Welcome to Goblin Town: Using Role-Playing Games for Education and Science Communication

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The emergent field of archaeogaming explores how people interact with gaming worlds. In this poster, we take a look at a subset of gaming, role-playing games (RPGs), and their potential for teaching archaeological concepts and critical thinking. We present three case studies of RPGs with archaeological themes that provide interactive narratives for players to experience. The first is the tabletop RPG, “Dungeons and Dragons.” “Welcome to Goblin Town” is a game played by archaeologists that explores issues such as looting, repatriation, identity, diversity, and ethics in archaeology. The game is made publicly available by live-streaming through Twitch and YouTube. The second is a classroom role-playing simulation for teaching players the Section 106 process and the decision-making skills required for projects. The third is an RPG where student players take on the roles of well-known archaeologists, and pseudo-archaeologists, and guess their theoretical framework based on conversations. Through these examples we show how RPGs can be used to teach students and the public about archaeological methods, theory, regulations, and ethics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37007.0