The Worldbuilding Workshop

Another fun chat with my pal @thergenrader.bsky.social, including nods to @dndbeyond.com, Free League's @vaesen-rpg.bsky.social, and Vampire: The Masquerade as well as @codingconduct.cc, @brendaromero.bsky.social, and @hbo.bsky.social's The Rehearsal! ✨

#EduSky #education #highered #k12 #roleplay

THE WORLDBUILDING WORKSHOP

• Using role-play to understand everything from sweeping historical events to day-to-day decision-making; and

• Whether the arc of history truly bends toward justice (spoiler: possibly, but only if we bend it).

Access additional free resources via our website:

www.theworldbuildingworkshop.com

• How Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal taught commercial airline pilots about critical thinking and empathy via richly authentic, socially collaborative role-play;

• The critical difference between regurgitating rote information on an exam and demonstrating knowledge through performance;

• Consent-driven role-play and why you probably shouldn’t position learners as oppressors/oppressed;

• The importance of debriefing role-play activities to break down power dynamics;

• Going meta on role-play, memory, and lived experience;

• Role-play to deconstruct complex systems in corporate environments;

• Voter ID legislation, drug testing for government benefits, and building a border wall as examples of reductive problem-solving;

• Good-faith vs. bad-faith argumentation;

• The “Do”s and “Do Not Do”s of educational role-play;

• Thinking critically and empathetically about others’ perspectives;

• Attending to learners as complicated, changing people;

• The Ship of Theseus model for our moment-to-moment reconstitution of identity;

• Using role-play to interrogate stereotypes and essentialisms;

• Encouraging learners to role-play and reflect in a logically coherent way;

• Connecting in-character decision-making with real-world decision-making;

• “Bootstrapping” as an example of contextual complexity vs. overly simplistic reasoning;

Topics include:

• Separating “role-play” from “simulation”;

• Inhabiting a character (first-person) vs. observing and analyzing a character (third-person);

• A brief history of role-play in education;

• Revisiting life-worlds and questioning what it means to “be in the same room”;

Album cover-style image for The Worldbuilding Workshop Companion Podcast depicting a pencil-holding hand hovering above a city skyline. The podcast features conversations between co-authors Stephen Slota and Trent Hergenrader.

In this week's episode of The Worldbuilding Workshop Podcast, @steveslota.bsky.social and @thergenrader.bsky.social provide a professorial profile of performative play practice in their deconstruction of "Chapter 14: Role-Play"!

www.theworldbuildingworkshop.com/podcast/epis...

#EduSky #roleplay

Don't miss this conversation between @steveslota.bsky.social, @thergenrader.bsky.social, and the fabulous @edufuturist.bsky.social!

Their Q&A covers the ins and outs of #worldbuilding as well as its implementation in a range of #teaching and #learning environments!

#EduSky #education #teacher #K12

I am very excited - and heartened - to host Steve and Trent at 2 pm ET today. Their work is so creative and rooted in a sense of care.
Please join us!

🚨 REMINDER 🚨

@steveslota.bsky.social and @thergenrader.bsky.social will be joining today's Future Trends Forum with @edufuturist.bsky.social to talk shop about all things worldbuilding from 2:00 - 3:00p ET!

Use the quoted link to listen in, ask questions, and connect with other attendees! 🌎

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Future Trends Forum: on worldbuilding. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting. How might we use the narrative practice of worldbuilding for postsecondary teaching? This week we will host two experts on the topic, Rochester Institute of Technology associate professor Trent Herge...

Tomorrow (Thurs, March 5) from 2-3p ET, @steveslota.bsky.social & @thergenrader.bsky.social will join scholar of futurism @edufuturist.bsky.social's Future Trends Forum to discuss The Worldbuilding Workshop! ✨

All are invited to chat/ask questions live!

RSVP at:

georgetown.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

THE WORLDBUILDING WORKSHOP

• Demonstrating how “practomime” (@tinperegrinus.bsky.social's term for “performative play practice”) shapes learner thinking and behavior.

Grab a copy of the book via @mitpress.bsky.social and check our site for more resources!

www.theworldbuildingworkshop.com

• Helping future teachers understand specific instructional technologies (giving them a fish) versus helping them understand foundational principles of technology integration (teaching them how to fish);

• Why reductive, essentialist thinking can’t and won’t solve “wicked problems”; and

• Going meta on decision-making to situate thinking in real-world problems;

• Model UN, GlobalEd, and Mars! An Ethical Expedition as tools for studying intersectional political, economic, social, & cultural structures;

• Shifting from career prep to teaching critical thinking/empathy;

• Beyond Nuremberg as an example inquiry-driven, museum-based virtual reality simulation;

• “Bumper cars” (exerting agency within a constrained system) versus “rollercoasters” (being locked into a linear pathway from beginning to end);

• Benefits of the “choose-your-own-adventure” model;

• Understanding simulations as teaching how systems operate versus role-plays teaching how people operate;

• Knowledge-as-doing and maintaining a 1:1 relationship between learning/simulation objectives;

• Separating evaluation of a system from individual people's performances *within* that system;

• Simulations as a way to explore “what-if” scenarios;

• Procedural rhetoric and evaluating biases embedded in simulation design;

• First-person versus third-person perspectives and whether calling third-person distant “god-like” is a misnomer;

Topics include:

• Differentiating between #simulations and #games;

• Kerbal Space Program as an exemplary simulation-game hybrid;

• How Democracy 3, SimCity, and Civilization encourage learners to tinker with real-world complex systems and visualize their effects;

Album cover-style image for The Worldbuilding Workshop Companion Podcast depicting a pencil-holding hand hovering above a city skyline. The podcast features conversations between co-authors Stephen Slota and Trent Hergenrader.

In this week's episode, @steveslota.bsky.social and @thergenrader.bsky.social (re)simulate the brainstorming and co-authorship process behind the book's thirteenth chapter, “Simulations"!

www.theworldbuildingworkshop.com/podcast/epis...

#EduSky #teaching #simulation #gamedev #education

THE WORLDBUILDING WORKSHOP

Reach out with questions, feedback, or show ideas via our website contact form or social media—we're eager to hear from you! 😎

www.theworldbuildingworkshop.com

• Deconstructing oppression and engaging in empathy through the study of the Tuskegee Experiment, Henrietta Lacks, and the Tulsa Race Massacre; and

• Practicing the Golden Rule and attempting to make your corner of the world a little bit more pleasant for everyone.

• Using spreadsheets to track bias toward or against certain character archetypes;

• Writing minorities back into history through research-driven social constructivism;

• Dismantling the just-world fallacy;

• How catalog entries help us evaluate intersectional privilege and oppression;

• Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and reinforcement of "main character syndrome";

• How and why Symbaroum highlights the (in)ability of individual characters to influence global events;

• Reconciling grand heroic adventures with more mundane hopes and dreams;

• Policing the line between historical accuracy and historical fan fiction;

• The personal nature of worldbuilding research and the criticality of learner agency for dissuading GenAI/LLM use;

• A Song of Ice and Fire, The War of Roses, and George R. R. Martin as a story gardener;

• How the role-playing game The End of the World helps players deconstruct their own identities and project them onto an alternate reality;

• Character identity and how it interfaces with being in the right place at the right time;

• Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld as emergent narrative generators;

• Focusing on people who exist in cross-sections between dominant poles;

• Character + Setting = Plot;

• Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, and the character-shaping power of a rich environmental context;

• Helping learners understand the world as experienced through someone else's eyes (or shoes);

• Using historically-accurate characters (rather than real people) to get the gist of a world's substructural influence without committing to specific lived histories;

• People, Places, Things, Groups, and Events as interconnected, cross-sectional indicators of a world's structures/substructures;

Topics include:

• Ensuring all aspects of a world add up to one hundred percent;

• Entry-creation as a vehicle for studying niche interests;

• Understanding relationships between majorities and minorities;

• Tinkering with entries until they provide a richly authentic sense of scale and scope;