Survive Avantgarde – a rpg adventure about self-esteem and self-efficacy

On tuesday 6th of july 2023 I had the opportunity to engage students in an exchange program called Transform4Europe at University of Trieste. They asked me to bring a game-based activity on self-esteem and self-efficacy. A great opportunity to show the intersection between games and psychology.

I quickly settled on a role-playing game, but I had two big questions in my head: what system to use and what narrative to bring. For those who know me, I’m deeply concerned about the relations between narrative, game mechanics and learning goals, and I “strongly believe” (this means: there is solid support in the scientific literature) that they must be not only connected, but synergic as well. After many ruminations about the kind of system to use, and with the great help of Diego Fabris who suggested the perfect game to tackle these topics, I settled on Prism, a game by Claudio Pustorino. The tag system was perfect to develop what I had in mind.

I pre-generated 10 playing characters (PCs) in order to allow the expected audience for some choices and quickly set-up the session. I used the card format, aided by the spoils of my (sold) Mtg collection*, sleeves and a printer.

*: as you can see, most cards are somewhat old

I used some generative AI to show just the minimum amount of the location I was describing – remember that there would have been a language barrier and students would not all be fluent in english (and neither my english is that good).

The adventure I came up with has been called “Survive Avantgarde”, and is a dystopian story about art and artists.

Finally, I held the session. I had 1 hour 30 minutes, debriefing included.

The group was completely estraneous to role-playing, but most of them cought up. It was a quite strange situation: there was no table around which to sit, but rather the setting for a frontal lecture; the five participants sat around the room, not toghether like you would expect for this kind of game; they were not ready to interact. In fact, when I explained that the activity needed them to discuss I saw fear in their eyes 😉

However, this is not something that needs to stop anyone from doing a perfectly fine game-based learning session. I simplified the rules on-line. I reduced the interactions to only the choices that needed to be made and to the minimum level of brainstorming. By the end of the session, most of the participants already had acquired the initiative that allows a role-playing group to play.

All in all, a great experience. It seems like we will have some opportunities to play Survive Avantgarde at least one more time 😉