Despite growing interest in game‑based learning and the rising cultural popularity of role‑playing games (RPGs), most narrative RPG materials remain commercially produced and sold, making them difficult to license and adapt for educational use. As a result, educators and education researchers interested in narrative roleplay often rely on purchased systems, create their own materials from scratch, or attempt to adapt the limited number of existing RPG‑focused OERs, many of which may not suit their specific teaching contexts or learner needs. This lightning talk briefly highlights the unique capacity of narrative roleplay to foster intrinsic motivation, agency, and engagement across age groups. The session then explores existing RPG OERs and research‑informed entry points that educators can use to navigate this emerging area of open, narrative‑driven pedagogy, and, if inspired, contribute to the development of new, openly shared narrative RPG tools.
Attendees of this session will be able to:- Define key components of game-based learning, including distinctions between gamification, game-based learning, and gameful learning, and describe how these approaches differ in goals and implementation.
- Articulate the pedagogical promise of narrative role-playing games, particularly their capacity to support learner motivation, agency, collective meaning-making, and engagement with complex ideas through storytelling and play.
- Identify existing open educational resources related to narrative RPGs, as well as gaps in current literature and resource availability, in order to imagine how their own teaching, research, or open education work might contribute to this emerging area.
