Players of Tabletop Roleplaying Games will be familiar with that sense of wonder that comes from having a great game with friends. However, the benefits of playing these games may be more profound than we think. Five years ago, Mythic Minds was established to explore and utilize the educational, therapeutic and healing properties of roleplaying games to support young peoples’ development. To that end, they established Young Dragons, a program that runs clubs for young people to play and benefit from roleplaying games.
I caught up with Garry Harper, the managing director of Mythic Minds, to learn about their offering and how they help young people develop.
The Origins of Young Dragons
Before Young Dragons, Garry started up an organization called the Role Play Haven along with David Coulter. The Role Play Haven is an organization that hosts tabletop roleplaying clubs across the UK, whilst supporting many worthy charities. At the time of writing, they have 10 branches across the UK and are the largest organization of this kind in Europe with over 800 active members.
As someone who benefitted from roleplaying games growing up, Garry pushed the idea of using these kind of clubs for young people to help them gain some of the benefits he had growing up.
What if we using role playing games as a social arm and a therapeutic tool, to help other kids with SEND needs? And so this project was called Young Dragons, which was started off from the Role Play Haven, a little working group. We got approached by Westminster Council when we were just in very early stage stages. They said, why don’t you go ahead and start doing this? Because we’ve got some programs we’d like you to get involved in.
They started Young Dragons as a working group that aimed to use roleplaying games as a social and therapeutic tool to support children struggling in school. Supported by Westminster Council, and with Sir Ian Livingstone as their ambassador, they made this scheme a reality. Mythic Minds was formed as a new organization to deliver the Young Dragons program to schools.
Mythic Minds is the group that delivers the Young Dragons programs for young people.
Since then, they have enjoyed success after success, positively influencing young people as well as collecting research and evidence on the therapeutic benefits of TTRPGs.
The Therapeutic Benefits of Roleplaying
Promoting and Incentivizing Literacy
Garry spoke about his experience growing up with dyslexia and the difference playing roleplaying games made for him. He spoke about his love of the game, Mutazoids, a game where you and your fellow players play people who have mutated after a nuclear war. This was a fiction that very much caught the attention of nine year old Garry!
As a nine year old, I was completely drawn into this, but what it helped me do was develop my math skills and my English. Because I was nine years old, I couldn’t even spell my own name, I was that bad. It kind of pushed me in a very organic, natural way start developing my own skills, because I really enjoyed it.
Now Garry is a managing director and producer of roleplaying games working with the likes of Modiphius. This is something that would have been unimaginable before Mutazoids awoke his motivation to develop his literacy skills!
Through Young Dragons, Garry has seen that people are much more willing to develop their literacy skills in a roleplaying game setting. He recalls talking to a parent who was concerned about their child’s academic progression:
I’m really sorry to tell you, but your child can write really well, but they’ve been masking all this time. They’ve literally written their own character sheet out!
A character sheet is an essential rite of passage and a great opportunity to develop literacy skills.
What really seems to make the difference here is whether or not the the learner is engaged. Being engaged in these games means being engaged in learning the skills in order to be successful in the game. Here is how Garry put it:
Engagement is an important factor in this. If they are engaged in the game, they will try harder to read that than if I say, here’s the Oxford Dictionary, do you want to read that for a minute? You know they’re going to more likely go, yeah, actually, this has given me a benefit to this game. I need to read it so they’ll try harder to read that spell. And then what we’re doing is we’re, we’re obviously very organic, natural way of helping them improve.
Trained Storytellers Make All the Difference
Of course, there’s more to what Garry and the team at Mythic Minds do than simply playing the games. Young Dragons makes use of trained storytellers who run these roleplaying games in a way that incorporates elements of learning and therapy in a safe and engaging way.
Our storytellers are all specially trained. We don’t just go, hey, you’re can you run this game? Right? Go for it. As a GM or a storyteller, you want to try to push these players in a very safe place that’s not going to be harmful to them, and give them challenges. And the more you can push and challenge things, the more the development of those players changes for the better.
Garry explained how whenever they get young people participating in Young Dragons, they always come with a detailed profile. This profile includes their challenges, relevant conditions and things they want to work on. Whether young people are struggling with social, academic, emotional, neurodiverse or mental health issues, the Young Dragons storytellers can run roleplaying games that will help with these issues. Through gameplay, they can develop innate skills such as communication, working with others, reframing problems, confidence, whatever is going to be valuable to the young people at the table.
Young Dragons’ trained storytellers make all the difference!
Garry used the example of supporting young people facing social challenges at school:
Let’s take a child who’s getting bullied at school. Well, let’s put that in a role playing game and actually put them in a safe environment so they can troubleshoot ideas and how they can get through that scenario. Then they can solve the problem, and we just give them that gentle push in the right direction.
Overcoming Barriers to Education and Therapy
In more formal education and therapy settings, there can be a lot of barriers to participating fully. Making these sessions relaxed and playful, makes a huge difference in getting through those barriers.
When you’re trying to work with them, if you put them on the chair and go, so tell me about your life. When did this all start? Well, I’m not talking about this, but when you’re doing it in a game, your your defense has dropped down. You’re not what we call masking the problems anymore. Your your mask comes down.
This emphasis on having a fun fantasy experience is crucial to what Garry and the team do with Young Dragons. These young people engage with these programs to enjoy the adventure with further benefits happening in the background.
When you’re immersed in a game, barriers come down and learning becomes possible.
We don’t market it as therapeutic. We market as, this is Young Dragons. This is a club. You’re doing this as an activity. So they don’t look at this as as an educational way at all. It’s not mentioned at all. So we’re not really tricking them either. We’re literally just running a normal interactive storytelling game where we’re just hitting particular topics and areas and in the backgrounds.
Garry then spoke about one case where there was a particularly profound shift. He was supporting a young person dealing with a lot of aggression. In gameplay, this was expressed in the young person attacking everything they encountered. Here’s how Garry was able to turn this situation around.
So I put a gigantic dragon down in front of him, and he didn’t wasn’t scared. No, I’m gonna attack him. And I said, you’re not hurting him. You’re not hurting at all. And he was like, what? Yeah, you’re not hurting him. I said, some things are bigger than you in life and they won’t always fight you back either.
This dragon didn’t fight him back, but then he went again, and he attacked it again and again and again. And nothing, nothing happens. And I said, Have you have you thought about talking to him instead of hitting him all the time? And he was like, what? So he talked to the dragon, and the dragon spoke back to him. That little moment there changed this child’s life completely.
Little moments of make believe like this can make all the difference in young peoples’ perspectives of the world. These clubs provide opportunity for young people to take a step out of their day to day reality and imagine better ways of being. The storytellers and their wider support networks can then help them realize their newfound perspectives.
The Results
I asked Garry how they measure the success of their programs. As discussed above, engagement can be a big barrier to education and development in formal settings. This means that looking out for whether young people are engaged is a big indicator.
Well, a smile! A smile on a child’s face is a success. Obviously, we have to produce research as well to reassure the education side of things, and whoever the client is, that we’ll see where we’re making an impact. But the main thing for us is, if that child is smiling, we’re doing the job right there.
If everyone’s enjoying themselves, you’re certainly doing something right!
Even young people who are skeptical about playing roleplaying games usually warm up when they see it’s about telling a story in a fun and imaginative way. Garry also spoke about the differences he regularly sees in the young peoples’ social skills through play.
Maybe the child has not got many friends, so they’re not interacting too much. So we would measure that. Are they talking to other children? Because this is what they wanted. They’re not doing much social interactions. Are they talking to other children? Are there more interactions? Are they making friends? So we do our sessions, we’ll see, we will report what we can through, and then we’ll follow up.
When I asked if the results were lasting after the game had ended, Garry spoke about getting feedback from parents about the incredible change they’ve seen in their children:
His mother now came to us straight away and said, what did you do? He’s actually starting to engage in people and talk to people more because he’s realized the power of this and he’s been put in this very safe bubble area where he can test things. It is almost like a virtual reality.
Getting Involved With Young Dragons
If you think that Young Dragons can benefit you, family members or your school, you can get in touch through website. As well as running school clubs, they can also run sessions at homes and community centers.
Or perhaps you’d like to help deliver their incredible programs and support young people themselves. They are regularly after new storytellers to run these transformative games. If you are interest you can check out their ‘become a storyteller’. If you are successful in your application, you can get support and training so you can deliver some truly impactful game sessions yourself.
Adventure awaits Young Dragons!
