Historical reality vs anachronistic fantasy: The history educators’ perspective on tabletop RPGs
Historical reality vs anachronistic fantasy: The history educators’ perspective on tabletop RPGs
Historical reality vs anachronistic fantasy: The history educators’ perspective on tabletop RPGs
Dimitra Petousi, Akrivi Katifori, Maria Roussou, Yannis Ioannidis, Pantelis Sakellariadis
Abstract
"Tabletop role playing games (TTRPGs) offer players the possibility to create and enact the actions of a character in a fictional storyworld. TTRPG are great for immersing players in the game world with proven potential for transformative learning, as they promote perspective taking and a deeper understanding of the storyworld. In this work we aim to explore TTRPGs as an activity supporting the education of history in secondary education, by recording the view of educators on the benefits and challenges of the game. History teachers play a key role in teaching students how to examine historical phenomena and recognize the importance of history in understanding the societies of today. We interviewed 7 educators to explore how they promote historical empathy in their lessons and their views on the potential of TTRPGs as educational tools. Our results indicate a positive outlook by educators regarding the implementation of TTRPGs in the classroom, also discussing challenges such as the use of violence, historical inaccuracy and anachronism. The findings are hopeful in terms of the potential acceptance of the game genre by the teachers and they can be used as the initial step towards guidelines for a TTRPG game design tailored to the needs of secondary education."
Reference
Petousi, D., Katifori, A., Roussou, M., Ioannidis, Y., & Sakellariadis, P. (2023, April). Historical reality vs anachronistic fantasy: The history educators’ perspective on tabletop RPGs. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-8). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3582437.3587197
Keywords
Historical Education, Transformative Learning, Historical Empathy