Melody [00:00]
The Game Master Certification Organization welcomes you to our interview excerpt podcast series. We are interviewing Hawke Robinson, who is currently working as a Recreational Therapist and Game Master, among many other things. Hi, I'm your host, Melody Rainelle. In this podcast episode, we will be talking about some guidance category questions: the difference between therapy and games being therapeutic, autism, archetypes, Bartle, and we'll talk about situations when professional guidance is needed. So, let's get started. Hawke, what is the difference between therapy and games being therapeutic?
 
Hawke [00:43]
Yes, it's very important to make a clear distinction. You do not want your average game master to be trying to "therapasize" somebody through gaming. That's just formula for disaster. Every now and then, people get lucky. But if you are not a trained therapist, do not try to do therapy on others through role-playing gaming. That being said, the research has found that participation in role-playing games- you know, originally, it all started, there was no research on role-playing games. Back in 1983, there was almost nothing.  It was really hard to find anything, and you had to really extrapolate from other parallel activities such as drama therapy and gestalt and all these other sources to kind of extrapolate what might be the potential. And in the eighties, there was the big anti-gaming movement that took off and the media really piled on, and there was an assumption that role-playing gaming was actually bad for you, and there are all sorts of stereotypes, negative stereotypes. That is ironically what triggered, finally, some real research starting to be done on the effects of role-playing games. And slowly, over time, first mostly correlational studies and a few case studies here and there. We started to find that not only were the negative claims about role-playing games and “the dangers of role-playing games” they just weren't true, we actually saw some interesting statistical data indicating that role-playing gamers were more resilient than the general population, that they were more social, had better communication skills, they had higher cognitive functioning. There were all these things that they did better than the general population. However, correlation does not prove causality, and in 2004, when I launched RPG Research's website with all the aggregation of all the research that’s available, and there were only about 40 to 60 studies at the time, and, again, most of them were more meta-analysis, correlative, or small case studies. There weren't a lot of larger studies, and there still is a bit of a dearth, but it's growing.  It could be that people with these skills were selecting this activity to be challenged, so that was distorting the curve. So back in '04 it was unknown how much of a causal effect role-playing games could have upon participants, but there were hints through these case studies and others. Since then, now we're in 2021, we can say fairly confidently, role-playing games do have some causal effects in some areas and that they do indeed help with things like social skills, communication skills. They appear to be helpful with depression and anxiety. And you know, there's a lot of theories as to why, but we find that anybody participating in a role-playing game, as long as the role-playing game group is a healthy, normal, gaming group and not a dysfunctional group, there's inherent benefits to just participating in role-playing games. And that's where you get inherent therapeutic benefit of participating in role-playing game, which is different than RPG therapy. So when you say, “RPG therapy,” that means you have an intentional, targeted, applied approach, that you are specifically targeting a specific, measurable, therapeutic goal. So, if somebody comes in barely communicating, high levels of depression, they're not making eye contact, not being able to express themselves, stand up for themselves, et cetera, these are all goals that you say, "Okay, our goals are we want them to be able to make eye contact for ‘X’ amount of time. We want their scores on various depression tests, assessments to be better. We want their communication skills to improve in measurable ways with assessments." And then we engage in an activity in an intentional way to improve that person's functioning and well-being. That is done through a lot of training and background and a lot of practice over the decades to do that effectively. You do not want just an average layperson to try to do it in that targeted way. You do not want somebody that says, "Oh, well, my brother is suicidal, so I should have joined my gaming group, to help turn him around." No, you know, you should have some- get to a therapist and see if there's something that can be done there, and then the therapist might be able to help with some sort of intentional use of role-playing games if that's something that's intrinsically motivating for the individual. And that's a key thing too, for the efficacy for most of these recreation-based modalities. As a recreational therapist, one of the key things we look for is intrinsic motivation. So, the person does it because they enjoy it, not because of any particular goal. Not because of any external reward. Not because of money. Not because of school. Not because their parents want them to do it. They're doing it because they enjoy it. And if you find an activity that somebody enjoys, then they're more likely to go through the harder stuff later to do better. So, for example, let's say in recreation therapy, a very common modality is wheelchair basketball. So you have somebody who's recently become paralyzed or lost their legs or something in an explosion or something, and you know, there’s often depression, a lot of other things going on with that, but there's also the physical aspect that they need to get up and be physical, and physical therapy is hard and painful. I've been through quite a bit of it myself for a number of injuries, and it's hard to get motivated each day to go do the activity. Right? If it's just a redundant boring- it's like when a lot of people don't like- some people like going to the gym, 'cause they enjoy the high of the workout, but for a lot of people it's just a drudge. But if it's a game, if it's somebody who like, let's say somebody played basketball and they love basketball, they're passionate about it and they feel like they'll never be able to play again, introducing them to wheelchair basketball is a great way to get them to want to get up each day and engage in the activity. Even though it's going to be hard and painful. They're much, much, much more likely to continue doing the activities they need to do to stay healthy. So, you know, research shows a lot of people, after discharge from physical therapy, or occupational therapy, or other treatment programs, is that they pretty quickly taper off and stop doing their exercises. They know they should. They know it's better for them. The tasks tend to be boring, and it's difficult for them to be motivated because they're extrinsically motivated, not intrinsically. So, they end up back in the doctor's office or the therapist office, six months, eighteen months later. With recreation therapy, the research shows that when we do a proper assessment about what intrinsically motivates them, you see a lot less of that recidivism. Whether it's for physical health. Whether it's for mental health. Whether it's for substance dependency, when you can find these things that resonate, they're more likely to continue doing what's good for them and make those connections and activities that help make their lives of a higher quality.
 
Melody [06:57]
Fantastic. Would you please talk to us about autism?
 
Hawke [07:01]
Ok. That's one of the easier populations to work with when using role-playing games. For whatever reason, and I mean, we have a number of theories, but let's just put that aside for the moment. For whatever reason, a lot of people on the spectrum are really attracted to and enjoy participation in role-playing games. Whether it's computer based, live action, or electronic. Some struggle with the live action, the combat focused ones, because sometimes there's more coordination required. Some do well, others may have coordination issues and so that can be frustrating. And in the video game world, some will do just fine, and others will find it frustrating. But in the tabletop role-playing game world, it allows the individual to go far beyond the players own abilities through their character. Whereas with the video game, any of the action-based games, you have to have the reflexes and be able to track everything, in the live action game you've got to have- if it's combat-centric, you need to have the physicality to do it, et cetera. But in tabletop game, the key thing is you need to be able to communicate, but then your character can do things far beyond what you perceive as your own abilities or your actual abilities, and when we take on the role of somebody else, when we're given permission to do that, that we're in a setting that says "Yes, it's okay to go ahead and pretend to be somebody else. It's pretend time and it's okay," and it's something that's again, intrinsically motivating, then the player is often more willing to pretend these behaviors that they would never do out in the real world in a positive way. For example, they might be very, very shy initially. They might have a speech impediment. They might really struggle. They're overwhelmed by eye contact with others. Some are even- well, we've worked with are nonverbal. We've worked with as young as two-and-a-half to five-year-old toddlers, including nonverbal on the spectrum. So in those cases we incorporate a little bit more of the live action activities, but we make sure they're scaled their abilities, and so in the game, while in the real world they might have trouble making eye contact and speaking up for themselves, if they've chosen to make a character, let's say a knight or something that they've defined as being a bold and outspoken character who's like, not going to back down from a fight, what have you, and in the real world they might be too nervous to do something like that; to stand up for themselves. And again, these are symbolic. So maybe in the game it's a fight. In the real world it's learning to just stand up for themselves and be assertive, but not aggressive. So, in the game, they can allow themselves to do that. They're doing it in character and it's amazing how many transform rapidly. We've seen some come in- I remember this one little girl who came in and she was from one of our community programs, but she came in and it looked like and then found out later, confirmed, yes, heavy patterns of abuse. So she came in with her shoulders slumped, her hands kind of between her legs, kind of walking very slowly. She's around ten/eleven years old and she wanted to play, but all of the tables at the time were filled with groups that were being kind of loud and boisterous, and she was a little overwhelmed by that noise. So we offered to have her sit down with one of our Game Masters one-on-one while I observed and such, and she's very quiet. You had to really lean forward to hear what she said. She's very timid. Wouldn't make contact. Eyes always down at the ground and had her to go over to sit at the table, and she's at the table, she literally put her feet up on the chair under her and she was in the fetal position, basically as much as she could be, sitting in the chair, slumped over the table, not looking up, not making eye contact. Slowly we walked through, just a lightweight version of making a character. She- she chose an elf ranger, and got to pick the name, et cetera, and she'd slowly speak a little bit more clearly when she started to understand where this was going and started to get into the adventure. And as I observed this, slowly, about 45 to 60 minutes into the game, one leg slowly crept out from under her and started to dangle off the chair. About another 15 minutes later, the other leg slowly came out and dangled off the chair. Pretty soon her hands were- she's no longer sitting on her hands, and her hands aren't in a fist, they were occasionally reaching up and using the pencil and such, to update her character, and now I could, over the noise of the Community Center and such, I could actually hear her voice starting to carry, and as she started to get into a battle with some orcs and such, you could actually start hear her getting into it, and she started making eye contact with the Game Master. This all happened in a single, less than three-hour session. By the end of it, she was fully seated in her chair, normally. Her shoulders were no longer slumped. She was sitting upright. She's making regular eye contact with the Game Master, doing dialogue in and out of character. Had completely tuned out the noise of the rest of the environment that had been so overwhelming for her. So she's experiencing, you know, high levels of immersion and potential flow state, and just had like-- transformed like a flower opening up in the sunlight. Right? Going from darkness into sunlight. Just completely transformed. Now that's an exceptional one. Right? We don't see that every time, but we see variations of that regularly with a wide range of populations. And, again, with autism spectrum, one of the main things that's nice for them compared to, let's say drama therapy, many are overwhelmed by the lack of structure in standard talk therapy or other therapies or the drama therapy, et cetera. That "yes, and…" openness can be very overwhelming for many on the spectrum, and again, I'm generalizing, we're talking the spectrum here of course, but for many that find that overwhelming, the structure of the rules gives them a safety net they can grok. That they can get and understand. That in the real world it's too unclear. They don't really understand what all the rules are. There's too many of them. It's too open-ended, and in the game, we create the structure of turn-based communication and very clear rules and incremental learning, where they can build on and build on and get better and better at it, and they just really gravitate and do very well with it. So it's one of the easier populations to work with, with skill development, using role-playing gaming. Some other populations can be a little bit more work. That's a very easy one, and many naturally gravitate to role-playing gaming on their own, if they're given the opportunity. They just, again, find it intrinsically motivating. It triggers all sorts of ancillary interests and as a byproduct, they end up increasing their social skills and desire to engage socially for those that may have had an issue with it before, and in order to play the game, they must communicate more clearly. They need to be able to be heard and they're ready to know who they're talking to. So they need to actually start to make some kind of eye contact or at least be facing in their direction, and you just watch these improvements happen quite quickly because they want to play the game. The game is intrinsically rewarding and they want to get good at it and it's a cooperative, supportive environment rather than competitive. Many of them have had their self-confidence speed up and other competitive activities, and here generally everybody there, it's to support you and help you through it. So it becomes a safe environment where they're still able to be challenged. If it's not challenging, then that gets boring. They know they've got support and help from their fellow adventurers, and it really is quite dramatic how rapidly we see improvements for this population when engaged in this activity. One good study to illustrate that for an overall quality of life, is a Japanese PhD did a study, I think it was 2016, but you can find it on the RPG Research website. It's mostly in Japanese, but we have some English translation posters that he authorized for us to post there, and it's a study on about 14-year-old, autism spectrum, in a Japanese tabletop role-playing game and with baselines and exits over a 14-week period showing their overall improvement in cooperation, communication, turn taking and the overall quality of life, engagement with friends and family. They did it on a lot of great measures and it shows some good strong correlations there. It's one of the better studies that's been done on this topic. We need larger sample sizes now.

Melody [14:36]
Nice. That is some great information to think about regarding positive benefits of role-playing games. How about archetypes?
 
Hawke [14:44]
Right, and we actually have a whole range of archetypes that we talk about and I don't know if you've been through that yet. So we talk about them from the classical archetypes, which is a little bit more Level 2/Level 3 conversation in training, to-- so like the Union and other type of archetypes, to the character-specific archetypes, to the player archetypes and Game Master archetypes. So the player archetypes would be like the murder hobo, and the rules lawyer, and the munchkin player, et cetera. The GM archetypes would be, you know, like the murdery GM or the Monty Hall GM, those types, and we also try to make a distinction between stereotypes and archetypes. The stereotypes, that's more of a box that you stick people into, that's constraining, and not as useful from a definitions perspective, professionally, as an archetype, which is a group of characteristics, traits, what have you, that are shorthand for a group of trades that we can then start with, have a conversation, and make it much bigger. So, for example, with the rules lawyer type, one of the things that makes up a rules lawyer is that they're more likely to argue over any particular ruling that happens at any given moment. They're much more likely to point out the rules in the book, go "No, on this page, it says this," and they are very, very focused on making sure that it's following the rules exactly correctly. What I've also found for a lot of rules lawyers, maybe not all, but a large majority, is their rules lawyerism often comes from a level of anxiety. Especially the disruptive types. So, we have rules lawyers who are just rules lawyers and that's no big deal. That's just, you know, personality traits. It's no big deal. But then you have the ones who are disruptive who do keep killing the game play. Who do keep arguing with the GM and the other players and try to lord over their rules knowledge over others, et cetera, and generally those come from combination of insecurities and anxieties, and we found the best way to deescalate that particular archetype is to address their anxieties and insecurities. What we find is, many of these, as I've interviewed them over the years, the ones that are the more disruptive type, they often report that out in the real world they don't feel like they have much control over their life. They may have either a very boring job, or their job situation is highly unpredictable. You know, their life might be unstable, or their life is very boring. We kind of see those two extremes. We see people who have had the same job for 30 years. They make good income, they have stable lives, but they report missing the opportunity to be a hero. Their job never gives them a chance to be a hero, and that in the real world, they report, you don't have the chance to be a hero. I personally disagree, but that's often what they will report. But in the game, the rules provide a mechanism that they understand about how they can be a hero. When you mess with the rules, you mess up with the opportunity for them to do that, and you create this unpredictability that they're already dealing with in the outside world, and the whole point they play the game is that predictability and that scaffolding and that structure that gives them so much more comfort. So when you have a GM or players who come in and threaten that predictability, that triggers a lot of anxiety. Now what's rea- also interesting is more than half of those I've interviewed report not having anxiety about the rules being disrupted. So they tend to be lacking in mindfulness and awareness of their anxiety, and it's only through repeated sessions and kind of bringing it to their attention, that they start to realize, "Oh yeah, I do get a knot in my gut every time somebody tries to go against the rules. I do notice my heart rate actually goes up really high, now that I'm watching for this, I didn't..." We already saw it. Everybody around them already saw their face would flush red and they might speak very calmly, but you could see they were irate. They had a physiological response that they weren't even aware of. So it's important to understand from an archetypes perspective- that’s shorthand. So we also have another role called the player architype specialist that I think is unique to our practice. Which is we have people trained to act out these archetypes at different levels of disruption. So, they may just do it, but it's not disruptive and then slowly ask them to increase the level of disruption. So maybe you have them play a cheater player and slowly become more and more obvious and disruptive about it, and then this is to train our Game Masters to be prepared in the real world to handle this, just like you do in other professions. Whether you're in therapy and elsewhere where you create scenarios, you know, where emergency responders, when you're training for first aid and such, you have a lot of volunteers who will put on fake blood and faux injuries and such. With the medical profession, right, you have patients who are pretending- they tell you what their symptoms are and they fake them, and you're supposed to be able to figure out a diagnosis and then figure out treatment and then figure out what the prognosis will be long term. So this is kind of the same thing. When you see somebody, you look for a certain pattern of traits. Do they fit any of these archetypes that are well known? They may not. They may just have a different patterns of traits, and the other important distinction is stereotypes generally- if you're a stereotype, you're this, you're put in that box, you can only be this. Archetypes can be a mixture. You can be a rules lawyer and strategist player and with other things that- they're not mutually exclusive. So, there again, they're a foundation of shorthand language to say, "Oh, yesterday I was working with the little moderate rules lawyer type player and today I'm working more with a bit of a munchkin type player," and we can quickly move on from there on the conversation instead of saying "Oh really? Well, what, when you say that, what does that mean? What traits were being expressed?” We have agreement in the profession, like: "Okay, we understand that. What did you do to address it?" We can move on in the conversation. So we've been working on the player architect specialist who's trained to act as any one of these archetypes. We have a manual slowly- we have almost 20 archetypes fleshed out, player archetypes, and expressing what the baseline behavior is, what the escalation patterns are, and then, if the GM does "X", escalate further. If the GM does "Y", de-escalate accordingly, and again, these are all things we're always evolving and iterating through to improve, but this helps prepare the GM's, they report, when we do eventually put them in community settings and in other professional settings, they are so much more prepared because now they see those traits, and they know exactly how to handle it, just like any other professional being trained to deal with those scenarios. And then there's the GM archetypes where we all have our GM'ing styles and there's nothing wrong with different GM'ing styles, but some GM archetypes can be disruptive, just like the player archetype styles can be disruptive. So there's some funny pieces that float around about giving kind of funny examples of these. I think we have floating around on one of our older websites under GM Archetypes, under Game Master Archetypes, under www2.rpgresearch.com is the older server, and you have like the Monty Hall GM, and the other thing about these is many Game Masters go through many of these as they evolve as a Game Master. I went through many of these phases and it's kind of like a pendulum. You swing one way and then you try another direction, another direction, another direction, until you finally find your style, and that's hopefully always evolving based on feedback and experience. So like the Monty Hall GM is a variation of the munchkin GM, characters tend to be lower level, so like a munchkin GM: "...Having slain the hordes of Azat single handedly, without even unsheathing the Sword of Universal Destruction, your half Grey Elven/half Golden Dragon, fiftieth level paladin, magic-user, cleric, monk, bard gazes down upon the pitiful Cthulhu, who grovels at his feet." Monty Hall GM, variation on the munchkin GM. Characters tend to be lower level. “You were each granted one wish.” “I wish to have the hand and eye of Vecna.” “I wish to have the flask of Tony the Merciless.” "I wish to have…” “Poof! They appear in front of you. Now what do you do?” Then there's many, many, many other variations, but just give you an idea. Now, I've been through the Monty Hall GM, you know, maybe not quite to that level, but some of my early campaigns I was giving out treasure left and right, and what I found is over time I had to make the enemies more powerful because the PC's were too powerful, right? They didn't scale well and so it made it difficult for long-term campaigning. So through that feedback and assessment process and experience, slowly learned to find a little bit more of a balance, and that's how I've been able to run campaigns that span many, many, many years. Starting at very, very low level and working your way up to very, very high level, and again BECMI DnD so far seems to be the only series of books that really elaborates. It has its flaws as far as guidelines that we've seen applicable from any game system. The guidelines they provide in there for long-term campaigns and scaling at a very basic level to a very advanced level and sustaining that over years is really good information in there. I may have wandered a little bit around on that one. So do you wanna bring me in back on topic there somewhere. I kind of lost the end of the thread.
 
Melody [23:57]
We're good. Just soaking in all this great information. Would you please talk about Bartle?
 
Hawke [24:03]
Ok, so some of the more popular references to player styles, one of the most commonly referenced one is Bartle. And one they usually quote has four different directions, and his original version actually had 16 different areas, so a little closer to the kind of Union approach, which holds up better. There's been some assessment, but the one that's usually used, the coefficient for the correlations, are not that great, and especially the explorer type doesn't hold up well. And most of all the ones that exist are for video game player types, which is still useful. There are distinctions and we've been trying to work hard on our own tools that bring in the tabletop and live action world to separate from just the video game world. And then you've got Yee, Yang, and others and so they have a huge database of like half a million video gamers filling out these forms, some great data there now a commercial database, and they offer their consulting service, et cetera. They're great for video game design. Yang focused kind of on the social quadrant. Really trying to make distinctions of the many different social gamer types and being able to measure and calculate those different types. So there's a lot of different tools out there to try to evaluate player styles and play styles in general. And play style is covered in the recreation therapy world and in different parts of the psychology world, play therapy, et cetera. But they're still evolving and there isn't really any one standard anybody fully agrees with, but there's still a lot of experimentation going on. Trying to figure out effective assessment rules to say yes. When we say this player type is a sociopolitical type player, we can predict these patterns of behavior et cetera. And we're all getting better at it over the decades, but still a long ways to go. Now I think this correlates with a lot of our lack of understanding that leads to the limitations in AI and other areas. So, until we have a better understanding there, I think that's still going to elude us. But the Bartle taxonomy is the one you hear the most often; unfortunately, it's kind of the weakest one, the way it is referenced. If you go to the deeper 16 measure version of Bartle’s taxonomy, you'll get a better assessment, but most of the ones that are out there are based on the weaker four point assessment. They'll still make for interesting conversations and a good starting point and that's what we're bringing up in our Level One training, but they're not great for therapeutic practice long-term. That's why we've been working on our own tools that we're trying to get better predictability and coefficients out of.
 
Melody [26:24]
Awesome. OK, so how do you know when to step back? If you're not a professional and you go, "Hey, wait a minute, this is not something I should be handling, this is something a professional should be handling." How do you know when to step back?
 
Hawke [26:41]
So as the GM yourself, and you need to go get help? Or in that you have a player or group that you realize they're needing help?

Melody [26:50]
Well, let's look at both if you wouldn't mind. Again, this is an open question, so however you'd like to answer it.

Hawke [26:57]
Ok. Well, we'll start with the GM one, that you find that you're using gaming as your own therapy and maybe doing it to an obsessive level… The key thing to look for, for anything, is the life balance thing and there's always mitigating circumstances like life balance is really modern product. Right? We didn't really have a concept of life balance before more recent centuries because we didn't have the luxury of that. We were in survival mode. We did not have recreational time available to us to a great degree. So this concept of life balance is a fairly recent concept. But now that we, in some cultures, have the luxury of it, you know, you hear people talk about that while they work so much, so obsessively, their family left them because they're never available because all they ever do is work. In other cultures, that's expected. Right? You were expected to work all the time and provide for your family, and anything less than that, your family will leave you. Right? So it depends on the cultural context. Well, same thing with any activity, whether it's a video game, whether it's a role-playing game. If you're doing it to a level that is compromising your social and physical and emotional and cognitive well-being, something's out of balance and you need to find that balance. So there's two forms of escapism we like to paraphrase from Jane McGonigal. She paraphrases it from somebody else, but so the paraphrase is: "‘Life sucks, so I go play games’ versus ‘life is better when I have time to play games.’" These are two very different experiences of the same activity. And one, research shows, is empowering and beneficial, and the other is disempowering, maladaptive and can become harmful. If it is an activity that grows and expands and you benefit from, and it again is in a balanced way, then that's great. And research shows, you know, an hour or two of video games each day, no more than two hours screen time is good for your brain, et cetera. You do more than two hours a day, there start to be deficits. But instead, if you're using it to run away and avoid all your problems, rather than prepare yourself to be better to take on problems, using it as this avoidant escapist approach in the negative context of escapist, as opposed to the beneficial escape approach. That can lead to really serious issues, and that's where you start hearing things like "video game addiction" and things like that. So if you notice as a GM that you're spending all your time, you're not doing it professionally, but you're spending all of your time obsessing about your games, you're so highly emotionally invested that the slightest criticism or disappointment from your players just has you crushed, crushed for days or weeks or months. And that you're not keeping your work/life balance and your relationship balance outside of gaming in a balanced way and, again, you're not doing it professionally, but you're doing at this level of intensity, those are certainly warning signs. There's one GM who's a Twitch personality, who I've worked with on/off over the years, who is a vet with PTSD and such and used video games and such as a coping mechanism but turned it into a profession and I GM'ed them through a gaming series for a while, and then I had some physical health issues and I had to discontinue the adventure, but he enjoyed it so much he really wanted to continue it. So he really delved in deeply and did an excellent job putting together his own world, running his own group. He became completely obsessed with it, and even when I was trying to give warnings like "You need to moderate this, you're not balancing this. This is going to come back to bite you if you don't keep the balance here." And it started to impact his wife and his family, his kids, and then eventually it all blew up. The show blew up, et cetera, because he overreached. He tried running multiple groups simultaneously and unfortunately it all came crashing down and he spent the next half a year, just offline, just trying to recover emotionally. So there's that life balance thing, and it isn't the activity itself. People who are struggling to find some direction and purpose and are having struggles dealing with whatever the emotional or situational issues they're struggling with, are going to find different ways. Whether it's drugs, whether it's escaping into books, whether it's just sitting in front of the boob tube watching TV, or whatever. I know I'm dating myself with that phrase. Sitting there watching YouTube and Twitch all the time and not actively engaging in life, any of these activities can be a sign when they're done out of balance, that, "Hey, you might want to go check in with a therapist to maybe help you get back on track here.' And with the gaming, if you're going in, you're like, "Well, this is my sole source of social connection." For some people, that's true, right? We treat people that they have no social life externally; we've introduced them to gaming to give them social life. But, we also try to transition the program so that they start to get into other extracurricular activities that may be triggered by engagement in the role-playing gaming, but are outside of it. So they get into making clothing, or metallurgy, or chemistry, or some other activities and start to expand their world and their horizon from this very narrow bubble. And we find that role-playing games are excellent for triggering those ancillary interests. But don't try to use your gaming group as your therapy group. That will- you know, it's tricky when they're all friends, so if you put a game group together, you're all friends to begin with, and then you've all taken turns GM'ing, or you're automatically are the GM, but you've all known each other for years, and are your friends. The lines kind of blur, right? Because they're your friends. You turn to your friends when you're struggling, and that's normal and accepted to a point. Then your friends usually tell you like, "Hy man, I want to help you, but this is beyond me. You should probably see somebody." In the gaming structure, if you're the GM, you have to be careful because there can be the power differential of being the GM versus the players. If you're reactionary, so to criticism and a player tries to say, "Hey man, you might be getting a little intense here, you might want to maybe back off a little, maybe take a break from GM'ing." And they're afraid you might get defensive, they might not say anything because of that, whereas the normal friendship relationship, they might have been more open. So you do have to watch out for that. When you're GM, there is that- it's meant to be authoritative. Some GMs can fall into authoritarian roles and you have to be careful about that. So that's kind of the GM side. There's whole other scenarios that go through; that gives you a few examples. On the player side, you notice one or more players who are/were depressed or struggling, or you brought them in because they're like, “Hey, they're really lonely, let's bring you into my group, no social life, et cetera,” and you notice that they're really clingy, they don't want to leave, like when you're done with the group, you don't want to go home. Clearly very, very lonely, and they're only social connection is this group. It's not your job as a layperson Game Master to solve their social issues. You can certainly make suggestions, for example, like "Hey, if you want to get some more gaming in, and I don't have time because I'm busy, but there's this group down at XYZ game store, maybe you want to go check them out as well". If it looks like they're more serious issues than that, if they say anything that has to do with like suicidal ideations, thoughts, behaviors, you know, then definitely you do not want to get in the middle of that. Try to encourage getting some help. Talking to a therapist. Going to social worker. Going to an emergency clinic, whatever, but you don't want to try to "therapasize" that, and you don't want to try to solve it through the game, and if you have a player- I, as a layperson years ago, occasionally would get these players, and they were rare, but I GM'ed a lot of people so I would- statistically, I was going to run into these from time to time without getting into the whole gamer floater theory discussion. So, I would get a player that was highly dysfunctional, and was disruptive to the group and very, very, very, very, very needy. And this is, you know, pre me going into therapy and all of that. The only I can do is try to have an offline discussion. Don't embarrass them in front of the group. Don't make a big scene out of it. Take a break if it's necessary to calm things down and try to have a conversation to encourage them to talk to others. Again, if you're not trained as a therapist and your a layperson, it's kind of hard to know what to say there. If you haven't been through mental health first aid training, things like that, it's really difficult to know what to do. Generally, this is where you do want to start excluding somebody who's going to be more than you can handle in the group. So I occasionally would have to ask a player like, “I'm sorry man, you know, it's just not working out. Here's some other groups you can go try, but I'm going to need to ask you to leave the group." Whether you have to do in the middle of the session because they keep disrupting and they don't adapt their behavior, or whether you can make it till the end of the session and do it after the game session. Have a- it's better if you can do it after the session’s over. After everybody’s left, they tend to be less likely to make a scene if they're certain personality types than if there's an audience available. It's a tricky situation when you get players like that. If it's other people who they're not disruptive at all, but you're just very concerned about them, the main thing to do is just try to encourage them to find a resource to go out there and get those special help. Whether if they're student finding something through their school, counselor, et cetera, and just, you know, expressing that you care about them like, "Hey, I notice you're looking down. Not much I can do about it, but have you talked to such and such?" You know, let's say you're all fellow students at the same school or something and just trying and encourage them to go get that help. That's a healthier approach than trying to- 'cause I hear many people like, "Well, I added this to the game because Kevin was feeling down and I wanted to help bring him up, so I added this aspect here because he was missing his ex-girlfriend, and then it went in the wrong because it made him more upset.” Well, you know, they were trying these things, they were trying to "therapasize" this gamer, and it made things worse. Sometimes they get lucky, but more often than not it gets worse. So, those are a few examples that I would give caveats about. If you have somebody who's, let's say, more profoundly on the spectrum or something, joining your group, try to give him a chance as long as they're not disruptive, right? If they're slowing down the game a little bit, that can be compensated for. If they're having outbursts and being highly disruptive, then as a lay person you are not obligated to try to train that person to improve their behavior. They need to go get somebody who can train them how to behave appropriately in social circumstances. It's not your job if you're a layperson, but do, you know, don't just automatically exclude just 'cause you know somebody's on the spectrum. You know, don't let the labeling get in the way at all. It should be behavior-based. If they're not behaving appropriately in your group, like any other person not behaving appropriately in your group, and then you give them warnings and say, "Hey, this wasn't appropriate in our group. This is not how-- we don't say those kinds of things in our group," and they don't modify their behavior, then yeah, you have to ask them to leave, and sometimes you can do it without drama, and sometimes that can be challenging, depending upon the person. So hopefully those are a few examples that are useful for people to make that distinction.

Melody [37:43]
Thank you for that information, Hawke. We really appreciate your guidance and taking the time to chat with us about it. It's just really good stuff, so thank you so much. To our listeners: please check out the podcast description for details on how you can connect with Hawke Robinson. In our next podcast episode, we will be talking with Hawke about what a Game Master is, rule sets, and Hawke's experience. We'll talk about flow and the profession of being a Game Master, so stay tuned for that. Follow us to receive notifications when new podcasts are released. For more podcasts and information, definitely check out our website: https://www.gamemastercertification.org/. If you liked what you've heard in this episode, please share it. Thank you for listening.