're a level zero avatar at the moment, and you're going to gain experience points and we're going to have guild assignments and projects and all this other stuff. You're going to go on quests, you're going to have a reflection journal."
And that language, a lot of them would look around at each other, "What class am I in? Am I in the right..." Some of them would even start checking their phones or their computers looking at their schedule. And then I'm like, "Look, all of this is the same language you know. It's just articulated slightly different, but this language is more playful and it also gives you a lot more room to be playful, to have more agency." And we really kind of break out what that system looks like in the classroom in a traditional way, but then also in a game-based way. And I really prided myself, I taught it that way for five years, the game-based kind of way with my script and everything inspired by Lee Sheldon's multiplayer classroom.
And I really pride of the fact that in those five-ish years, only two students ever left that class after syllabus day because of what it was all about, that I was using gaming language. And because it was composition, there were plenty of other sections that they could slip into, But they really kind of stayed with it. And at the end, they had a great time, they enjoyed it. And I still hear from some of those students that were in those class asking for recommendation letters for grad school or all different kinds of things saying, "I still think about your class. I still think about things in playful ways," and I'm just like, "You know what? Even if I've only heard from maybe 2% of the students that have taken those classes, the fact that they're still thinking about their composition class, which is a class that most of them are trying to forget while they're even in that class, is a huge win." So it really does demonstrate the power of gaming language and gaming systems.
Dave Eng:
So I think that my main takeaway is that, like you said before, it's a lot of it is focused on systems thinking and students really being able to focus on the fact that there's more game elements that are present in our everyday life than they may realize. So thank you again, Chris. I appreciate it. Unfortunately, we're running out of time, so I want to go into our guest outro. I appreciate you joining us today. If people wanted to find out more about you and your work, where is a good place for them to go?
Christopher Stuart:
So my website was recently taken down, unfortunately, which I'm trying to get back up, which is chrisstuart.com. But I'm trying to post more and more on LinkedIn and I'm more active on Facebook. And I'm trying to create more of a general presence around the data that I'm collecting around gaming on those platforms.
Dave Eng:
All right. Well thanks, Chris. I appreciate it. I will post those links in the show notes and descriptions so people can find you online. Thank you again for joining us, Chris.
Christopher Stuart:
Thank you for having me.
Dave Eng:
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more than a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us.
Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. So if you like this episode, please consider commenting, sharing and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you. I'd also love it if you took some time to rate the show. We live to lift others with learning. So if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit. Also make sure to visit University XP Online at www.universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter at University_XP and on Facebook and LinkedIn as UniversityXP. Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on!
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2025, January 19). Christopher Stuart on Applied TTPRGs. (No. 130) Video]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/video/130
Internal Ref: UXPJY70EG4JO
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