Join us in this interview with Guardian Adventures founder Meghan Gardner on the Serious Games Podcast with Julian Kea about EduLarps and Transformative Experiences.
Transcript below.
Intro: Hello and welcome to the Serious Games Podcast, all about playful methods for interactive trainings and facilitation. Let’s get started.
Julian: And welcome back to the Serious Games Podcast. Today I am connected with Meghan, Meghan Gardner in Bedford, Massachusetts. I understood that you could have taken the car to the Serious Play Conference, but you decided to fly. Meghan and I, we met two weeks ago, yes, at the Serious Games or Serious Play Conference in Toronto. And Meghan, I have to say, this is so great. When I look up your website, your title is Immersive Education and Transformative Experience Consultant. Oh my God, how great is that? That’s like a job title I would like to steal. Meghan, welcome. Welcome to the podcast.
Meghan Gardner: Thank you, thank you. It’s great to be here. It was such a pleasure to meet you, Julian. You’re one of the first people I’ve met in the industry who’s focusing so heavily on the debrief process.
Julian: Oh yes, yes. Yeah, there’s a connection and we have to definitely talk about debriefing and debriefing a LARPing, life action role play experience. And you are using those, obviously, in the educational sector and beyond. And I would love to, I mean, time is always limited, but I would love to learn how you do that and what is needed, and of course, all the experiences, but then also the learnings that your participants take out of such an experience. So let’s start. I have two traditional questions I ask in this podcast. So number one is, what should our listeners know about you? And the second question is, how do you explain EduLARP to someone who has never heard of this term?
Meghan Gardner: Right. Well, what do they need to know about me? I am, I’m actually currently pursuing my master’s degree through Uppsala University out of Sweden. Thankfully, it’s remote, so I don’t have to go to Sweden, in transformative game design. And so even though EduLARP is a big part of what I do, it’s only one aspect of what I do, because my interest is actually in transformative experiences as a whole. So in other words, experiences that inspire us to change our perspective or gain a new perspective upon ourselves or other people or a situation. And it can be used in everything from therapeutic settings to cultural bridge building for cultures in conflict, to just, it actually can be used in a more lighthearted, entertaining way, just to learn more about yourself. But it has so much power. And then also it’s used in educational LARPs to inspire people to learn more about a specific industry or specific concepts. And that’s the area that I have the most experience in, although I’d say in the last 10 years, so I’ve been doing this for 25 years, in the last 10 years or so, I’ve really started the foray into cultural LARPs and partnering and working with cultural educators around the globe to create transformative experiences for their culture or for other people to experience about their culture.
Julian: Wonderful. Well, that sounds like many hours that we could talk, Meghan, many, many hours. Let’s focus on maybe one or two scenarios, right? Of course, there are multiple, but I really want to get into learning and helping our listeners to understand how this works and what you are doing to enable such experiences and you know, what’s in for the learner, obviously. So how do you explain LARPs or EduLARPs to someone who’s never heard this term before?
Meghan Gardner: Okay. So LARP is an acronym and it stands for Live Action Role Playing. So imagine Dungeons and Dragons, what we call a tabletop RPG, role playing game, and accept that instead of sitting around a table and telling you my actions, I’m actually up and acting out in an immersive environment. The immersion level depends upon people playing the topic, of course, but then also how much of the environment is WYSIWYG? What you see is what you get. So at our fantastical LARPs, Wizards and Warriors, if we tell you that there’s a nine foot tall ogre out on the battlefield, you will go out, you will find an actor dressed in an outfit on stilts playing a nine foot tall ogre, very big and intimidating, with foam shoulders and huge, you know, masks, et cetera. So in those types of environments, there’s a rule structure, essentially a game system that you’re trained in beforehand. And within that rule structure and within the ethos of the game, which is what we call the magic circle, when you come into a play space and everybody is agreeing to suspend disbelief inside that space and enact this story. You are then involved in a very dynamic game environment. It can be as, so I’m going to use two terms, railroad and sandbox. Of course, railroad means I’m driving you through the story and there’s not a whole lot of options. And then there’s sandbox, which is basically: I’m going out into a world and I have control over every aspect of what I’m going to do and who I’m going to play. Now a lot of LARPs, a lot of games, will be somewhere in a spectrum between those two. Especially with children, it can be very hard to give them a complete sandbox because children have the most phenomenal imaginations and their understanding of how to bring in elements from their imagination that are appropriate for that game environment might be a little less in the mature side, depending upon the age. Teens are quite good at it and I would say, I probably, I have to say that when I started doing LARPing, I’ve just LARPed with adults and then I started LARPing with children and teens and I wasn’t really interested in LARPing with adults much anymore.
Julian: Oh my god.
Meghan Gardner: Because kids and teens have so much ownership over the experience and their character and they are right there in the immersion. So I love that and so that’s kind of LARP in a nutshell and EduLARPs specifically have an end goal of trying to make education available to them. Now I have to put a caveat in there again that you have EduLARPs that are specifically run in schools where they are what I call education forward, meaning the, it’s pretty obvious that this is an educational LARP, the goal is to learn something and so we try to make it a game as game-like and fun-like as possible but there is very much an education forward element. In our summer camps, we take that and step it back so that education is definitely a part of it but you are by no means required to learn anything in order to play the game, right? But what we did was we created educational elements to power up, if you will, so in order to advance, to get more powers, to get more knowledge about the plot, you should pursue the educational elements but here’s the key thing, we make the educational elements a designed aspect of the plot. So in other words, for example, to be a wizard, you need to learn Newton’s laws of physics to get your first spell. So you go out into a battlefield and there’s all these kids running around, there’s non-player characters running around and there’s staff and everybody’s in conflict and there’s this big battle and you stop a kid, eight years old, and you ask them what do you need to know in order to get your spells, you know, the wizard, the little wizard, they’ll be able to not only recite but demonstrate Newton’s laws of physics to you because all the spells are based in physics. So there’s a real reason for it. You’re not just learning this to learn it, you’re learning it because literally all the spells, each spell you learn, you’re learning the physics behind that spell. If you’re a healer, you’re learning the biology of healing, so you actually learn what happens to the body under the influence of poison and you can take it all the way up to those who can resuscitate or reincarnate, if you will, a dead player. They actually have to learn CPR and first aid, now they’re not performing it but they have to be able to demonstrate it in order to get that skill because the assumption is you have done this to revive your friend player. So we make the education directly related to the content they’re learning. So it’s not like: Okay, now we’re going to stop the game, we’re going to go over here and you’re going to learn something because you need to know education or something that’s tangential to the storyline. Every aspect of education is built in to the story to be integral to the plot and so kids often don’t even see it as an educational LARP. They see it as a LARP. Oh yeah, but I also learned all these different things.
Julian: Yes. Wonderful. And this is why I think, and again, this is a big nutshell, let me try to ask a couple of questions. First of all, I do believe that when we are talking about play and game-based approaches, yes, of course, we have that play moment, that magic circle where we agree that something will happen, it can happen, but then, of course, we have a content or let’s say the frame where and how this is happening and then, of course, you have this whole story and again, for me, the story begins with the framing and the invitation and of course, continues not only in the magic circle but also when you then leave it again with a debrief or within a transfer and reflecting on the learning. So I think that that’s really our job. I did feel when I was researching, I looked at a few YouTube videos, I did feel maybe this is the purest form of playing and being so explicitly clear that I’m now playing a role to do something else than I would do in my regular life, I mean, maybe, maybe not. We can talk about that and the ownership and why teens and kids are different than adults. And also when I then look upon my fellow players, also understanding and then is it a dissection or imagining how they would feel or are feeling and why they are making those choices in their role, acting out their role, but also what choices they would make and the reasoning behind they would say as who they are. So it’s really interesting and maybe we can talk about this in a second. But Meghan, you also mentioned the level of immersion, right? And you mentioned the fantastical world, right? But what is on the other end of the spectrum?
Meghan Gardner: Oh, you mean what other themes are possible?
Julian: No, if the immersion level is not as high as we go out and find you know actors playing characters.
Meghan Gardner: So you could have just role playing, live action role playing in even a business environment where you are, and we do this, we’ve done this. We have had a number of clients bring us in to do, you know, basically management lectures and hands on activities and then some role playing experiments where people are role playing what they’ve just learned. And so that role playing where they are, the key thing about the magic circle in that instance is that the magic circle is a safe space, is the space where you can mess up and not have it negatively impact you, you know. So granted for a lot of people inside of this environment, they are role playing themselves. They’re not role playing a character, although it is fun to do this with managers and training who are not yet managers. And you’re saying: You are now a manager, here’s your team of five, you have to provide this type of feedback to them. You know, and set up the scene for them and let them play pretend for a while and experiment with: What does this feel like to me as my future self as a manager and am I capable of giving this important criticism? Although I would, you know, I use criticisms lightly because we, in our training, we prefer to focus on telling people how to do something right as opposed to what they’ve done wrong. So, because when you focus on, for example, if I say to you: Julian, don’t think about white rabbits. What are you going to think about? You’re going to think about white rabbits. But instead I say: Think about, you know… Instead I focus on, okay, so instead of saying: You did this wrong. All I’m going to say is: I’d like you to do again and now this time I’d like you to do this. And let them go down that avenue as opposed to focusing on what they did wrong, they’re focusing on how to do it right. So when they’re doing that, is that criticism? I think that’s more coaching. And so that’s the kind of direction we take with our management environment when we come in and work with adults in a professional environment.
Julian: Yes. And what I would like to add is I do believe that when we’re, I think it earns the name of LARP, but please correct me, when a group is involved, right, I guess a lot of listeners have definitely experienced like these roleplay moments: Now you go on stage and we give you feedback on your presentation, right? And it’s still a lot of trainers might call this roleplay, but literally it’s, yeah, putting someone on the spotlight, right, but here you’re involving the group, not just as a feedback resource, but you’re involving the group also to act out: Okay, imagine I would be, you know, the employee, the team member and…
Meghan Gardner: How do I do that? How do I roleplay that and how am I interacting with this new manager who’s trying to tell me what to do?
Julian: Correct. Yes. Lovely. Okay. Wow. And now just because you mentioned it, what is the real difference? And then I’m going to get into my more structured interview, but what is the difference in the play and the ownership of kids and teens and adults? Could you describe it in a few words? Why is it different? And maybe before you answer another question, at which time of life does that change?
Meghan Gardner: That’s a good question. I think that those, I’m going to start backwards and start with the last part. I think that for those teens, children, teens who start LARPing young and go all the way up to adulthood, it doesn’t change because they’re coming, this is a lived experience that they can look back on. What I think the difference is among new adults coming into a LARP is this concept of opening yourself up to play. Our society delivering a message to us as adults for so long that we should not be playing. The play is a waste of time, that it’s something kids do, right? So we are already as facilitators looking at a bit of a challenge and getting people to really let loose and play and also experiment with aspects of themselves. This is something I think teens do readily because many teens, this is their first exposure. They head into middle school, it’s their first exposure to rejection of who they are, a desire to be someone else. They’re in this ripe space of trying to figure out who they are and what these situations mean to them, how should they project themselves, what’s their identity? It’s so much flux. It’s not to say that adults don’t have identity flux, it’s that it’s generally spread out more over time. So we can usually, looking back, identify our identity flux over a span of say 10 years, right? We can look back and go: Yeah, I’ve changed a lot in 10 years. However, teens, they’re looking at a span of months or days even where they’re experimenting and trying different ways of interacting with people. And so when they come into a LARP environment, they are invited into an environment where they can explore everything in a safe environment and be able to blame it on the character, right? So, well, I didn’t do it, my character did it, right? So as long as you create a safe environment with boundaries and rules to protect each other, then what is appropriate behavior even though you’re experimenting, you also need to make sure that the way you’re projecting your character is going to be received by the other people in a way that is safe for them. So there are certain signals that we might need to look for, either terms or signals, and safety is really important. And this is something that I’ll tell you, I can look back on my 25 year history and go: Wow, yeah, that situation right there, that required a lot of safety measures that I did not know about at the time. But as you go through this over time, you learn more and especially now that I’m pursuing this degree, I’m learning a lot more about the different ways that people can signal to each other about their comfort and whether or not this type of experience is, if they’re open to receiving it, or if they need to just step back, you know, and we did put a lot of safety measures in for kids. For example, out of bounds, there was always this out of bounds area that they could step into when they got overloaded and that’s like: Nope, I’m out and no one can, no one can touch me, no one can do it. It’s a space for me to step out. We had, we did have safety terms, but there are more subtle things to look for that is, here’s an example: Tonight, actually, I’m going to be doing a play test of what we call a NanoLARP, a very small LARP, and we’re going to be using hand signals. So hand signals, this means everything is good, just a nice solid thumbs up. So if somebody’s yelling at me in character and they’re, I want to give them a signal, this is okay. But depending on where I am in my head space, I might be getting a little, getting, this is getting uncomfortable or: Yeah, no, no, that you using that specific terminology, not any good. Right? And that’s a very clear signal to them, like: Okay, I need to adjust the way I am relating to Meghan’s character because she is signaling to me her comfort regarding around this interaction.
Julian: Wonderful. And, and let’s unpack, you know, a couple of elements because yes, that this is part of being in control, right? So it’s not just this, as you described it with the sandbox and the railroad, right? I can be in control in every moment and I can then signal, which is also like an instant empathy feedback, I would say, right?
Meghan Gardner: Right.
Julian: And also checking in with myself, but also then checking in with the magic circle, so to speak, the bigger picture. But let’s unpack a little bit how you build this up and where this can be useful. And, and again, I know you would have so many examples and maybe I will always ask you for, for one kids/teens example and one business and adult example. So let’s start with you. I mean, how did you get into LARPing?
Meghan Gardner: Dungeons and Dragons nerd as a teen, playing, don’t start playing, but oh boy, I might gonna date myself here, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons back in 1982. I had found my game. I had found my reason for reading. I had found such a way to relate to people. And then through my passion for that, also got interested in everything from martial arts, sword fighting, archery, you name it, you know, the classic nerdy and endeavors, I would say, because you have in your mind what a warrior should be pursuing. So 25 years of martial arts training as well. And then, and then I intersected with LARP back in the late 90s. And it was through a work environment, I overheard somebody role playing and I came in, I’m like: You talk about Dungeons and Dragons? He goes: Oh, no, no, no, this is LARP. So he gave me a phone number and I called the phone number and he explained what the LARP was. And there was one playing next month, he’s going to send me a rule book. And I went to LARP and it was amazing to be able to act out these experiences. And once doing that, I tend the Dungeons and Dragons became so much less appealing because I couldn’t stand to sit at a table anymore. I had to stand up and move around. I’m a person who likes to move on the run, you know, I walk in order to hear and understand. So I started LARPing and now I, when I started LARPing, my daughters were, wow, very young, probably three and six years of age. And my first thought was how, first of all, I’m learning a fake language in order to excel at this LARP. What if it was like, what if I was instead inspired to learn Latin? So we were using Latin and I’m learning these fake symbols for alchemy. Well, what if alchemy was based in chemistry? And so there’s all these different, I was like: How can I create a LARP? Not just the, a LARP that my outside life directly impacts my abilities on the inside game and vice versa. So I am inside the game learning things that will make me, that I want to take and transfer into my life outside of the game. So I hired a bunch of people. I hired a martial arts studio at the time and a whole bunch of students and I hired some people on to start creating LARPs and then of course kids got involved. My own children got involved and they were a big part of it. They became very enamored with it. They went to the summer camps and so my interest in martial arts began to wane. I’m a person of change, but when I say, you know, I don’t do things like in tiny bits, I guess, you know, I did martial arts for 25 years. But when I saw my children in this environment and what they were learning and how they were interacting and I saw the ripe opportunity for education and for transformation inside of this space. And so I followed my children and I gave up my martial arts. I closed all of the classes and I just pursued doing EduLARP.
Julian: Wonderful, wonderful. That’s so great. Now tell us, I mean, yeah, tell us how it starts when you are called, okay. So imagine the phone rings and someone asks you to come and is it facilitate, maybe even design a LARP. I understand you have some out of the box, but then others are specifically designed for a use case for a group for specific content. How does that work? And can you…?
Meghan Gardner: Yeah, so to be fair, the first thing I do is, a LARP isn’t the solution for everybody. So when they cause our, my expertise is transformative game design or transformative experiences. So when people call the very first thing is: Tell me about the outcome that you want. And then we go backwards from there. Tell me about the outcome. Tell me about the audience. Tell me about the resources you want to invest in this? Who’s going to be running the program? Because we don’t run, there are some cases where we’re hired to come in and facilitate. But usually we’re creating them for somebody else to facilitate. So for example, when Royal Caribbean contacted us to create LARPs on board their cruise ships, we. they said: Okay, we want a LARP for younger kids, a LARP for teens, a LARP for families. And they had a lot of constraints because storage on a cruise ship is very small. So we had to make sure everything that was part of this LARP was easy to break down and short and small on storage. They had to have a 1:50, that’s five o, ratio of staff to guests. And now I heard this is like: Oh, wow, how the heck are we going to create a LARP where it’s a 1:50 ratio? Because you have to have an antagonist and especially among kids and teens, you don’t want the kids and teens playing those antagonistic roles. So the antagonist of the person is facilitating has to also be the antagonist or and what we ended up doing for some of them is we had a video feed of an antagonist. And so they’re role playing with a video feed. And so there were wonderful challenges to overcome to create these LARPs. And then CERN, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, they wanted to create, us to create a role playing game that was about a career, different career paths at CERN, because a lot of people think falsely that you have to only be a scientist to work at CERN when in fact they hire a lot of engineers and a lot of tech, IT people. So we create an adventure to explore the different types of career paths as in: What would you do if the large, the LHC broke? What would be your role? So each of the different roles, the IT, the engineer and the physicist each had to play a different role in solving the mystery to put the LHC back together again.
Julian: OK. Wow. Well, let’s zoom in maybe those two examples. Right. But I really want the listeners to understand, you know, the setup, but then also, you know, how it works, the timing and I mean, then we definitely didn’t talk about this facilitation skills, right? Because now you’re asking the facilitator then to also, you know, be a non playable character and to also have a, you know, a role in that play. So what are the durations? I mean, just to just to the specs a little bit, I mean, I understand a cruise ship, that’s a big room. I don’t know if you did it in one room of the cruise ship and…
Meghan Gardner: Depends on the LARP.
Julian: Yeah.
Meghan Gardner: One was like a treasure hunt that went all over the ship. So and then the other two were in rooms. But the yeah, I’m going to come back to your point about the NPC being the facilitator. So the one advantage of having NPCs be the being the only antagonist is that they have a lot more control over how they project to which players. So it tends to be safer because you can be, we encouraged because with younger people and with people who are not who are not specifically trained as facilitators, you can kind of be an over the top ridiculous, you know, like an archetype of a villain. And it’s so that people are very, if you say something dangerous, it’s very obvious that is not it’s an in-game thing, right. The bigger challenge comes, believe it or not, with the when you have a company hire us to create LARPs run between adults where everyone’s playing a role and there isn’t, the facilitators on the outside. So and they’re interacting and the antagonism, if you will, are the conflict models happening between the players, whereas in with kids, we always encourage that the antagonist is controlled by the NPC and never played by the kids or the teams. That just allows for a lot more control over how that the conflict model works. But among adults, you can have consensual conflict. So what we call PvP, player versus player, is as opposed to just player versus NPC. And that makes an environment that is much more ripe for misinterpretation of cues for somebody saying something that’s hurtful, like even though they’re embodying a character, it’s possible for them to say something that really pushes somebody back on their heels. Especially when you have people of color coming in to play the game. Women and men or non gendered people, gender fluid people, there can be unconscious bias inside me as the player. And there can be outright bias from my character. And how I play bias can be very difficult if I’m playing bias with opposite a person who experiences it in their real life. Right? So for that type of situation, we absolutely need what’s called a pre brief. So before we go into that type of environment, we talk about what we have a good discussion everyone involved is in the pre brief. What are, what what’s the structure of this game look like? What’s the type of conflict that’s acceptable? What language is acceptable versus what language is not acceptable? What are my safety signals? Remember how I told you my safety signals? Some people use in-game safety signals. I don’t like those. I prefer safety to be very obvious. Like this is very obvious. But some people bring it into game like they would say something like: Oh, I’m feeling overwhelmed right now. Now I can be saying that as a character role playing my character being overwhelmed, but me, Meghan, I’m not overwhelmed. Right? Now I’m leaving it up to this person who’s engaging with me to grasp: Is she out of game overwhelmed? Is she in game overwhelmed? Right? So I would really prefer to give some clear signal out of game clear signal, which can be as simple as a thumbs, up thumbs down or some other type of greed upon signal that lets everyone know that: I’m OK with this. Or: Yeah, we’re trading into danger zone now.
Julian: Got you.
Meghan Gardner: So that’s your pre-brief.
Julian: What else is part of the pre-brief? Oh, yes. What else? I understand structure, safety, signals. What about the storyline?
Meghan Gardner: Who’s my character? So tonight at the Nano, at the NanoLARP, I’m playing a very specific character. So in part of the pre-brief, because this is going to be an adult PvP and designed so that half of, at least half of the group is constantly in, is against the other half verbally. Right? So and they want you to maintain that conflict throughout a whole duration from 20 minutes to an hour if you can handle it. So before we get into that, we all have to kind of first get to know each other as people, you know, and understand that somebody may say: You know what? This is gonna be a particular challenge for me because they might say: I’m conflict avoidant. And here I am getting into I’m role playing conflict. And so this may be difficult for me. So we discuss: OK, good. All right. So what are you going to, what signal will you give us as things get to be difficult? But we also create safety spaces. So this is going to be done over Zoom because I’m literally doing this with people on the other side of the world. And so when we have a safety space, remember how I told you, the kids can step out of the interpretation? We have a safety space where they turn off their camera and mute their mic. And that is they’re saying they’re still there, but they are processing. And here’s the thing. No one challenges that. Nobody says, no one even says: Are you OK? We have to trust that person to turn on that camera when they’re ready to come back in. Now, they might have a halt to the process or a pause and say: I need to restructure this because this isn’t working for me. Because in transformative game design, we really want to make sure that people ultimately feel safe and that we want to encourage them to kind of put one foot outside of that zone. Just one foot. Not both. You know, step into that discomfort, lean into it a little bit, because that’s where you can challenge yourself. But only do that when, for as long as you feel like you can handle it. And it’s OK to pull that foot back and get back behind that safety line and take care of yourself. So that’s the pre-brief, is discussing what does this look like? What are the parameters of this and what’s acceptable? And then we have a debrief at the end, which was…
Julian: And before we go before we go to that, Meghan, because I understand, you know, and I think it’s really important and I want to point out a couple of things. So number one is it’s not just downloading a rulebook and shipping some information and then expecting everyone to be able to step into that role or character and then play it out. It’s really a very conscious, yes, process, you know, you even said, you know, process. And it’s something that you are ready for, in terms of that you, again we’re playing and the magic circle can only work when you are willing and we all agree that we’re willing to step in, but then also having all those measures, signals, possibilities to also step out. Again, not out of the magic circle, I would say. And then you can challenge me on that. But out of that experience, but you still in that safe space, obviously, right? So you’re not checking out.
Meghan Gardner: I would say, though, anyone wants to completely check out. They have a right to.
Julian: Of course, of course.
Meghan Gardner: And you don’t question them on that because they know themselves, unless a person decides to share it. We don’t know what trauma somebody has. And so if this is something that’s happened, has triggered that, then we have to trust that they are taking care of themselves and that that it’s appropriate and not to take it personally. So yeah, go ahead.
Julian: And how much of that do you need to know beforehand, right? Again, I totally understand the story, the characters, the safety measures. But then you and you mentioned that you got to know your fellow players beforehand. Is that something that you could do on a workshop?
Meghan Gardner: So I’m actually coming in, having never met these people before. So this is, it’s exciting. Literally, I mean, we’re students in this class and we’ve quote unquote met each other over text, but we’ve never met each other in person or even over video. So we allotted for a 20 to probably be about a half hour NanoLARP. We allotted at least a half hour of just creating the standards, right?
Julian: Okay, yes.
Meghan Gardner: The framework for this.
Julian: And how does it start then? I mean, yeah. So you’ve done that, checked in…
Meghan Gardner: Right.
Julian: So the framing is clear, yes, no more questions. Yeah.
Meghan Gardner: Yeah. The great thing is that the our professor is phenomenal at providing us with resources to explain: Here are some different measures you can take. Here’s a video about it. Here’s some text, a text reading. So everyone is expected to have done all of that work, that pre work ahead of time. And I even copy and pasted the URL right in. And so what, if you wouldn’t do anything, watch this video, because it’s just it’s like a 30 minute video about creating safe spaces and doing that pre-work in the debrief after.
Julian: OK. And then yeah, how does it start? Who gives the signal? When is it over?
Meghan Gardner: When everyone is ready and then we and I have a timer because we have to go at least 20 minutes and and we’ll say: OK, everybody, are we all are we all set? We introduce our characters, names and our backstories, and when everybody is ready, I say: OK, I’m going to hit the timer, begin. And now we start, we start talking.
Julian: Yes. Do I know the other characters? I mean, do I also get an overview?
Meghan Gardner: Yes, I have a document that explains each of the different characters.
Julian: OK, wonderful.
Meghan Gardner: But a lot of this now is trying to, is letting them bring this character to life.
Julian: Yes.
Meghan Gardner: And discover more about these characters.
Julian: Yes but it’s not, I mean, I understand in the world, tabletop, role plays. You also craft, you co-craft your characters, so to speak. Is that also a part of that?
Meghan Gardner: Well, I think that’s absolutely a part of it. Dependent, I mean, somebody may come in and say: I know exactly the type of character I want to play. And we can work with that because, remember, the objective of this NanoLARP is to stay in conflict. So having a rigid structure like that, as long as it’s safe, is actually not a bad thing because, you know, if my character is a rigid structure and this other person has a rigid structure, it’s easier to find conflict. If they’re too malleable, like we as social people learn how to be malleable. We learn how to adapt. But if I’m playing a more extreme character, it’s easier for that conflict to happen. And then it’s about then it is a balance of in game and meta, trying to figure out how am I going to portray this character in a way that isn’t over the top, that is still feels real, but is and is not going to take the conflict to a level that is well, might be uncomfortable, that does not get to the point where somebody’s thumb turns down.
Julian: Correct, correct. OK, so let’s imagine fast forward, right, that 10, 15, 20 minutes are happening now. This is a facilitated experience, right?
Meghan Gardner: It is not facilitated because it’s all of us are playing. We’re all on equal standing, what, we’re adults. So I would never do this with children. So it is not facilitated in itself. We’re doing this as a cooperative LARP.
Julian: OK, and then you also mentioned there are obviously facilitated LARPs where the NPC, the non playable character is enacted by the facilitator. And then there are moments, planned moments or moments can happen where you just address that facilitator, that character and ask.
Meghan Gardner: Out of game, right.
Julian: Yes, yes, out of game. OK. Got you. Let’s say the timer’s over, right? The yeah, you know, we don’t know what happens again. It’s an yeah, experiential experience. You just cannot foresee. You hold the space, you time box it in this case, or maybe there is a natural end, you know, in that storyline. And then it comes to a close. OK, so the role playing comes to a close. OK, what is the first thing that you do or that you invite the players to do? I mean, really the second after.
Meghan Gardner: Yeah. The second after I invite people to shake off their character. So what I like and this so I’m, this is my, this is a new experiment for me, this NanoLARP in that, it’s such a short term, intense experience. So imagine that it’s going to be, I prefer to have some type of ritualized exit from it, from the experience. So that, you know, can be, you know, I like to do the actual physical shaking of my hands off.
Julian: Yes, yes. I can imagine that. Yeah.
Meghan Gardner: Right. Letting go of the, as if I just washed my hands and now I’m trying to dry them off and I don’t have a towel, right. So I am trying to expel the vestiges of it, take a deep breath. So there should be a space in my mind of just and this is all agreed upon in advance, again, because before we get in, we talk about what the debrief will look like. So so there’s no surprises. And I even I even like to have some questions lined up, which I have to add. I’m going to just pull this up right here. I’m going to pull out your deck.
Julian: Wonderful, wonderful. And yes, let’s, so hold on. But you mentioned now in the pre-brief, you’re already mentioning this afterplay phase, right? So that there will be a separator ritual of exiting, that there will be a set of questions that the players know beforehand. Right? It’s also some sort of it might prime them and have an influence on what they’re doing or not. And then you, I mean, how does it continue? I can imagine everyone just shook off their character. Maybe someone says: Wow, I just need another minute, I need to take a deep breath. Maybe I need to go for a walk. This was very intense, maybe also emotional. Maybe I got triggered and I and I really went that that extra step and stayed in, let’s say, the example you had in that conflict. Wow. This really I don’t know, I just cannot make sense out of it right now. What’s the next thing that happens?
Meghan Gardner: The thing that would do is what do you need to be able to I don’t make any assumptions. What do you need to be able to process this? And they honestly say: Listen, we only have a half hour left. I need to go take a walk. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to come back. What I would say is: Absolutely OK, if that’s what you need, I would ask that you and I touch bases or that our group have another meeting. One would be good for you to help process this when you’re in that space to process it. And allow them and we do ask for them to come back so we can have closure on this, because especially if something causes somebody to get triggered and they, you don’t want to leave it at that. We want to be able to have that closure for what was it that caused the triggering and so that to be able to explain: Here’s where I was with my character and here’s where they were with a character. And not get into any blaming. So what we don’t want is somebody say: Well, you know, I don’t know why you feel that way because this is what I did and that was perfectly acceptable, right? It’s completely honoring the fact that this person had an experience that was different than mine.
Julian: Yes, yes. And again, that’s part of the pre-brief, right?
Meghan Gardner: Yes, yes. Part of the pre-brief is understanding what a debrief will look like.
Julian: Yes.
Meghan Gardner: If you leave, that you agree to come back, we will reach out to us when you’re ready to talk to us about the experience.
Julian: And I think this is so valuable, again, this is really what I meant when I said: Maybe this is the purest way of, you know, a serious game in that case, because we’re giving full transparency about the structure and what resources are available throughout the whole experience and then we invite to play. And again, I know a lot of listeners, when they listen to the serious games podcast, they think of, you know, simulations, they think of, yes, maybe role plays in a different way. And there we sometimes, I do observe that what is happening afterwards, what is in for you, it’s sometimes left in the unknown because, of course, I want to be able to react on what has happened. But still, I really want to point out, you can give the players the full structure and the full overview of the day and how it will unfold, right, even without knowing exactly what will happen and what will trigger you.
Meghan Gardner: Yeah. Well, because that’s some people would say: Well, I like the element of surprise. Trust me, surprise will happen within good role play. You do not need the added surprise of an out of game failure. So we are all together coming up with a code of conduct of what’s acceptable in this environment and how we’re all going to act if this happens or this doesn’t happen. And, you know, this is where the adulting is important, you know, kind of creating the whole container. Failure to do that means that there are going to be at least some people in that, depending upon the intensity of the role play, that are really not going to have a good experience and perhaps even have an experience that is negative. And we don’t want that because that is not positive transformation. Our objective in all of these experiences is to have a positively transformative game experience where I can try on aspects of myself. I can interact and exercise these ideas that I would not otherwise do in my life, in my real life, and see how it goes. And then at the end, I can do a debrief on it and see how I’m going to possibly integrate aspects of that experience into myself. You know it’s sort of an externalization and then a reintegration of these aspects of ourselves. And that in order to do that, I have to feel safe. I have to feel safe.
Julian: This is safe and positive. And Meghan, would you agree that when you say positive, that means like an experience that I can say yes to, right? Even though in that moment, it might not feel comfortable, I might feel out of comfort, I might feel stressed or triggered, right? But still, I do because I’m in control and again, I agreed but then also, I have also agreed to stepping out whenever I’m ready to. But then I say yes to exactly being in that state, staying there, seeing how it develops because I know maybe I want that there’s something in for me. And I know there’s something in for me. Okay. Wow. And let’s talk about the debrief or the conversation that starts then. I mean, we shook off the roles, okay, we breathed, we got fresh air. Maybe we changed the room. I don’t know. So we had this ritual. And what is a way that you love to start that conversation?
Meghan Gardner: Well, what I like to do is actually before, again, in the pre-brief, decide on what questions are going to be answered and in what order even. Now, that doesn’t mean we’re going to stick right to those questions. We’re going to be open to going with the flow. But again, having that structure and preparing people, as they’re shaking off, they’re able to look down at the list of questions and go: Okay, all right, I’m going to start wrapping my head around this first question. Which tends to be a very high level question because it leaves it like such as: How did that feel for you? Right? And we just start, all of us just start talking about: Whew, that was intense, especially that moment when that happened, right? And we can all start to process this together. And then as people, we can use the questions. The questions are a tool. It’s sort of the vehicle for helping the discussion. But the truth is that once we start talking, it’s okay to go off on tangents, although I’ll say, you know, that there are going to be some questions in there I really do want to get to. But that’s okay. I can just say, you know, at some point when we put a period, I can say: I’d really like to go to this question. And since we all agreed upon it now and now the other thing is, everyone else has the right to be able to say: I’m not ready to answer that. Right? So it’s very empowering.
Julian: I guess, I can imagine. I mean, look, this is a I mean, this is scripted. We have characters, we have the conflict, we have the agreement, we have adults in the room. I mean, even in a half an hour, so many things can happen, right? How long do you debrief? I mean, what is your approach to debriefing? I mean, there’s probably you could probably do multiple rounds and meetings on unpacking what has happened. But there must be a limit. Right. And we cannot…
Meghan Gardner: Well, let me tell you, we have a two hour time slot booked for a 20 minute LARP. So we have a lot of room for the pre-brief and for the debrief because we really want to book in this nicely, especially because we don’t know each other going into this. And this can be a vulnerable experience. So we need to have that structure to help protect ourselves in this vulnerable environment. And also it doesn’t mean we’re going to use up the whole two hours. What it means is we’re just going to leave availability for people to continue to talk things out and that when we all sign off, we all feel good about having been heard, having been seen about how we navigated, that at no moment did we feel like we weren’t our boundaries weren’t being honored.
Julian: And after that conversation, right, again, there are different ways. Maybe you have a tip or a hack for us or for how to unpack experiences during gameplay. How are then these experiences, these learnings, also this understanding from other characters, but then also other players and how they phrase it and, you know, and how it touched them during play, but also afterwards, right? How are those translated into future behavior? I mean…
Meghan Gardner: Yes, well, I would this is where I’m really going to pitch your deck. I hope you don’t mind…
Julian: No, feel comfort….
Meghan Gardner: In your debrief cube, you have these green cards and they are my favorite cards, particularly because of that, what these are, these are transfer right here, these green cards. These are about, so here’s an example: What does this experience remind you of in your day to day? What do you learn about yourself and the team? What would you, what did you do that will be beneficial to you? What are you more aware of now? What are the top five things you will take away? So I’m already, by having me consider what I’ve done and learned today and how it applies to my life outside of the LARP environment and even the debrief environment, that right there is the pinnacle of transfer. That’s what we want to achieve, because I am making it personal to me. Not just, it’s not just a self contained experience. It’s a self contained, it is a contained experience that is going to shape me and how I see my life outside of this from here forward. Now I’m a big proponent of transformative game design. Now the one thing I would maintain is it’s very rare to have a revolutionary change of a person inside of a game that they come out completely changed. That’s kind of that’s something that’s often put forward in media that you’ll have a therapist, you have a patient and there’s this big light bulb moment and they’re forever changed after that. You know, good will hunting is something like that, right? But the truth is, most situations, I’m not going to say all, but most are a very tiny blip of the needle, you know, and that but that needle can blip again and again, every time I can go back and retrieve the artifacts and the information from that experience and continuously apply it to moments in my future. So that and that’s the repetition. Every time I revisit what I’ve learned, apply it to me today, me next week, me a month, a year, two years from now. That’s when my transformation, my transformative experience has actually now been sustainable and prolonged, not just something that changed me for next week, but something that was prolonged and impacted me for years to come.
Julian: And I want to add, you know, as you know, it’s really embodied. We also have the body memory, right, the muscle memory, which is also a nonverbal, maybe an unconscious if you like that concept, but trigger, right? And reminder of what has happened in this situation. So that’s yeah, that’s this immersive experience. Wow, wow, wow. I guess you already mentioned the NanoLARP tonight will be online. So yes, this can be done online. Do you have any tips for our listeners in terms of safe space in the online world? I understand, you know, you mentioned switching off the camera, switching off the microphone. But then how I mean, yes, they’re adults. But what other safety measures are there, especially if you as the facilitator, you know, you I mean, we, OK, let me rephrase that. What do you do if someone switches off the camera? Do you trust them? Of course. But you also feel or sense: There might be a little bit more? I mean, what do you do if this person is literally sitting on the other side of the planet?
Meghan Gardner: Again, this is, a lot of this is discussed in the pre-brief. What would be if everybody in the in the room says: You know what? I’m OK with being messaged and saying, are you OK? Then we would do that. But we also want to be acceptable for them to not respond, to have boundaries. So this is and it’s interesting because I feel like LARPs are an amazing place for people to practice boundaries. And it’s not even just inside the LARP, right? It’s on the other ends of the LARP. We’re learning how to protect ourselves and create spaces in which we can learn and grow. Despite our past, despite whatever triggers we may have. It’s not, LARP is very big on saying and helping people to understand that, you know, there’s a saying in Buddhism: In order to walk on the barefoot on the earth, should I coat the entire world with leather or should I put leather on the bottom of my shoes or on the bottom of my feet? So in other words, do I need the whole world to adapt to me or do I adapt to the whole world? So if I am carrying a lot of trauma in me, I have got to learn how to work with the world because the world will not adapt to me. Now I can also create a support structure of people who will create a safe space for me to explore these things. And this is this environment. We are all coming in consciously in a supportive environment to practice these things so that when I come in here, if I’m bringing my, if my trauma pops up with in this environment, I have the ability to push the pause button and to manage the feelings and that one act of pushing the pause button of creating a boundary right there, that is transformative. It’s teaching me that I have the right when I am interacting with people to put up a boundary and to have it honored. And when I’m repetitively in an environment where my boundaries are honored, I look towards other people honoring my boundaries. So it might begin, you might actually begin to look at your social group outside of the game environment and go: Hmm, who in my social group would honor those boundaries and who would not?
Julian: Yes and I think, you know, and again, I know we’ve been talking for a while already and, you know, we must come to an end at one point, but I understand also, you know, besides the script and the story and again, the framing of this, you know, context and set up and the content and the learning that is woven into the story or beyond, I guess, with this whole acting it out layer, there’s way more to discover, right? For oneself, but then also obviously for this social encounter and, you know, learning within itself is a social encounter. So I think it’s great, great that we, you know, could make this just a little bit visible. And of course, hopefully listeners want to now be part of a LARP, a Nano LARP, EduLARP or some other circles that are, yeah, out there online.
Meghan Gardner: And I should add, I hope that the LARPs they participate in have an awareness of this, because as I said, years ago, I was not quite aware of the power of a debrief. And it was something that was brought to my attention by some of my staff after a particularly powerful moment. And it was like: Wow, okay, yeah, yeah, feel free to jump out a game and work with that. And now I’m learning that this has to be, it has to be, the pre-brief and the debrief have to be a part of any type of experience that is going to be emotionally dynamic. There are, if you take a look at the adventure LARPs that we do with the kids, there’s not a whole lot of emotional depth to these. And what’s going to be probably the most emotional as the kids interact and perhaps have some interpersonal conflict about what the next action that they’re going to take as a group is. Those are the types of things that I’m trusting teachers to already have in place, skills already have in place. But when you’re talking about a LARP that somebody is engaged in for eight hours in one day, right, or even 20 minutes, but it’s, we’re capturing, we’re encapsulating an incredibly conflict-based experience. If there is not a pre-brief and a debrief, and if there is not a structure in place to help you come into and out of this safely, don’t participate.
Julian: And then thinking, what I think I need to think longer than this recording is if this, if this can be generalized for any full game and playful approach in a learning, let’s even say a business learning content, or content, sorry.
Meghan Gardner: Yeah, I think it, I mean, your deck really encapsulates it because you have some very good, you know, I think in here it even has instructions on the pre-brief. You even talk about touching on these things before the experience begins So, and that’s in part why I would recommend this deck, not just to people involved in games, but people involved in any type of business environment. For example, if I’m bringing everybody into a meeting, it’s going to be volatile. You know, for example, I have to lay off a bunch of employees, right. So before we go into that environment, we should have an understanding of what’s going to be happening, let people kind of, you know, don’t hit them with it all at once, give an idea of what’s going on, and what are the steps you need to take to make people feel safe to speak up, to feel heard. And then when they leave, what kind of support are you providing at the end? You know, there’s this great example of, there was a tech company that had to do this massive layoff, and they brought everybody into a town hall, letting them know about it ahead of time. And the CEO got up and totally took responsibility for putting the company into this situation, said here are the measures we’re going to be, and first said: This is going to be, I know that this is very upsetting and scary to people right now. So empathized with people first, then talked about what they were going to do to support each person that they were laying off, and then closed with: And here’s our plan to be able to call you back. So ending with optimism and hope: And here’s our support structure, here’s what we’re going to do to support you in this transition time. So it was really well thought out as to how it was going to be delivered. Now take that versus a certain nameless social media company that came on and let people know they were fired through posting it publicly on social media. What!? Yeah, so do you think people are going to want to go back to that company versus the first company that took into account that, you’re going to have people in really emotionally stressful spaces, space here, and how do we accommodate that and provide an opportunity for people to feel safe in that moment?
Julian: I have two more questions. One is, I went through a LARP, I learned something, I want to change behavior, do I get to play again to see if I can now do what I learned or that I can act?
Meghan Gardner: Yeah, so you’re talking about the same exact? All right, so.
Julian: Yes, yes, because now I want to practice if I can, you know, react differently to such a conflict and is that part of this learning experience or?
Meghan Gardner: It could be. I would say that if you play enough LARPs, you’re going to experience that situation again. But the thing about, so here’s the thing, the thing about LARPs is they are extremely dynamic and they’re beautiful in the sense that you have three distinct parts of a LARP. You have the plot, which is what I, as the designer of the LARP, create. Then we have the story and the narrative, and the narrative is basically, I may have these reversed, so I believe the story is what I’m navigating, and then the narrative is at the end, which is: Now the game is done and I’m going to go back and I’m going to tell you about it, right? So or it might be flipped where the story is at the end, just now learning about this. But I love that they are dividing these three places because a LARP will never be the same again once it’s played. That’s the point. The plot is going to be depicted differently every time I do it. So can you go back and play the same game? No. Can you go back and play the same plot with a different narrative and different story? Yes.
Julian: Got you. Now I figure out I’m just going to add another question or maybe another. What’s your ultimate facilitation tip? I mean, 25 plus years experience in game facilitation, being NPCs, probably seeing kids, teens, adults, different contacts, content, plots, narratives, and reactions. I mean, if you just need to pick one ultimate facilitation tip, what would that be?
Meghan Gardner: I would say, and this is assuming I’m the facilitator: Leave myself at the door. So as the facilitator, if I am participating, then I’m part of the, an ingredient in this whole experience. But if I’m just a facilitator, I have to leave myself at the door. So in my life outside of my work, I volunteer in hospice. And so I work with people who are anywhere from months to minutes away from dying. And so there are times that I will enter into my patient’s environment with their family, and their family or they may be very angry and they may project that anger onto me. And I am essentially a facilitator of this dying process. I can’t take that personally, I have to allow that they are in a really difficult space. And if they need to project, I can create boundaries to some degree, without a doubt. Like if I feel in danger, I will set up that boundary. But if they just need to say something angry, if a child needs to yell at me, okay, all right, that’s what they need in that moment. And my goal is to get them to a space where they can begin to talk about those feelings, as opposed to yelling about them. But if I start taking it personally as a facilitator, when somebody says something, one of the most powerful tools might be: It sounds like you’re really upset. So they say something angry at me, and I can say: It sounds like you’re really upset. Is there something more to this than what you’re telling me about? Or simply that must, if they’re angry about a situation, I can simply acknowledge, especially in the dying, you’re losing a loved one, how much this sucks, right? You know people make the mistake in the dying among the family by saying: At least. They say: At least. And I like to tell people: If ever you are going to say something to somebody who’s in experiencing loss, and you start with „at least“, don’t say the next words. Because the words at least means you’re minimizing what they’re experiencing. So be very careful as a facilitator to never minimize people’s experience or accoutre it. If they perceive that you said X, Y, Z, and you do not recall saying X, Y, Z, don’t say: I didn’t say X, Y, Z. Just say: Okay, all right, can you tell me more about what happened there? And what, you know, was that experience like for you? And I’m okay with apologizing for something I don’t think I did. Because what does it cost me? Literally, it costs me words to help this person feel better. And what is it? And that’s it. If they need an apology from me to move on, then I will give them an apology.
Julian: Wonderful. Oh, so many tips now in one. Thank you, Meghan. And LARP, what is the secret source? I mean, why do you think it works so wonderfully in helping you, helping the participants to create those transformative experiences?
Meghan Gardner: Well, it’s improv, which is one of the most amazing experiences. If you’ve never done improv, I highly recommend you do it. In fact, it’s one of the most sought after hobbies for Fortune 500 companies when they see that you’ve done improv on your resume. That makes a difference because of this concept of yes and, right? So I am receiving, I’m a part of this story, I’m participating in this story. But for me, I think it’s the embodiment. I am acting out, I’m speaking, I am physically acting out my character, within reason and within the margins of safety. But to me, it’s that embodiment and at the higher level arts, I have props, I have costuming, I have all these different external artifacts to help me get into character and to portray my character. So there are so many levels of how that can be utilized as a tool. I mean, just even looking at artifacts and go: I’ve embodied this thing with so much meaning. And what is that meaning? And can I take this artifact outside of this environment and still have it mean that? And when I look at artifacts inside of my life, what do they mean to me and why? And then when I try to marry that with my hospice, where you’re literally leaving everything behind, right? Except for I would maintain the love that you hold for each other. So I can’t name any other experience, and I’ve had many experiences, many different types of games that I’ve played, experiences that I’ve had in my life that can induce a state of flow, induce a state of such adrenaline rush. And this interplay is the space that I feel is the most ripe for me to learn about myself and other people.
Julian: Wow. Well, thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. And I guess everyone could feel and hear. And we’re going to take a screenshot and you can also see that this is very much in your zone and what, you know ,inspires not only you, but all your participants. And I can just imagine how the NanoLARP and all the other designs that you’re creating are inviting participants to have that transformative experience. Thank you so much.
Meghan Gardner: Oh, it’s my pleasure, Julian.
Julian: And yes, for all the listeners, pan around the playlist. There are many more serious games portrayed in this podcast. And until the next time, your Julian.
Guardian Adventures provides consulting and transformative design for therapeutic centers, museum and science centers, summer camps, amusement & attraction industries, and more.
