Tabletop Philosophy: Catharine Saint-Croix

When I arrived at the University of Minnesota, I applied for a small “teaching innovation grant” to support what I took to be a long-shot idea: building a philosophy course around a role-playing game (RPG) like Dungeons & Dragons. I assumed the proposal would be rejected, but I was wrong! Then, I assumed there was no way I would ever be allowed to actually teach the class. But, again, wrong! The University’s Honors Program turned out to be wonderfully supportive of strange pursuits, and encouraged my teaching the course.

The original idea was to run an actual D&D campaign over the course of the semester, with students encountering structured philosophical problems along the way—an in-game trolley problem, a famous sorcerer fatally entwined with the body of an innocent townsperson, and so on. I loved the immersive potential of that approach because it seemed like a way to give students a sense of having a personal stake in the matter, even while considering the rather fanciful conditions that arise in philosophical thought experiments. But the logistics were strugglesome: D&D groups work best at about 4-6 people, and groups would need to be consistent throughout the semester. More importantly, it would place a lopsided burden on students who chose to be Dungeon Masters (DMs). The DM is the player responsible for telling the story and adjudicating the game, but they also need to do a lot of preparatory work. Too much, I thought, to reasonably expect of any student.

As I rethought the structure, however, I landed on what would become the core of the course: game-linked modules. Rather than running a continuous, DM-based game, the course would be composed of modules focused on the philosophical issues drawn to the fore by particular games. We would play one (sometimes two) sessions of these games during extended class periods, then devote the next several meetings to philosophical ideas surrounding those experiences.

The modern RPG landscape provides a rich palette for this. There are the classics like D&D, of course, but there are also world-building games like The Quiet Year, in which players co-create a world through mapmaking, and Microscope, in which players zoom into critical moments in the history of a universe to tell its story in any order they please. There are games that drastically limit most players’ usual capacities, like Dialect, in which players invent a sign language and may never speak. And there are odd little one-offs, like Honey Heist, where everyone is a randomly-rolled bear (with a randomly-rolled hat) and they have to work together to steal honey from HoneyCon.

In developing the course, I had two aims. First, I wanted to encourage students’ curiosity for the things that they’re excited about. Often, philosophy is constrained to topics that are distant from many students’ day-to-day experience. But, all on their own, students often have what amount to disorganized-but-philosophical discussions about the things they love. So, my primary pedagogical goal with this class was to foster that impulse, showing them that following those rabbit holes with the sort of care and rigor that philosophy demands can be deeply rewarding. Second to that, I knew that we would have a vast array of different experience levels in the class, so I wanted to make sure the structure of the course would level the playing field and provide students with experiences that could serve as our objects of study. Hence, playing the games in class!

This structure was immensely rewarding. Though I didn’t play (for fear that my being there would cause students to unduly edit themselves), the students loved the gaming sessions, and the shared experience turned out to be an excellent starting point for conversations. We focused on issues concerning the nature of games, the concept of truth in fiction, the possibility of a meaningful life, to name a few. The success of this approach led me to develop a similar course, Philosophy on the Rocks, focused on climbing: the ethics of altering the environment, the social construction of things like routes and difficulty scales, the nature of games, and so on. (We did, indeed, have a climbing gym session!)

Next year, I’ll be experimenting with Tabletop Philosophy—trying out new games, different assignments, etc—and I’m excited to run the class again. One of my favorite features of these classes is that they are especially approachable to philosophy-curious non-majors. So, while these classes can be a challenge to run because they really thrive in smaller classroom environments, if you love RPGs, climbing, or any other rich hobby, classes like this are a joy.

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Catharine Saint-Croix

Cat Saint-Croix is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Setterberg Faculty Fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Their work spans formal and social epistemology, logic, and feminist philosophy, with a current focus on how attention shapes epistemic agency. They also foster public engagement with philosophy through directing the Minnesota Regional High School Ethics Bowl.