Unit 7 Overview: Designing Safety Structures
Welcome to our unit on Safety and Identity in RPGs! In this unit, we will deepen into concepts related to safety design. Several issue that can arise with regard to psychological safety during games. Examples include schisms in role-playing communities; issues with online communication; issues arising from intimate and/or romantic relationships; creative agenda disputes, i.e. when players have different styles of play they most enjoy; power struggles between players and facilitators; and bleed-in and bleed-out that has not been processed effectively (see Chapter 2). Serious psychological safety issues can also arise related to issues of inclusion and accessibility; players experiencing crisis states; and sensitive content.
Such problems can lead to emotional flooding, when a participant is cognitively incapable of processing further information due to psychological overwhelm; dysregulation, when a participant’s psychological well-being falls out of balance; activation and/or triggering, when a situation activates a survival response in a person, e.g. fight, flight, fleeing, or fawning; and harm, when a person or a situation inflicts psychological damage on another person, whether purposefully or accidentally. However, in some cases such problems can be avoided or addressed directly, leading players to re-establish psychological safety within the group more quickly. Therefore, we will explore different strategies for promoting and maintaining psychological safety before, during, and after role-playing games.
Required materials:
- Bowman, Sarah Lynne, Elektra Diakolambrianou, Josephine Baird, Angie Bandhoesingh, and Josefin Westborg. 2024. “Chapter 5: Safety and Community Container Setting.” In Transformative Role-playing Game Design, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman, Elektra Diakolambrianou, and Simon Brind, 147-185. Transformative Play Research Series. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala University Press.