Episode 110 Andrew Harris and the Guild Chronicles
Andrew Harris and the Guild Chronicles
Episode Summary:
In this episode of "Experience Points" Dave Eng interviews Andrew Harris, a game designer, therapist, and educator behind The Guild Chronicles program. Andrew discusses the origins of The Guild Chronicles, a transformative game-based learning program he developed, which combines tabletop RPG elements with therapeutic and educational objectives. The program focuses on fostering social-emotional growth, collaboration, and teamwork among autistic youth. Andrew explains how the game mechanics encourage players to work together, solve challenges, and develop skills in a safe and engaging environment. He highlights the narrative elements that make the intervention unique and effective, helping players learn and grow through shared experiences. To learn more, visit GuildChronicles.com.
Andrew Harris
He / They
Game Designer and Facilitator of Group-Based Social-Emotional Learning
Guild Chronicles
Andrew Harris Schramme is a game designer, therapist, and educator working and living in Lexington, Massachusetts. Their life-long love of roleplaying and gaming led to the development of the Guild Chronicles Program in 2010. He has a Master’s Degree in education from Lesley University, where his studies focused on Autism, Disability, and Facilitating Learning in Virtual Environments. Prior to attending Lesley University, they received their Undergraduate Degree in Community Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Outside of Andrew’s private practice, the Guild Chronicles program has been used in public and private schools as well as out-patient hospital settings in Massachusetts. Before leaving their position at Mass General Brigham’s Aspire Program, Andrew used Guild Chronicles as a means of connecting groups and skill-building with over 100 adolescents and young adults.
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/guild-chronicles/
(Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/GuildChronicles/
(Instagram): https://instagram.com/guild_chronicles
(YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@GuildChronicles
(Website): https://guildchronicles.com/
(Other): https://linktr.ee/guildchronicles
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 Space Learning by University XP. Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com.
On today's episode, we'll learn from Andrew Harris. Andrew is a game designer, therapist and educator residing in Lexington, Massachusetts, and is a visionary behind The Guild Chronicles program. With a passion for role-playing and gaming Andrew developed this transformative program in 2010. Andrew holds a master's degree in education from Leslie University and has expertise in autism disability and facilitating learning in virtual environments. The Guild Chronicles program has made a significant impact being utilized in public and private schools as well as outpatient hospital settings across Massachusetts. Andrew's previous role at Mass General Brigham's Aspire program involved leveraging Guild Chronicles to foster group connection and skill building among over 100 adolescents and young adults. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Andrew Harris:
Thank you, Dave. It's really good to talk to you again. I'm really excited to be here and share more about how I use games in my work.
Dave Eng:
Great, thank you, Andrew. So that leads us into question number one. I want to preface this with letting all the listeners know that Andrew and I first met at PAX East. We were actually both at the UnPub section play testing our games. I did not have a lot of people play testing my game. Andrew didn't have a lot of people, so we've decided to help each other and play each other's games.
So that's where I originally learned about The Guild Chronicles, and Andrew's work overall. So I want to give you some time, Andrew, to start with this first question, which is about your origin story and your background and therapy in general. So I know you've got this incredible background and it blends games, therapy, and service to others. So can you please share more about how you were able to find the "common thread" between your personal and professional interests, and then ultimately what led you to design The Guild Chronicles?
Andrew Harris:
Yeah, I appreciate you starting here. I think for me it was a really roundabout journey that kind of got me here. I've been a lifelong gamer. I started playing D&D when I was 11 years old, had to convince my parents that it wasn't some sort of satanic scheme because it was the nineties. And throughout my gaming, I've always been pretty cognizant that I was learning while I'm playing games. I sort of noticed early on that I was developing leadership skills. I was feeling more confident. I was getting better interacting with people. So always when I was playing games, I was always thinking about it in that way. How can I stretch myself further or what can I try in this game that's a safe place for me to try out these things that I might not be ready to test out in other places in my life?
So my undergraduate was in art education. I was an artist. I really loved art when I was a kid. I was really good at it, and I just kind of stumbled into an art college because it seemed like the best idea at the time. Throughout that whole experience, I was learning a lot about education and that was really what I was getting really interested and excited about. So as I was coming out of my undergraduate, I got a job in a public school, like a teaching assistant in a special education program, and I was working with an elementary aged student who was really, really, really interested in D&D. And as soon as I found out that we had this shared interest, it was really easy for me to build rapport with him, build trust with him. I could get him to do math lessons by connecting it in some way to the game mechanisms of playing a ranger.
He was just really into it. And the teachers, I think for the first time really saw this kid investing time and energy and were pretty surprised to see that happening and thought that I had some magic power. It was really just that I recognized an interest in him that I shared with him and started to kind of lean into it. So I pitched this idea that we could really try to leverage this interest more. A lot of his goals on his IEP were more related to the social emotional learning stuff. He was very bright academically, could really figure all that stuff out. He was more bored with school than anything else, but socially and emotionally, he really was isolated and struggling to make connections.
So I said to the school psychologist, "D&D is a social game. You need to get a group of friends together. You have to work together to beat the bad guys. It really provides a lot of social challenges and it might be a way that we can connect with some peers."
So I was really lucky. I had a couple of mentors at the time that really believed in me and thought, this is worth trying. But D&D we quickly figured out was too complicated to play for fourth graders. He was able to, but his peers were really struggling. So that summer I set out to kind of make a game that was a little easier to get into, and that was sort of the prototype for Guild Chronicles, and I think it had a lot of the same basic design principles. Trying to encourage collaboration, easy entry point was really important to me. I wanted people to be able to build a character pretty quickly. And then from there, it was clear pretty quickly that next year that we had struck gold.
We had a lot of investment from him. We were hearing from parents and teachers that we were seeing behavior changes in other areas too. I was getting more invested. So we spread the program out and involved more people throughout the year. More and more kids were finding success with it. So the next year at that school my role shifted to becoming, I had lots of opportunities to co-facilitate games like this with the school psychologist, and that sort of became all of a sudden my interest. I think becoming an art educator was still interesting, but this definitely became my passion. So I worked in a handful of different public schools in this sort of role, getting to bring this into each of these schools that I was working in before I ended up over at Mass General Hospital. And there I really got to hone my craft.
We really identified the type of students this was working well with the types of goals that it was working well with. And then last year I decided to leave my job and try to do this on my own as a full-time gig. I've been working really hard this year to get the game rules published. I think having the game be out there and available to people and building a fan base is going to be really important in getting more people to use this as a tool in schools and therapeutically. So yeah, I guess the original impetus was just to create a better game. But as I realized that the way that the game was built could really either impede or improve the ability to learn certain things, I realized how important it was to really have a customized game that was engineered to this end so that it really could reward and provide these opportunities for learning that we had seen in the classroom.
Dave Eng:
Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate it. I know that one of the aspects I really liked about your game when we were play testing it back at PAX East was its accessibility. Full disclaimer, I'm not a big tabletop RPG person, but I really liked playing The Guild Chronicles because I felt like it used a lot of really familiar game mechanics because more of just a regular tabletop board game player in determining specific actions for my character movement on a grid attack, like random number generator with the dice and everything. So I found that really appealing.
And the other part that I really liked about your response was that essentially, you are following game-based learning, which is you're using the actual elements, the mechanics, the formal components of the game to reach a specific learning outcome. Like you were talking about the applications of mathematics and arithmetic to game systems within the game. So this is, I would say, based on everything that you've demonstrated so far, this is a case study for how games can be used for serious purpose, whether that's learning or therapy or really any sort of professional development. I think you're doing it in a way that others should follow.
Andrew Harris:
I really appreciate that. Yeah, we're really excited. We had a pilot research study last year to sort of see if we could measure some of the efficacy behind this, and it really gave me a chance to zoom in and really think about what are the things that I'm doing or what are the things that the game has that are providing these results, and how do I hone those more? How do I lean into those more? How do I make that more emphasized? So yeah, kind of really thinking about it with that educational lens has really, really allowed us to keep pushing it. I think my master's being in education has really helped me conceptualize a lot of this stuff that I kind of intuited just as a gamer. It's really gotten it much more concrete and honed since then.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you. Thanks, Andrew. I appreciate it. I want to jump into the second question here, which I think we will dive deeper into those applications. So this one is Guild Chronicles for professional development. You've discussed already that's been used in schools and therapeutic settings to foster social emotional growth, particularly with autistic youth. But in addition, it also aids personal development with an emphasis on collaboration and rewarding teamwork. So can you elaborate on how the game mechanics and design contribute to this positive impact and how both create an inclusive and engaging experience for players?
Andrew Harris:
Yeah, I think probably the most direct answer here is in the games design you were talking about, I've played a lot of different role playing games where I feel like there are opportunities to work together, but often it just sort of feels more like loosely coordinated parallel play. We're all attacking the same thing, but we're not often interacting with one another as we do that. So I wanted to make a game that was really tactical, the things that you described, like the gridded board, having discrete actions, everything feeling very kind of gamified and concrete. That was very much by design. I think with those sort of parameters and those concrete rules, it really allows people to kind of know what they're working with and then find ways to work together. Nothing's so abstract that it's hard to really coordinate your actions together. So I wanted to make it very tactical, and to me that doesn't mean that it's complex or hard to learn, it just means that every decision you make has a big impact.
So I guess, yeah, when I'm thinking about the parts of the game that really provide those opportunities, I think the very beginning, the first choices you make are about making your character. So typically a group of four or five or six people are playing together in the game. They each get to make their own characters. But in Guild Chronicles, no single character is going to be able to do everything very well. So they really need to coordinate their efforts and start to work socially together to kind of make those decisions. So if everybody just wanted to be a damage dealer and no one had any ability to defend themselves or heal anybody or support one another, they would get pretty quickly steamrolled by whatever enemy came their way. The design is really there to, from the beginning, give opportunities to build things that synergize or compliment each other.
The idea that a diverse party with different strengths is really the strongest party we emphasize throughout, and I think players pick up on that pretty quickly and it's pretty exciting to see them kind of realize that it's made for them to work together and it rewards them when they do, they can see it as they go through the game. I think another really basic way is just in the math of it. So one, people get to choose different powers when they make their characters. One power might give the individual using it like a plus three bonus to their attack. We balance that with other powers, right? You want to have a game that's pretty well-balanced so people feel like it's fair. So that power is balanced against another power that maybe gives everybody else a plus two bonus to their attack. So not quite as much per person, but you're benefiting that whole group of four or five.
Or maybe it's a power that gives just one other person a bonus. It might give them like a plus five. So we played with the math to deemphasize the kind of individualistic play and really give people rewards when they're thinking about others and they're trying to find ways to get the whole group to perform better. We also have some powers that sort of allow those interactions that I said a lot of other games I felt like were missing. So I'll just list a couple quick examples. So I think one that I always think of is there's a wizard power that lets you steal the speed from an enemy and give someone else an extra action. And having played the game, you know how important a single action can be. So this kind of thing, you can't give it to yourself, but you can give it to the person who could make the biggest impact.
So you have to think about what everyone else at the table is doing, what the needs of the group are. Do we need an extra heal? Do we need an extra attack? Do we need to reposition somebody? So that kind of interactivity and creativity is really kind of integral to the way the game is played. Lots of powers that let you switch places to protect somebody and take the hit for them or give up something to give someone else the benefit.
So just lots of these little powers that when they're all put together, it kind of creates a gameplay that gives people the impression that they are helping one another. And it feels really good when someone helps you. When someone takes the hit for you or gives you an extra move, it feels really good to that person and the kids playing the game also start to realize it feels really good to be the person doing that for someone else. So it does, it just creates this sort of feeling that everyone needs to work together to succeed, and it provides the experience of success when they are able to do that effectively.
Dave Eng:
All right, thank you Andrew. I appreciate that. Some points that resonated with me were the discrete actions in the game. I think part of the reason why I was not really a fan of other tabletop RPGs was it seemed like there was a lack of discrete actions. And I think that when you introduced Guild Chronicles for me, you made that very clear at the beginning and I was like, okay, I can get into this. I know what I can do, what I can't do, what's allowed, not allowed. I think that really speaks to game literacy because there may be some individuals or students that you may be working with that aren't familiar with games at all, or maybe are just not familiar with tabletop RPGs. So I think addressing this on a very accessible and beginning scale, particularly with talking about those discrete actions is really important.
And the last part this really speaks to me is because you really focus on the fact that a really effective team is going to be a diverse team, which is individuals that can do some things better than others. Some people that are better suited to doing some things better than others, or maybe just generalists that can do a lot of different things, but not as well as a specific specialist.
That really calls back to the time when I discovered game-based learning for myself when I first used Pandemic as a teaching tool, a training tool to really identify the fact that there are many different people that are playing that all have different abilities. And while you can do a lot of different general things, there are going to be individuals on your team that are specialized in one particular area. So to focus on those areas of expertise, it's really leverage the fact that your team is diverse. They can do a lot of different things well, but how you synergize well together is really the main point of playing the game and the exercise overall. And I see a lot of that in the intrinsic and critical DNA that makes up The Guild Chronicles. So thank you for sharing.
Andrew Harris:
I appreciate it.
Dave Eng:
All right, so the third and last question here, Andrew, is about The Guild Chronicles again, but it as a unique intervention. So I think that one of the unique aspects of The, Guild Chronicles is how it's motivating and different compared to other interventions. So can you tell us more about what makes Guild Chronicles unique and how motivating players to play synergistically helps them learn and grow? I really want to focus on getting players to play and learn synergistically together.
Andrew Harris:
Yeah, I think just to step back from Guild Chronicles for a second, I think in general, people that are trying to foster and teach social emotional skills are starting to recognize you can't just lecture at people to have them learn these things. You can't just do a lesson and then do a little bit of role play and expect them to be able to generalize that into other settings. So there is a movement towards this more experiential learning, but then I think people are struggling to figure out what experience you can do to have the learning happen. And I think that's where games really come in really well. I think this is true for all people who are using games to learn. I think fundamentally it's fun.
So this isn't really unique, but it's just so important that it is so often the alternative parents will say, my kid doesn't want to go to a social skills group. They hate it's boring. They feel like they're getting lectured. And then after the first session, I'm always hearing from parents, "Oh my God, they loved it. What did you do? What did do to get them to have so much fun?" No, we're playing a game. So I think that's really critical. I think that a lot of the alternative interventions out there right now aren't fun or they're trying to be fun and they've started to figure it out. But this one really is.
I think also an important part is that there are narrative elements to this game. So I think your example of Pandemic is fantastic, and I think it's a really great game for learning. And the things that you highlighted are perfect. I think it's even more fun because there's sort of a little bit of a story behind it and people can kind of understand what they're doing and working together.
It would be a lot less fun if it was just moving around the pieces for no reason. And tabletop role playing games really lean into that idea that it's story driven, and this makes it a harder intervention. I'm coming up with narrative elements, I'm improvising, I'm telling stories that I think are going to resonate with the kids, but I can also shape stories to kind of address their goals. I think of, for example, I had a student, a trans student that had just transitioned and were trying to get people to use their new pronouns but really struggling. They were autistic, they had a hard time with any kind of advocacy, and this was an extra level of stress for them. So I included a trans character in the story. It wasn't them, it was just another character that they met, but the character had the same struggle and the whole group kind of helped this character.
They coached the character, they helped the character, and indirectly they were helping this student that I was working with that really needed this kind of advice. But because I could weave it in narratively and because it could kind of happen within the safe space of our gaming table, it really gave them unique opportunities to learn and grow and take risks that I think we couldn't really do just role-playing between ourselves or trying to go out and practice this in the environment that wouldn't feel safe, but around this table with kids that they trusted in a story with wizards and dragons, that was the safe place that they could start to work on those skills. And weeks months later, another person joined the group that had a similar challenge. And I could tell that this first kid had really internalized it because they were then helping that other kid.
They were saying, "Oh, it's okay. We all share our pronouns. When we introduced ourselves, you can too." It was just really cool to see that kind of growth happen. And I think because there was a story being told, my game mechanisms didn't help in this at all, but because there was this story, we had this extra level of intervention that we could kind of get into.
And then I think it's also just such an authentic challenge. So playing a tabletop role-playing game, you need to work together to fight dragons and monsters. You might get a lot of treasure and need to find a way to fairly split that treasure between people. You might disagree amongst your group about what action you should take next, where you should go in the story and you have to pause and come to a consensus. All of these are social challenges and the students all feel them really, really, really strongly.
They say this is important to them, they care about it, so they're going to work hard. The motivation's there, I don't have to bribe them with points, I don't have to do anything like that. They're just eager and excited to solve these problems. And then again, we're in this safe space around the table so I can provide a preview of the challenge that's going to come that day. "I know it's going to be hard to split this treasure. Let's talk about it ahead of time. How are we going to make our decisions before we see what the treasure is? How will we make our decisions in a fair way?" And then as they're going through that process and splitting their treasure, I can coach them, I can ask leading questions, I can do all these sort of teaching interventions to kind of help them navigate through the challenge.
But again, they're doing it. They're actually doing it. They're not being told how to do it. And then afterwards we can debrief it, who feels like that was fair, what felt good, what worked? So this sort of teachable moments that you can kind of create with story produce these really authentic chances to learn that I think this extra layer is why I think Guild Chronicles is a really exciting way to do that. Between the extra math stuff and the game design and then these narrative elements. I think it's really, really cool.
And my next goal is to kind of try to articulate the sort of storytelling side of this. How do you tell stories that provide this ability to grow and learn? So that's sort of my next project that's in the queue is going to be to try to articulate those things because I think it's both. It's the game, but it's also stories that you can tell together.
Dave Eng:
All right, well thank you Andrew. I appreciate that. I think one of the areas that really resonated with me was I often use this phrase that we often teach the way we were taught. So those that are very used to didactic and lecture focused teaching and instruction will often use that whenever they are in a position where they also have to teach or instruct others. But the area that we focus on, and particularly those that use game-based learning, is on that really experiential aspect. The games are an engaging experience that you play and engage with others, and it's an activity that you do that reaches a specific outcome, whether that's educational or instructional or therapeutic. It's really important that everyone engages in this experience together.
And I think that your particular example about the fact that, okay, there's going to be a point in this experience, in this game where we're going to have to split up a resource loot or treasurer or whatever. How do we want to do that? And then how do we do so in a way that is equitable and responsible to all of the characters and the players and the experience overall?
And I think that is a really great analogous representation for how we come to these cooperative and collaborative frameworks. But you're using Guild Chronicles and this particular scenario to represent that in the game. And I think that's something that is both experiential and something that players can take the lessons from and apply to applications outside of the game and what have you. So thank you for sharing.
Andrew Harris:
Absolutely.
Dave Eng:
All right, so Andrew, thanks for joining us today. Where can people go to find out more about you?
Andrew Harris:
I think probably the first place to start would be to go to GuildChronicles.com that's got information about the game. It's got information about the educational programs. It's got my email contact and all the social media stuff is there. So yeah, I would say head over to GuildChronicles.com.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you Andrew. And I will also include that link in the show notes for those that want to go to that link directly.
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more than a great place to start is my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can always get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in a description or show notes. Thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng, from Game Space Learning by University XP. On Experience Points we explore different ways we can learn from games. 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. I 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). (2024, April 28). Andrew Harris and the Guild Chronicles. (No. 110) Video]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/video/110
Internal Ref: UXPZONLX2YZW
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