Can ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ and other tabletop games help youth build social skills?
Can ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ and other tabletop games help youth build social skills?
Can ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ and other tabletop games help youth build social skills?
By Thomas Wilde
March 25, 2023
Summary
A new whitepaper from two Seattle organizations exhibits research into how tabletop roleplaying games, such as Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons & Dragons, can be used to help children and teenagers develop their social skills.
The January whitepaper is the result of a collaboration between Foundry10, an educational research organization, and Game to Grow, a nonprofit organization that focuses on using games as therapeutic aids.
Tabletop role-playing games such as D&D are essentially collaborative storytelling exercises for three to six players.
In its exercise, Foundry10 aimed to see what group problem-solving behaviors were exhibited by children and teenagers while they played an online tabletop role-playing game, both spontaneously and when prompted, and to see if those players made any progress on their social and emotional learning skills over the course of the experiment.
For the study, Game to Grow staff members ran weekly 90-minute tabletop gaming sessions for four groups of young players, ages 10 to 14, via Zoom.
The games used 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons, running adventure modules from Game to Grow's Critical Core gaming system.
Each challenge that came up in the game, whether it was a mystery, a puzzle, an obstacle, or a fight, was presented by the Game to Grow facilitator as an opportunity to practice social and problem-solving skills.
Reference
Wilde, T. (2023, March 25). Can 'dungeons & dragons' and other tabletop games help youth build social skills? GeekWire. Retrieved April 25, 2023, from https://www.geekwire.com/2023/can-dungeons-dragons-and-other-tabletop-games-help-youth-build-social-skills/