Matthew Berland is an Associate Professor of Design, Creative, and Informal Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UW–Madison and Affiliate Faculty in Information Studies, Computer Sciences, Educational Psychology, and Science/Technology Studies.
Nathan Holbert:
Season two of Pop and Play.
Haeny Yoon:
Woohoo.
Nathan Holbert:
Hey Haeny, welcome back.
Haeny Yoon:
Hey Nathan. Good to be here.
Nathan Holbert:
You seem excited.
Haeny Yoon:
I am. I'm very excited. Well, welcome, everybody. On this season of Pop and Play, we're talking about narratives. What are the stories we watch, listen to, read, and how do these structures of these stories or the lack of structure contribute to our experiences building or existing in narratives?
Nathan Holbert:
On this episode, we're talking role-playing games. Role-playing games are social experiences where a group of people collectively create a narrative through interactions with each other, through a predetermined world and also the rules of a game system. A game master sets up the basic narrative elements of the world and the story, and they manage the game rules. Then they also prompt the players as we build our story together. If you've heard of Dungeons and Dragons, you've definitely heard of role-playing games.
Haeny Yoon:
Dungeons and Dragons are just one example of a role-playing game. There are so many more with a huge variety of narrative elements, each requiring different levels of involvement, expertise, and seriousness.
Nathan Holbert:
Role-playing games can be a valuable tool for trying on different identities, which of course could be a lot of fun, but it can also get a bit complicated. We get into that and more with our guests.
Haeny Yoon:
Since this is pop and play, we weren't content to just talk about role-playing games. We had to play one.
Nathan Holbert:
Folks, we had a ball, but our endless giggling, bathroom jokes and commitment to a traveling acrobat troop bit got a bit long.
Haeny Yoon:
Since it did get a little long, we pulled some clips of the gameplay session together with the conversation and help from our fellow nerd, friends, Matthew Berland, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Antero Garcia from Stanford University.
Nathan Holbert:
Haeny, tell us about the game that we played together this week.
Haeny Yoon:
I think, originally, when I thought about role-playing games, I definitely thought about pretend play, and I thought kids do this all the time, right? They always role play. They always do this. How hard could it be?
Nathan Holbert:
It's got to be easy, right?
Haeny Yoon:
Yes, to my shame, I realized that it was actually really hard and in preparation for it, I actually watched a YouTube clip of Critical Role. It was a bunch of expert professionals doing a role-playing game. It definitely discouraged me. I definitely had frozen in fear of failure during this whole thing. We played Lady Blackbird. Lady Blackbird is pledged to be married to royalty, I think. What she wants to do is escape to a faraway island to be with her lover. She hires this smuggler ship and a crew of outcasts and people like that to help her get to this island.
Nathan Holbert:
Haeny, can you say a bit about what character you chose to play?
Haeny Yoon:
In preparation for it, we all had to pick a role. I actually don't remember who all the characters are, but I chose Lady Blackbird who was the central main character of this story. I was a little hesitant on whether or not I was going to choose her because I was afraid of what everybody else might think of me choosing the central character. Who did you choose Nathan?
Nathan Holbert:
The character I chose was Kale, described as a burglar and petty sorcerer, first mate and mechanic of The Owl. I am very drawn to the sort of thiefy type characters for some reason, even though I follow most all the rules generally in my everyday life. When I'm pretending, I like to be the more...
Haeny Yoon:
Oh, like a rebel, you're a rebel.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. I try to put on a rebel identity just for pretend.
Haeny Yoon:
I was thinking about when we were doing our back and forth e-mail chain. Everybody was very confident in what they chose.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, that's right. We were, we were all very like, "Oh, of course, I'm going to be that character. How could I be any other one?"
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Okay, so now let's jump to the game. Antero played the role of Snargle the Goblin Pilot and Matthew acted as our game master. Our story, Lady Blackbird, begins with each of us trapped in a different part of our ship with the bad guys, the Imperial Guard, looking for us.
Haeny Yoon:
Prior to what you'll hear next is when Lady Blackbird, played by yours truly, disabled, the guards by releasing a lavender bomb to escape. This ingenious move made the guards very, very chill.
Nathan Holbert:
This clip takes up with each of us trying to sneak past the remaining guards to retake the ship.
Matthew Berland:
All right. The three of you together, how are you going to get the ship back? Come up with a plan and then it'll happen.
Nathan Holbert:
I mean, Snargle, you're the pilot, do you have any ideas of how we can get a hold of this thing?
Antero Garcia:
There is a way. We could hack into the cruise control sensors that are directly below the bridge, what?
Matthew Berland:
Absolutely. Yeah, sure. That's what it's called.
Antero Garcia:
If we get down there, it is a three person... It's one of those things where two people need to turn a lock at the same time and another person needs to whisper the code into the talk box.
Matthew Berland:
Absolutely, that was done that way on purpose. Absolutely. It was.
Antero Garcia:
If we can get down there then I think we could probably take over the ship.
Matthew Berland:
Yeah. You only believe there to be two people between yourself and the secret hatch that gets you to underneath the bridge. How are you going to get past those two people?
Haeny Yoon:
I feel we should just be in disguise.
Nathan Holbert:
Just put on big Groucho Marx glasses and just be like, "Hey, what's up guys?"
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. We should just stroll right in there. Who knows?
Matthew Berland:
Great. That just happened. You walked up to the two guys and they're like, "Wait, who are you? Those are... Why are you dressed in? Who are... What is... Are you... Were you passengers?" Lady Blackbird, what do you do about them? How do you answer them?
Haeny Yoon:
I don't. I just pretend I'm in a silent movie and I just keep walking and just keep confusing them.
Matthew Berland:
Great. I'm going to give you another two XP for that. It says you only have one on my sheet. You should have at least five.
Nathan Holbert:
Okay, so XP stands for experience points. I know experience is with an E, but that's just what it is. The game master is going to give us experience points when we do something that matches up with our character. Then we can spend that XP to unlock new skills and traits.
Matthew Berland:
Again, you can spend those at any time, if you want to be able to fly all of a sudden or blast people with lightning or whatever, or sense things from afar, just go ahead and hit modify and change that or whatever you want.
Haeny Yoon:
Oh, got it. Okay.
Matthew Berland:
That was a strange decision to make. I will say, you walk right up to them and you just act like you're in a silent movie and one of them looks down and is like, "The fact that you are acting like Charlie Chaplin and that it smells so powerfully of lavender right now is, I mean, I cannot... I don't know what's happening, but I'll tell you what I feel right now, which is okay. For the first time in a long time, do you know what I mean? I'm feeling okay. I've got to go call my mom." One of them just sort of walks off. The other is less convinced. He's like, "Oh man. You're me, you the one who looks like me, except for slightly greenish. Why are you me?" Snargle?
Antero Garcia:
I think I kind of want to lean into the silent movie situation.
Matthew Berland:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Antero Garcia:
When they give me the confused look, that's when I start pulling the invisible rope, that's leading me away from them, doing the mime version and just look very confused while I'm doing it. I can't help but have to pull this rope and walk away rather than engage in this conversation.
Matthew Berland:
I love everything about that too. You can take two XP for that. Kale, what is your way? One of them wandered off to go call his mom. One of them is staring. The one that remains is, at the moment, fixed on Snargle trying to parse why he is seeing himself do a rope trick at himself.
Nathan Holbert:
Right?
Matthew Berland:
When you are trying to pass by, what do you do?
Nathan Holbert:
I do two things. One, I use a light spell to make it blindingly light right near that Empire guy's face, and two, I pants him.
Matthew Berland:
Okay. You blind him so you can pants him. Everything about this could not be more confusing. You've basically just walked up to a random, small-town cop and tried to pants him while someone else was him doing a mime rope trick.
Haeny Yoon:
Very nice.
Nathan Holbert:
All right, so that was our game. I'm not sure if any of our listeners could actually follow what was going on there during that game, but it was a lot of fun to play.
Haeny Yoon:
I don't even know if I know what just happened. Nathan, should we talk about what happened during this role-playing game?
Nathan Holbert:
Let's do it.
Nathan Holbert:
Well, Haeny, I'm curious, this is your first time playing a role-playing game, right?
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nathan Holbert:
How did you feel about it? What's your reaction to it?
Haeny Yoon:
I realized that I don't play a lot of games in general.
Nathan Holbert:
Oh my God. We got to... I don't know how we got into this partnership.
Haeny Yoon:
That's why I'm so good at the what's popping part.
Nathan Holbert:
That's true.
Haeny Yoon:
I don't really play a lot of games in general. I think I'm very much used to games with rules and it's a lot easier to circumvent something with rules because even in that, you know that you're circumventing a rule versus just creating something on the fly. I think I've told you this Nathan, how I feel like one of the things that actually pushed and stretched how I thought about playing imagination was when I did improv.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
Haeny Yoon:
Not that I was an improv person, but I was chosen to take a stab at it as an audience member and I was like, "This is so freaking hard. It's crazy." I'm like, "I do not realize how hard it was to just even sustain a storyline." I think that was the thing that was interesting to me is that I just didn't know how to create scenarios for myself except just be like, "What did I just do yesterday? I'll just use that." Like, "Oh Snargle's going to the bathroom. I guess I'll just go to the bathroom too." Yeah, what about you? What are your thoughts on it?
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. Well first of all, I think it's a funny way to think about it as this is sort of an improv. It really is.
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nathan Holbert:
It's an improv exercise in a lot of ways.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
There was this really...
Haeny Yoon:
Aren't you good at that? That's your jam?
Nathan Holbert:
No. Well, I've done it a lot many years ago, but I wouldn't ever claim to be good at it, but it is stressful and it is really hard. It is like you said, you can't just assume you're going to pop up there and be great and funny or, or be able to engage in something creative. You really do have to think about it and be able to think quickly about it.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
I related to that note. I don't know if you remember this, but at the beginning of our game, it opened by Matthew, our game master basically saying, "Heany, describe what you see around you." You were like the very first person that got called and the prompt was essentially, "Tell us whatever you want to tell us."
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nathan Holbert:
Which is so little constraint from which to build from.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, that seemed very stressful to me.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
You did it, you did a fine job.
Haeny Yoon:
I don't even remember what I said. I probably just imagined a scene from Firefly.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
Matthew Berland:
I was like, "Okay, I'll do this." Is that imaginative or is that just poaching content?
Nathan Holbert:
It's building on other ideas. That's the polite way, way to say it. It's remixing.
Matthew Berland:
Yeah. Oh, it's remixing. Yeah.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
Matthew Berland:
Yes. That's actually a theoretically sound idea.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. We can write a paper on remixing. We can't write a paper on stealing.
Matthew Berland:
We want to welcome back today, Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia. We're going to talk a little bit about role-playing games and the line between imagination and play and all of those good things. We're really thankful to have them on again as our expert guests to tell us more about what game design and role play affords and gives us in our lives.
Nathan Holbert:
Matthew, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you're doing here?
Matthew Berland:
My name is Matthew Berland. I'm an Associate Professor at UW Madison. I run the game design program there. Antero who are you?
Antero Garcia:
I'm Antero Garcia. I profess at Stanford University. I'm excited to see what happens today.
Nathan Holbert:
Maybe I'll start with just this core feature of role-playing games of playing pretend. I feel like pretend is kind of a core part of any aspect of play. We can pretend that a plastic chess piece is a Knight, or we can imagine that a stick is actually a sword. We take ordinary things and we transform them into something else, something more extraordinary, or something else altogether. I guess I'm wondering when we think about this idea about pretend, what role does it play in role-playing games? What do we learn when we engage in this practice? What do we learn about ourselves? What do we learn about other things when we engage in role-playing.
Matthew Berland:
One thing in learning sciences and in educational research we come back to so much is about identity. It's not just are you able to do task X. It's how do you learn to connect with sets of knowledge or feel the importance or understand. How can you use your own experiences and values to learn new things, to come to new forms of knowledge? One of the tricky things about identity is it's really hard if you fail at it. Learning is often through failure and that goes also for identity and for in sociocultural context as well. You need that ability to fail without being thrown out of society or kicked out of school. One of the things that pretend play offers kids, but also adults... This is often in some ways an excuse for adults to do what kids are doing, which is play with identities. Which is, again, so crucial, such a core of learning in ways that allow for failure, but also that where the failure doesn't have negative ramifications, if anything, as positive ramifications
Antero Garcia:
As Matthew and I were thinking earlier this week for a potential project... One of the things they oftentimes think about is, if you're playing a civics kind of game with young people, you can have them go and pretend to march in front of City Hall and pretend to engage in a mock protest for whatever the game requires. Once you finish the game, the students have now learned how to protest and how to march in front of City Hall. They know how to protest. There's probably something around education and transfer and I'm sure our fields have something profound to say around this, but I think just the very simple idea, the game as a form of social civic, academic growth, and that pretending is the foundational part of that feels important to me.
Haeny Yoon:
I think one of the things that I'm thinking about too, that both of you are saying is about how it's not necessarily the pretending that is the end goal, the end product, but it's what pretending and any of the tools. Whether it's role play, whether you're going to do some kind of dramatic thing or whether you're playing a board game, or whatever it is and what that actually does for people. What it does for people is also identities in the making and trying out a bunch of identities. Just to throw a question out there, I'm also thinking about how some identities stick to people, even if you're trying them out and rehearsing them and some identities do not stick to people. I think about that with young kids, how that stickiness could be really detrimental to them.
Haeny Yoon:
I remember reading this one article about how the kids in the classroom really loved playing monsters. They would play it all the time. The interesting thing part of it is that a lot of the white kids could take those identities on and off. They could be the monster during play. Then when play is over they can resume whatever they decided they were and how they were going to move through the world. What she found was that a lot of the black kids, they were seen as monsters. They had this monstrous characteristic during pretend play and for some reason, after that was over, it wasn't pretend anymore. It's this unfair thing because they were just trying it out, like all of us. We were trying out an identity and sometimes those identities stick to us.
Haeny Yoon:
I think on the reverse side, right, some of us like to play out like a commanding, whatever it is, and that gives us affordances. Then some of us, like me, feel like a small Asian lady. Somehow it works in a certain context, but people don't always see you like that. It's like taken on and off. It doesn't have sticking power or whatever it is. I guess the question is, how should we think about that or navigate that because I think both of you have such important points. I totally agree that is really the identity-making is happening when we can have these free and flexible spaces of pretend play, but then circulating around it are all these parameters right around our identities.
Matthew Berland:
I think speaking to which identities stick, that feels like this was a prototypical moment of this. Reminds me, there's another colleague here in the psychology department, Steven Roberts who's been doing work on if you are a Christian and you've been raised to see God as a white man, in terms of depictions. The ways that can funnel into your work environment and how you think about white men in authority positions of you. I think these ideas of what identities stick and how they play out, probably have profound impacts, honest to some extent.
Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Matthew Berland:
I do think it goes both ways too, though, in that, a character might be something that sticks to me, but I might also stick to a character when I was doing a whole bunch of kind of ethnographic work on gaming, tabletop gaming communities, there's one person in particular who I worked pretty closely with, who always played a dwarf. This was just his thing. He was a military vet. As he talked and described himself. He identified himself as carrying kind of like very tokenesque dwarf disposition in how he saw the world. He was very, maybe, dogmatic. He had little patience for people who didn't understand the kind of rules and procedures of things. I actually titled an article around this. The quote is "I piss off a lot of people when I play dwarfs like dwarfs." It is very much I embody this dwarf aesthetic and I live in this identity. It's not just like these identities get carried on to you, but you might carry them with you also. I'm not saying the reversal side of this very clearly.
Antero Garcia:
I agree with everything everybody has said. The one thing I would take a little issue with Haeny is free and flexible. Flexible maybe, but free, I don't think is a good plan. I think, as the teacher, as the game designer, it's incumbent on you to pay a lot of attention to how you're structuring that classroom or that game. If you are forcing a situation where all the black kids are monsters, that is bad. I don't know. That's just a broad statement. That's a bad thing.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
Antero Garcia:
Being more thoughtful about what it means and complexifying the characters and complexifying the situation is part of the constraints that you... Yeah, thank you. Tara said that was very bold of me to say.
Nathan Holbert:
We're not afraid of controversy.
Antero Garcia:
Right. It's a hundred percent serious. I think one of the reasons, these things aren't just free play. This is not against free play, but I think there is something real about the reasons it's not just free play. The reason that classrooms aren't discovery learning it's the same principle is that society is very imperfect. There are so many issues and there are so many inequities and there's so many problems. The last thing you want to do is just say, "Hey, everybody's already got everything they need. Let's just work with whatever you know, and everybody who doesn't already know what they want to do for a living, sorry." It is the same reason you don't walk into a game and say, "Everybody do anything all the time."
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
Antero Garcia:
The people who already know and who want to construct these entities and want to have the power or have some means of the power will assert that power. Part of what you do as a teacher, I can say as part of what I try to do, maybe successfully or unsuccessfully, is think about the real power relations in the classroom. That's something I also try to think about in games. Again, if you get into a situation where you have enabled those inequities, not only to stick, as you say, as negative identities, that's a situation where you haven't really paid attention to how power and race and inequity manifest themselves. We're not saying it can't happen otherwise, obviously.
Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.
Antero Garcia:
These things are unconscious parts of society. They exist, but at least you can try. That sounds to me like a situation where that was not the focus of how they tried.
Matthew Berland:
That is such an important point. I think it also an important point for like early childhood educators because I feel like the pinnacle of how we think about play is free play. I think you're right, that play can't always be this free, everybody does everything play. I think what you're talking about is alluding to that there's not necessarily rules, but maybe conditions around how to create spaces of equitable play where everybody can have, participate and contribute and experiment with these identities that they want to try out. I'm wondering if you have comments on, what are the conditions?
Nathan Holbert:
Well, I actually was going to pose this to you, Matthew. I think one of the conditions of tabletop play that is pretty common, it's not universal, but I think it shows up in the majority of games, is having some kind of facilitator, some kind of game master or dungeon master. As much as you pointed to this game, much of the action is dependent on the players and you respond to it. You are also still guiding us to some extent. I guess I'm curious if you want to speak to whatever this, I'm going to call it game master, whatever the game master's role. Also master in that title probably can do a lot of work in terms of unpacking on this too. I don't know, Matthew, if you, if you have thoughts around that.
Antero Garcia:
What constraints can a GM add to make a situation more equitable or more conscious of power? I don't know that I'm the best person to answer that question, but I can just say trying to be conscious of it at all times goes really far. Trying to see where it pops up and see where it doesn't. I've been in a lot of games over the years where people have repeated words that sort of are connotatively if not, denotative problematic that come from fantasy tropes. Even the fact that D and D, Dungeons and Dragons has historically used the term race to describe different, like drag dragons versus humans. It is an interesting thing. I don't want to say you're policing, because what you're doing is you're providing constraints and you're showing people what the grounds of the conversation are.
Antero Garcia:
I don't think it's ill meaning, but somebody might sort of start with an accent that you find offensive. If you just say, "We're not going to do that accent. Why don't you think about it?"
Haeny Yoon:
Hmm.
Matthew Berland:
Then move on. You don't have to be like, "You're a bad person now and what you've done has ruined it." You just say, "No, okay. Let's shift." So much work can be done by those little bumpers on the side to help focus people and enable them to see some of the power relations they may have not been aware of in their behavior. You can say, "No." If they need an explanation, you can have a discussion with them later. I think in this, as in so many classrooms, 99 times out of a hundred, they know exactly why once you've helped them focus on it. It's rare that someone will say, "There's no reason that's offensive." They'll say, "Oh, ooh, yep, right, okay, yes." Then you'll move on and now they've got a little bit more focus on that kind of thing.
Nathan Holbert:
I think we could even talk about this a little more with regard to, we've talked mostly at this point about kind of the power dynamics and considerations for ways in which we are participating in socially acceptable or socially productive ways. There's also this other component, which is, creativity and what kind of thinking can you support and what kinds of conversations can you enable? I think the game master role is an interesting component of these role-playing games. Then, if we talk about other kinds of video games or other kinds of even board games, there's sort of a rule system and that rule system is kind of defined by a book or a manual of some sort, maybe it's a computer itself kind of keeps check of those rules and whether or not you're following the rules.
Nathan Holbert:
Then in this case, there might be a manual, and in most cases there is some sort of a manual, but the ways in which you follow those rules or the ways in which you implement those rules comes down almost entirely to a person. What I'm trying to say is the rules are very, very minimal here and they're also implemented or chosen to be implemented entirely by the players. There's this tension between, when we think about game design, the degree to which there's a high amount of structure or the degree to which we, you called it earlier something closer to free play. Those structures can be important for figuring out what are appropriate ways to play, but they also support different types of thinking and different types of creativity and explorations in here. I guess I'm kind of curious, can you say a little bit about the relationship between structure and maybe rules in this case and the kind of play that's possible or the kind of thinking or creativity that might be possible in such a space?
Matthew Berland:
When you are teaching someone to paint, you don't just give them, this is again, I'm repeating myself a little bit, but when you're teaching someone to paint, you don't just give them a blank canvas and a bunch of a paint and say go. The way that you get there, the way that you come into this creativity is that you find those sets of constraints and you find the points in those sets of constraints, where you can allow for degrees of freedom as it were. I guess the answer is I always try and I'd rather err on the side of too many constraints in general and then figure out where we can break those constraints when I'm making a game or teaching a class. I'm happy to break constraints. It's easy to do that. It's hard to go the other way after you've let all the sheep out of the pen, then they're no longer doing synchronized swimming. Antero?
Antero Garcia:
Those values are never neutral within a game or within a schooling setting. Just to go back to Matthew, the painting example. I agree that if I want to know how to paint in a way that is read as being a painter, then I probably need to start with particular kinds of formal constraints. If I want to paint, but only use paper clips to never actually touch a canvas or use what people imagine as paint, then I probably don't want to go with those constraints. I probably want to reimagine painting anew, using only what you can find in like the paper clip aisle of a Staples or something like that. I think there's a way to think about the possibilities of... You still need constraints. I think that's the point. I was pulling up this quote from Stravinsky who talks about the Abyss of freedom. This is a terrible that the challenge of freedom is that is limitless, which means it is terrible and not useful.
Nathan Holbert:
I do think it's interesting, and maybe a little ironic, and maybe you double back in the end, but your example of how to be free of externalized constraints was to give yourself an extreme set of constraints. You're like, "Oh yeah, I don't want to be bound by your rules, man. I'm only going to paint with seven paper clips." You're like, "Okay, sure." I think the point might stand. I think the question is how do you get to the point where you can understand that seven paper clips, or whatever, are going to create this meaningful thing? How do you know when you are able to break existing constraints?
Antero Garcia:
I was working with my ninth graders and I had this vision of them re-imagining our classroom. We were going to literally redesign the space. I spent the whole morning, on the first day of school, moving out all of the furniture out of my classroom. Just put it all in the hallway, which probably was a safety hazard in retrospect. First day, first period, these kids who have never been in high school, walk into this empty classroom. This teacher, who they've never met before, is like, "Students, this is your space. You can do whatever you want with it. Make the classroom." They all looked at me and we had this stand-off for a while. After a while, they just slumped their shoulders, went out in the hallway, brought all the desks in and put them in rows.
Antero Garcia:
Is this what you want? You want me to put your God damned furniture back in the classroom. They basically recreated the classroom and as they knew it was supposed to be. Where you can push on these boundaries is both, there are existing boundaries, but it also means you can learn and push on those over time. There's ways I probably could have modeled these clearer over time than just say on the beginning. Let's redesign space in this very problematic way on the first day.
Nathan Holbert:
What a delightful moment for a new teacher though. Just perfectly encapsulates this like, "Yes, we are going to break the rules. We're going to change things. Crap. That's not how any of this works."
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.
Matthew Berland:
Yeah.
Antero Garcia:
Yeah, not even a little bit.
Haeny Yoon:
We're not necessarily having a conversation about whether or not there should be rules versus no rules. It's thinking about regardless of whether or not we have rules or constraints or boundaries, or whether we decide to have an empty classroom where all the kids are the movers and they do all of the work for us, it's not just about that. It's about what does that afford us? What are the questions that get raised? What are the possibilities through that? What does it do or not do for imagination? Maybe that's the question that we should be asking as teachers, or as educators or as people in the classroom. That we shouldn't be arguing about what the rules are, whether or not we should have them because no one here is arguing that we should or should not, but that we should think about, what if, what does it do for the boundaries of the classroom and for people in it?
Nathan Holbert:
What a great way to summarize that conversation. I love it. What if and the ways in which these role-playing games give us space and give us freedom to kind of push on the nature of where we are and what we could be and what we could create together and how rules play into that. That's fantastic. Thank you very much, Antero and Matthew, for both playing Lady Blackbird with us, and also helping us try to make sense of what the hell we just did and why that was worth doing. That was great. Thank you, guys.
Haeny Yoon:
Thanks for listening to Pop and Play and thanks to Matthew and Antero for joining us. Pop and Play is produced by Haney Yoon, Nathan Holbert, Lalitha, Vasu David and Joe Rena Ferry at Teachers College Columbia University with the Digital Futures Institute. This episode was edited by Jen Lee and Billy Collins. For a transcript and to learn more, visit tc.edu/popandplay.
Nathan Holbert:
Our music is selections from Lee Feeder by Paddington Bear used here under a creative commons attribution non-commercial license. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.