Lines Veils & the Library: A TTRPG Identity Exploration Workshop for 1st Year Students—Amber Sewell

This presentation was delivered on June 12, 2025 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2025: Games, Conflict, and Education.

Slides as PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gRPn...

Description:
A university student’s first year is a natural time for them to begin to explore different identities. This is especially important for students in the queer community. These can be fraught experiences, though, as people figure out how to navigate conversations about these identities with others. New research is emerging about the impact tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) can have on identity exploration. they allow individuals to create characters and explore new worlds and are unique places for people to play out different identities in a fictionalized setting, best done with various player safety tools in place to set community expectations. The academic library, which connects the campus community with a wide variety of resources, is a natural facilitator for these types of events. Academic libraries participate in outreach and programming that support the well-being of their students8, often hosting events highlighting the needs of marginalized community members. They can support these events by providing physical space, connecting otherwise siloed campus entities, and even incorporating TTRPG rulebooks and other materials into their circulating collections.

In this presentation, I will lay out the design process for creating an identity exploration workshop for first-year students using TTRPGs, including a review of the literature and my strategy for forming collaborations across campus to effectively introduce students to the idea of using TTRPGs as a way to safely explore identity and practice navigating identity-related conflict in a fictional setting. I will address the gap in literature about the incorporation of safety tools utilized by the TTRPG community, and explain how the academic library is an ideal place to facilitate these workshops and provide students opportunities to use TTRPGs to practice navigating conflict and identity exploration throughout their time as a university student while connecting them to other relevant campus resources.

Bio:
Amber Sewell (she/her) is an assistant professor and Teaching and Learning Librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she works primarily with first- and second-year undergraduate students. Her research interests include games for instruction and outreach, pop culture, and fandom. Creator and host of The LibParlor Podcast, she is also interested in podcasting as a means of making scholarship more widely available.

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This hybrid outreach event was co-funded by the Erasmus+ ROCKET project; the Uppsala Forum on Democracy, Peace and Justice; and Region Gotland.

The seminar is hosted by the Transformative Play Initiative in the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. The Transformative Play Initiative explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.

See the complete program: https://gamesandsociety.speldesign.uu...

Learn more about Transformative Play at Uppsala and join the TPI mailing list: https://www.speldesign.uu.se/research...

Learn more about the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design: https://www.speldesign.uu.se/research...

Like Transformative Play Initiative on FB:   / transformativeplay  

Like the Games and Society Lab on FB:   / gamesandsocietylab  

Graphic Design by Liliia Chorna. Music by Elias Faltin. Video edited by Kjell Hedgard Hugaas.