Implementing Transformative Role-playing Games

This textbook explores implementation practices for running transformative analog role-playing games, such as transformative leisure, educational, and therapeutic applications. We foreground central considerations for hacking existing games, framing, scaling up existing designs, adapting to the needs of specific populations, creating functional groups, and working with stakeholders.

Additionally, the textbook covers many practical considerations when producing and running logistics. Examples include project management, organizational teams, establishing the setting, character writing, location logistics, as well as tech, interaction, and sensory design. We offer suggestions for communication, casting, documentation, guiding player preparation, workshop design, and onsite logistics.  

Next, the textbook discusses different facilitation roles and responsibilities. We describe several skills associated with good facilitation and recommendations for working in different settings. Additionally, the textbook presents general principles for cultivating safer and more accessible transformational communities surrounding play. We discuss ways to address physical and psychological risks in implementation for both organizers and players, such as injury, psychological overwhelm, and inappropriate behavior in the community.  

The textbook also features theories connected to the play experience, including motivation, creative agendas, and labor. Then, we present several concepts related to transforming one’s self concept, social identity, relationships with others, and spiritual development through transformative play. We include various practical recommendations for working with preparatory activities, steering, bleed, different types of immersion, interpersonal dynamics, group dynamics, and gathering play experiences through feedback and documentation.  

The textbook closes with a chapter offering practical advice for playtesting, iteration, and conducting research on transformative play, including study design, ethics, data gathering, and analysis. We conclude with a list of studies offering empirical evidence for the affective, cognitive, and behavioral benefits of these games.  

We recommend also reading the first book in this series, Transformative Role-playing Game Design, edited by Bowman, Diakolambrianou, and Brind.  

This book was created within Empowering Game Design Education with Transformative Role-playing Games (EDGE), a joint Erasmus+ Higher Education Cooperation Partnership project in the Higher Education sector between Uppsala University, Dragons’ Nest, Avalon Larp Studio, Chaos League, and Turku University of Applied Sciences. https://erasmusedge.eu/   

Sarah Lynne Bowman, Uppsala University

Sarah Lynne Bowman is a scholar, game designer, and event organizer. She received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in Radio-Television- Film and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in Arts and Humanities. Bowman has taught in the Humanities, English, and Communication. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in Game Design at Uppsala University Campus Gotland. She formerly served as Coordinator for the Peace & Conflict Studies program at Austin Community College, where she teaches Humanities. Bowman is a founding member of the Transformative Play Initiative, who research analog role-playing games as vehicles for personal and social change. She co-edited The Wyrd Con Companion Book (2012-2015) and currently edits for the International Journal of Role-Playing and Nordiclarp.org. Bowman has co-organized several conferences, including Living Games (2014, 2016, 2018), Role-playing and Simulation and Education (2016, 2018), and the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar (2022). More information at sarahlynnebowman.com.

Guus Quinten van Tilborg

Guus van Tilborg is a Ph.D. student at Groningen University. Originally from the Netherlands, he recently graduated with a Master’s degree in Game Design from Uppsala University Campus Gotland. Guus received an M.A. in History (American Studies), an M.S. in Social-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Besides his academic pursuits, Guus has been actively teaching in various settings, ranging from language tutoring college students to teaching immigrants civics and history. Throughout his career, the central theme has been “belongingness” and how to make people feel welcomed and accepted: a theme that also happens to be his main research interest. Guus is a volunteer with Erasmus+ EDGE.

Nikola Sekulić

Nikola Sekulić is a career athlete, martial artist, stuntman, HEMA scholar, and instructor, as well as a larp and game designer. Throughout his athletic career he has achieved numerous medals and recognitions through various sports such as Judo, Gymnastics, Parkour, HEMA, etc. He specializes in biomechanics, kinesiology, kinetics, locomotion and sports psychology. He has worked in several Erasmus+ projects and is a member of the LARPifiers non-profit organization. Sekulić has been a larper since 2016 and has attended a great number of larps as well as helping establish, edit, and run several game settings and rulesets throughout Balkan larp communities. He likes to focus on bodily self expression, body positivity, self-improvement, nurture, and growth through body movement. He hopes to spread positive athletic values in a friendly way to others through nonformal education.

Josephine Rydberg, Stockholm University of the Arts

Halfdan Keller Justesen

Halfdan Keller Justesen is an event manager and larp producer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has made larps with Avalon Larp Studio since 2017, and been a board member since 2018. In 2019, he completed a MSc in Engineering with specialisation in Sustainable Design from Aalborg University, Copenhagen. Halfdan has larped as long as he can remember. Since 2016, he has volunteered at more than 30 international larp events, where had a designing and leading role in five of those productions, and he slings a mean pizza. Since 2021 he has been one of the organizers behind Blackbox Copenhagen, and in 2023 he became a board member of Gnist. His current design interests are in runtime activities, modularity in character design, and how to include players as participants in the design of their own experience during the workshop process.

Joshua Juvrud, Department of Game Design, Uppsala University, Sweden, Uppsala University

Joshua Juvrud has a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and is an Associate Professor at Uppsala University. As a research psychologist, his work has focused on the ways that novel techniques in research (eye-tracking, pupil dilation, virtual reality) can be used to assess how children and adults perceive and interpret people, emotions, and actions. Josh focuses this research in two fields. In developmental psychology at the Child and Babylab in Uppsala, he seeks to understand how children learn about their world through social cognitive processes, such as play. In games research at the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design in Visby, Gotland, his work examines the psychology of people, their actions, and emotions in game development, player engagement, learning, and immersion to understand better how different game players (with different personalities, traits, and experiences) interact with various game mechanisms and are, in turn, affected by game experiences.

Felipe García-Soriano, University of Alicante

Felipe García-Soriano is a sociologist from the University of Chile and a PhD candidate in Economy, Business and Society at the University of Alicante. He works primarily as a consultant and designer of non-formal learning experiences, with a focus on organizational development, civic engagement, and systems thinking through tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) and participatory methodologies.

Alessandro Giovannucci

Alessandro Giovannucci is an award-winning game designer and theorist working in the field of larp and immersive experience. He co-founded the larp collective Chaos League in 1992 and wrote the manifesto “Southern Way – New Italian Larp.” His work focuses on political and social topics, experienced through the participatory nature of larp. He has worked on different formats and styles of games, going from small ones (First They Came) to some of the bigger and most successful international larps (Sahara Expedition, Miskatonic University). Very active in the field of online larp, he designed games and organized several online festivals in the last years including the International Larp Festival. Alessandro is also regularly invited to host talks, larp design workshops and seminars all over Europe and their games are hosted in some of the most important festivals. Has already participated, both as a partner and leader, in European funded projects related to larp, civil rights and education. Alessandro is also a music teacher at the University of Teramo and University of Chieti, researching the relationship between materialism and storytelling in the arts.

Elektra Diakolambrianou, Dragons' Nest, Institution for Counselling and Psychological Studies in Athens

Elektra Diakolambrianou (Ilektra Diakolamprianou) is a licensed psychologist and psychotherapist, a certified adult educator, and a larp designer. She has a B.Sc. in Psychology from Panteion University, a Pg.Dip. in Person-Centred counselling from the University of Strathclyde, a Prof.Cert. in Art, Drama and Play Therapy from Edexcel, and is a European Certificate of Psychotherapy holder. Currently she is pursuing a M.A. in Creative Writing offered by the Hellenic Open University. A certified trainer of communication skills by Gordon Training International and member of the trainers’ pool of the Greek National Agency for Erasmus+ Youth 2014-2020, Elektra has had continuing education in cinematherapy, music therapy, bibliotherapy, therapeutic writing, gamification methods, game-based education, restorative justice, and social psychology. Since 2012, she has been working as a psychotherapist working with socially vulnerable groups, including: unaccompanied minors, refugees, immigrants, NEETs, unemployed people, former prisoners, and women. Since 2013, she has been an academic staff member at the Institution for counselling and Psychological Studies in Athens. Her academic work emphasizes the potential of larp as a medium for personal development and psychotherapy. She is also a co-founder of the LARPifiers. Elektra has experience in working as an emotional safety person in games and projects, as well as in curating larp designs for emotional safety.

Angie Bandhoesingh

Angie Bandhoesingh (Antzela-Sita Bandhoesingh) is an educator and larp designer with extensive experience in non-formal education. She has an educator’s degree from the Literature, Philosophy and Psychology department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and has worked as a private tutor, a child animator, and a non-formal education facilitator since 2010. She has experience in youth work across multiple projects, including several in Erasmus+. Angie is a co-founder of the Dragons’ Nest nonprofit organization (formerly RPG4Kids), is the company manager, and is the educational content supervisor for extracurricular school activities for children aged 5-12. She also co-founded the LARPifiers non-profit organization, where she is an edu-larp designer and organizer, including having co-designed the grant-funded edu-larp Superhero Union. A larper since late 2015, she has been an organizer of local larps from 2016-2019. She has been exploring arts and crafts as a way of personal expression and informal learning activities. Her interest in non-formal education stems from a desire to transform formal education into a children-friendly, student-centric environment.

Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, Uppsala University

Kjell Hedgard Hugaas is a Northern Norwegian game designer, organizer, writer, theorist, and trained actor. In particular, he is engaged within the Nordic larp tradition, where he has been active for a bit over two decades. For the last few years, he has explored the transformative potential of games, and has proposed specific intentional game design practices that facilitate transformative effects. As well as being a founding member of the Transformative Play Initiative, Hugaas has theorized how ideas impact players through the processes of memetic bleed, procedural bleed, and identity bleed. His work on bleed has so far culminated in his 2022 Master’s thesis in Game Design at Uppsala University, and he is planning to expand on this theoretical work in the future. In 2023, he completed a second thesis for UU on the impacts of larp on participants’ attitudes and anxieties around death. He works as a project assistant on EDGE, the Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership ROCKET, and the Horizon Europe Larpocracy project through LARPifiers. Hugaas is the co-founder and CEO of the game studio and research company Evocative Games AB, where he currently works as a consultant, researcher, narrative designer, and writer, including for the Erasmus+ Dystolarp project

Simon Brind, Avalon Larp Studio, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

Josefin Westborg

Josefin Westborg is one of the world’s leading designers in edu-larps. She has a background in game design and pedagogy and is one of the founders of Lajvbyrån (previously LajvVerkstaden Väst). Josefin has worked as a research assistant and teacher at Uppsala University’s Department of Game Design where she was a founding member of the Transformative Play Initiative with focus on analog role-playing games. Westborg co-designed curriculum for Uppsala’s Master’s in Transformative Game Design and has worked as a teacher in its introductory courses, upon which EDGE is based. She has also been a teacher in game design at both Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg. She recently published an article for the International Journal of Role-playing entitled “The Educational Role-Playing Game Design Matrix: Mapping Design Components onto Types of Education.” In addition to EDGE, she also works as a project assistant in the Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership ROCKET. Throughout her career Josefin has met thousands of students of all ages, and run and designed larps for them. She is passionate about designing for interaction, storytelling and learning. When she is not involved with games you will probably find her at the dance studio doing ballroom dance.