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The Classroom Is Already a Role-Playing Game

Why tabletop role-playing belongs in education, and why I developed bookwormburrows.

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The classroom is already a role-playing game. Every morning, students enter a room governed by rituals, permissions, hierarchies, roles, tacit expectations, and shared fictions about what counts as intelligence, participation, success, failure, authority, confidence, and belonging. A teacher establishes a world through language; students discover the conditions of that world through experience; each person learns what kinds of speech receive attention, what kinds of risk appear safe, what kinds of knowledge can alter the direction of a conversation, and what kinds of identities become available within the group. Education has always involved the difficult work of entering a social world and learning how to act meaningfully inside it.

Tabletop role-playing games make that structure visible. They give a group a world, a set of constraints, a distribution of perspectives, and a sequence of situations whose outcomes depend upon collective interpretation. A facilitator describes a scene. Players decide what their characters see, fear, desire, believe, conceal, question, or attempt. The world answers through consequence. A promise made early in a campaign may return many sessions later as an obligation; a missed clue may become a source of danger; a poorly judged action may change a relationship whose importance only becomes clear after the group has already moved on. The table becomes a small society whose members discover, through play, that speech and action carry forward into a shared future.

This structure deserves serious pedagogical attention because it joins intellectual work to consequence. Much classroom learning remains organized through separation: reading occurs in one activity, discussion in another, writing in another, assessment in another, and application somewhere beyond the horizon of the unit. Tabletop role-playing gathers these practices into one unfolding environment. Students read in order to orient themselves within a world; they discuss because each participant possesses partial knowledge; they write because language can persuade, repair, reveal, protect, accuse, interpret, or redirect a situation; and they reflect because the consequences of earlier choices return to them through the world they have helped create. The activity gives knowledge a practical life.

John Dewey’s account of experience remains useful here. For Dewey (1938), educative experience develops through continuity and interaction: meaningful action grows from prior experience while also reshaping the conditions of later action. A tabletop campaign gives this continuity a material and social form. The group remembers what happened. The world remembers what happened. Students discover that their decisions acquire weight because later scenes inherit the traces of earlier ones. The classroom thereby becomes less like a sequence of isolated tasks and more like a lived field of inquiry in which attention, interpretation, and revision can accumulate.

Vygotsky’s (1978) account of learning also illuminates the form. He understood development as a socially mediated process in which learners extend their capacities through participation with others, language, tools, and cultural practices. Tabletop role-playing places students inside precisely this kind of mediated activity. A student who cannot yet formulate an interpretation alone may encounter that interpretation through another player’s question, through a character’s response, through a teacher’s prompt, or through the pressure of a situation that demands more careful thought. The group becomes a scaffold for forms of reasoning that individual students gradually learn to inhabit with greater confidence and independence.

Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of situated learning offers a related perspective. Knowledge develops through participation in meaningful social practices, especially where novices can move toward more central forms of contribution. A role-playing table can create such a space when its structure allows different kinds of expertise to matter. One student may remember a textual detail that everyone else overlooked; another may recognize a historical pattern; another may understand the emotional stakes of an interaction; another may see the flaw in a plan that initially sounded persuasive. The group advances through distributed intelligence. Each participant encounters a reason to attend to others because collective understanding becomes the condition of collective action.

This social character of learning helps explain why tabletop role-playing carries promise for classrooms. The term “collaboration” often appears in school policy and curriculum documents, yet students frequently experience group work as a division of labour in which one student writes, another speaks, several wait, and everyone receives the same mark. A role-playing table can generate a more demanding form of interdependence. The party’s movement through a shared world depends upon the ability of its members to listen, remember, negotiate, clarify, disagree productively, and recognize the value of perspectives unlike their own. The table makes social attention consequential. A quiet student’s observation may alter the group’s understanding of the scene; a student who hesitates in conventional discussion may find a compelling voice through a character; a student with strong spatial or strategic thinking may contribute an orientation unavailable through ordinary academic talk.

Gary Alan Fine’s Shared Fantasy (1983) remains foundational because it describes tabletop role-playing as a layered social practice in which participants move among the frames of person, player, and character. The player speaks as a fictional figure while remaining aware of the social world around the table; the group inhabits an imagined reality while continually negotiating its relationship to shared rules, real friendships, humour, conflict, attention, and trust. Later scholarship has developed this insight through the language of “dual consciousness,” describing the movement between player-self and character-self as a distinctive condition of role-play that can support reflection on identity, relation, and agency (Diakolambrianou & Bowman, 2023). In educational settings, this doubled position gives students a protected way to rehearse modes of being that ordinary classroom identity may have made difficult. A student can explore care through a healer, courage through a diplomat, patience through a scholar, leadership through a captain, or ethical ambivalence through a character who must act under conditions of conflicting loyalty.

The value of such experimentation lies in its relation to reflection. A role-playing character creates distance, and distance can create room for judgment. Students can ask what their character wants, what their character fears, what their character misunderstands, and what assumptions their character has inherited from the world around them. These questions can return students to their own lives with greater clarity, although the process depends upon careful facilitation and sustained opportunities for debriefing. Bowman’s (2010) account of role-playing games emphasizes the ways participants create community, solve problems, and explore identity through shared imaginative activity; Daniau (2016) similarly identifies role-playing’s capacity to connect knowing, doing, being, and relating. These claims describe possibilities rather than automatic outcomes. Their educational value emerges through the design of the activity, the quality of facilitation, the social conditions of the group, and the seriousness with which reflection follows action.

Dungeons & Dragons remains the most visible example of this form because it has given generations of players a recognizable grammar of collaborative fiction. Its current rules organize play through social interaction, exploration, and combat, while the larger rhythm of play moves through the description of a situation, the declaration of an action, and the narration of a consequence (Wizards of the Coast, 2024). Its educational significance arises from this rhythm. Students encounter incomplete information, form provisional judgments, ask questions, make decisions from particular perspectives, witness the consequences of those decisions, and revise their understanding as the world develops. The game gives uncertainty an active role. Students learn that interpretation often begins before certainty arrives and that responsible action requires attention to context, evidence, relation, and consequence.

The broader educational literature has begun to take this possibility seriously. Bawa (2022) identifies motivation as a central affordance of tabletop role-playing, especially where the activity gives students meaningful purposes for communication, inquiry, and collective problem-solving. Cullinan and Genova (2023) offer a component analysis framework that begins with learning objectives and then links those objectives to specific role-playing elements, including content knowledge, reading, executive functioning, social-emotional skills, and mathematical fluency. Westborg (2023) similarly distinguishes among leisure role-playing, stand-alone educational role-playing, role-playing incorporated into education, and educational role-playing designed from its foundations around particular learning aims. Together, these works clarify an important principle: tabletop role-playing becomes educationally powerful when the desired forms of learning, the game’s structures, and the facilitator’s practices reinforce one another.

Cullinan’s (2024) qualitative study of eleven middle- and high-school educators provides a valuable view from classroom practice. The educators described increased engagement, new social connections, the emergence of affinity groups, lowered perceived social stakes, and a movement from individualistic toward more collectivist understandings of success. The sample remains small and qualitative, which makes the study especially useful as evidence of practitioner experience and as a guide for further research. Its findings illuminate the social climate a well-facilitated role-playing environment may create: students can come to see their own success as connected to the success of the group, while the fictional frame can make participation feel less exposing than ordinary classroom performance.

The literature on literacy offers related grounds for attention. Kaylor’s (2017) graduate research paper on Dungeons & Dragons and adolescent literacy collects evidence and practitioner accounts concerning reading interest, rule literacy, narrative composition, and the motivational force of shared fantasy. Zamboni’s (2024) work on tabletop role-playing in the Italian L2 classroom argues that the medium’s emphasis on storytelling, communication, and immersion gives language educators a rich framework for interaction and expressive practice. These studies require measured interpretation: they contribute promising classroom-oriented insight, while the field continues to need larger controlled studies of reading comprehension, writing development, and long-term transfer. Their relevance lies in the mechanisms they identify. Role-playing gives students reasons to use language with purpose. A description has to be clear enough for others to imagine a scene; a question has to reach the information the party needs; a persuasive speech has to account for the motives of the person being addressed; a written journal, letter, map, or report becomes part of an ongoing social world.

The broader game-based learning literature provides a related, though distinct, source of evidence. Clark, Tanner-Smith, and Killingsworth’s (2016) meta-analysis concerns digital games in K-16 learning contexts, rather than tabletop role-playing games specifically. Its findings therefore belong in this discussion as a design precedent, especially because the review found stronger learning outcomes where games included repeated engagement, instructional augmentation, and teacher-provided scaffolding. Tabletop role-playing offers unusually fertile conditions for these forms of support. The teacher remains present as a facilitator, interpreter, guide, and co-designer of the learning environment. The activity can therefore move fluidly between play, discussion, close reading, writing, feedback, and reflection without requiring students to leave the imaginative world that has made the work meaningful.

The field also carries important cautions. Yuliawati, Wardhani, and Ng’s (2024) scoping review of tabletop role-playing as psychological intervention identifies recurrent cognitive and psychosocial benefits across the literature while emphasizing heterogeneity in systems, populations, methods, and outcomes. Merrick, Li, and Miller’s (2024) repeated-measures study of 25 adult community participants reported reductions in depression, stress, and anxiety alongside increases in self-esteem and self-efficacy over eight weeks of structured Dungeons & Dragons play. That study offers encouraging evidence about adult wellbeing in a community sample; it does not establish school-based literacy or academic outcomes. The distinction matters because educational advocacy gains credibility when it names the evidence it has and the evidence it still needs.

The role-playing form also requires sustained attention to power, representation, and historical responsibility. Fictional worlds carry assumptions about race, gender, class, disability, violence, authority, family, religion, and belonging. Garcia’s (2017) cultural-historical analysis of Dungeons & Dragons examines how game systems shape racial and gender identities, showing that rules and settings can carry social meanings long before individual players begin to improvise within them. Classroom role-playing therefore requires more than enthusiasm for imagination. Teachers and designers need accurate source materials, thoughtful framing, clear agreements about participation, multiple modes of entry, and practices that honour the distinction between entering a fictional perspective and claiming another person’s lived experience.

Historical role-playing raises related questions. Petousi, Katifori, Roussou, Ioannidis, and Sakellariadis (2023), writing from the perspective of history educators, examine the tension between historical reality and anachronistic fantasy in tabletop role-playing. Their work foregrounds historical empathy, critical thinking, collaborative creation, and the challenge of helping students engage a past world without flattening its difference. The strongest educational role-playing experiences allow students to feel the pressures of another time while remaining accountable to historical evidence. A student can explore a past world imaginatively while grounding the world’s social structures, language, customs, conflicts, and constraints in credible sources. Historical care gives imaginative participation depth.

The facilitator’s role becomes central here. A classroom game grows through pacing, invitation, interpretation, and care. The teacher notices who has entered the conversation and who remains outside it; asks the question that turns a flashy answer into a more careful one; returns students to the text when the group begins drifting into unsupported invention; helps a conflict become an occasion for reflection; and creates enough structure for risk-taking to feel possible. Watson’s (2026) recent practitioner-oriented work on tabletop role-playing in K-12 education reflects the growing demand for implementation frameworks that make this form accessible to teachers whose expertise lies in teaching, curriculum, assessment, and relationship rather than in hobbyist game mastery. The challenge is pedagogical design: creating a form of play whose energy remains available to a diverse classroom while its intellectual work remains visible, rigorous, and assessable.

bookwormburrows emerged from this question. I began asking what would happen if the text a class was already studying became the world of play. What kind of learning environment might appear if students entered a short story, novel, poem, play, historical document, speech, archive, or philosophical argument as a dimension with its own language, atmosphere, institutions, relationships, tensions, silences, exclusions, and unfinished possibilities? What might happen if the act of reading ceased to function mainly as preparation for a later classroom task and instead became the threshold through which students crossed into a shared world?

The premise of bookwormburrows is therefore simple: the text is the world. A literary work becomes the ground of the campaign’s social reality. Its characters provide perspectives and pressures; its setting shapes what counts as possible; its historical context informs the language, customs, power relations, and dangers of the world; its formal choices teach students how information is withheld, revealed, intensified, ironized, and transformed. A class reading Langston Hughes’s “Thank You, Ma’am,” for example, could enter the moral and social world of 1958 Harlem through the tensions surrounding Roger’s attempted theft, Mrs. Luella Jones’s mercy, poverty, dignity, desire, and the story’s deliberately unresolved future. The purpose of such an encounter lies in sustained attention to the questions the story makes available: what counts as care in a world structured by economic scarcity? What does Roger understand about himself by the end of the story? What does Mrs. Luella Jones see that the reader may initially miss? What remains unspoken because the story’s brevity has made silence part of its meaning?

This form of play asks students to treat interpretation as an action. A textual detail can change the party’s understanding of what a character knows. A historical source can alter the plausibility of a plan. A careful inference can reveal why a seemingly ordinary gesture carries enormous social weight. A student’s written scene, letter, monologue, annotation, map, research note, or reflection can become a meaningful contribution to the shared world. Literary devices gain a practical presence: point of view shapes the limits of knowledge; metaphor shapes perception; irony alters the meaning of speech; setting distributes power; silence becomes evidence; form becomes a pattern of possibility.

The project draws its name from an image of reading as transformation. A bookworm moves through texts and becomes altered by what it consumes. The image carries an educational claim: reading shapes subjectivity when students experience a text as a world of relations that can challenge, complicate, extend, and revise the identities they bring into the classroom. The bookworm carries traces of one dimension into the next, allowing students to encounter continuity across literary worlds while recognizing that each new world reorganizes what a character can know, want, fear, and become.

bookwormburrows therefore belongs to a growing family of educational role-playing designs that seek to align setting, purpose, framing, processing, and learning objectives (Cullinan & Genova, 2023; Westborg, 2023). Its contribution lies in the particularity of its question: how can a classroom build a role-playing environment in which the assigned text supplies the world, close reading supplies orientation, research supplies depth, writing supplies a means of action, and reflection supplies a way of returning from the world with a more developed understanding of what one has encountered?

The project remains a design hypothesis awaiting empirical evaluation. Its claims should be investigated through classroom pilots that examine reading comprehension, writing development, discussion quality, historical reasoning, participation patterns, student engagement, teacher workload, and the experiences of learners with varied strengths and access needs. A rigorous research programme could compare bookwormburrows units with conventional units built around the same text, collect student work across time, study the role of different facilitation structures, and examine whether the experience helps students carry habits of close reading, interpretive care, and collaborative inquiry into later courses and contexts.

The deepest promise of tabletop role-playing lies in its capacity to make a world answer back. Students learn that attention changes what they can perceive, that language changes what they can do, that other people’s perspectives can reorganize their own understanding, and that a shared world gains depth when its members treat one another’s contributions as consequential. Literature classrooms already contain the materials for this discovery. They contain worlds, voices, conflicts, histories, absences, questions, and forms of life waiting to become more than objects of extraction.

The classroom is already a role-playing game whenever students enter a world together and discover that their interpretations matter. bookwormburrows grows from the desire to make that fact visible, playable, and intellectually alive.