Philosophies of Psychological Safety in Analog Role-playing Game Discourses

Abstract

This discourse analysis outlines various philosophies of psychological safety in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), freeform, and live action role-playing games (larp). The corpus of literature related to RPGs includes 79 popular and 26 scholarly sources, including published presentations, interviews, articles, chapters, and books. The sources are primarily informed by the Nordic Larp discourse (Stenros 2014) and adjacent communities, but the corpus also includes texts related to indie and traditional tabletop RPGs, indicating communication and shared practices between these communities in recent years. The article emphasizes play groups, designers, and theorists who value the psychological safety of the participant group over rules, consequences, narrative concerns, individual play experiences, and personal immersion. Based on years embedded within these discourses and engaged in safety work for larps, the authors highlight several main themes related to psychological safety, including the complexity of safety; safety as a perception rather than a fact; safer vs. brave spaces; safety vs. support vs. risk mitigation; and safety and transformation. The article also presents differing philosophies on where responsibility should lie for safety: with the individual player, the play group, the organizer, the designer, or the community as a whole. The authors present these philosophies in their own model, Zones of Safety, Challenge, and Risk, which includes play that falls within one’ comfort zone (low-risk), occurs in one’s growth edges (medium-risk), and pushes toward one’s hard limits (high-risk). The article concludes with some examples of consequences of vague or inadequate safety structures in RPGs.