This course will explore the potential for psychological growth through analog role-playing games RPGs. These games involve spontaneous, improvisational co-creation in which participants enact characters in a fictional world. These characters can be quite similar to their self-concept or distinct.
Such play allows for a process of group individuation to occur, in which players participate in a form of active imagination and engage with archetypal content through their characters, the stories, and their interactions with others. Whether these games take place in leisure, educational, or therapeutic settings, these spaces can become transformational containers from which players can distill insights leading to lasting personal and social change.
This potential is increasingly explored by therapists and educators working with tabletop, freeform, and live action role-playing games. This series will discuss archetypal engagement woven into the design of several of games, including archetypes such as the Sage, the Witch, the Trickster, the Divine, and the Mother.
We will also explore the types of cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills that role-playing games can practice. We will discuss the transformative potential in analog role-playing games to help catalyze processes of change. We will introduce role-playing game theory, including concepts such as alibi, bleed, immersion, identity, ritual, and safety.
We will discuss processes for creating transformative containers of play that support exploration and facilitate integration of insights into everyday life. We will explore how role-playing games allow for exploration of identity and engagement with the personal and collective unconscious, including archetypes and the Shadow. We will discuss the concepts of active imagination and individuation through a group lens, considering how imaginative enactment within a community might contribute to both individual and collective processes.
