Although best known within the board game community for creating games such as the Jenga-based role-playing game Star Crossed and For the Queen (the second edition of which was just published by Critical Role studio Darrington Press), Alex Roberts also runs a consulting service.
At first, the two career paths may seem very different, but for Roberts, designing games and helping people heal are irrefutably connected. “Playing story games made me a better counselor,” she says. “Obviously, I started making games because it’s fun, but it taught me to really pay attention and listen to people.”
For the Queen is a storytelling game in which players take turns drawing and responding to cards from a deck, with everyone’s responses and the cards themselves driving the narrative of each game. Players take on the role of attendants to a matriarchal monarch, and their characters are faced with various scenarios that test their loyalty and force them to examine their relationships with their ruler. It’s a game that focuses much more on the journey than the destination, and players are encouraged to listen to their fellow courtiers as much as contribute to the discussion.
“[For the Queen] “The game is structured in such a way that people are primed to listen to each other,” Roberts says. “Players go into listening mode so they can answer follow-up questions.”
For the Queen isn’t meant to be a separate turn for each player. Instead, the game is a collaborative experience across the table, as the cards indicate. The cards cover a variety of topics, from people’s relationships with power and authority to their feelings about femininity. In addition to the revamped artwork for the second edition, Roberts confirms that some cards have been changed. In particular, she cites a message she saw a number of players react negatively to in the original version: “Being told they’re ugly affects people in a certain way, it wasn’t worth keeping it that way because of the bad times it caused.”
“The experience of being recognized and treated as a valuable human being who is listened to is powerful.”
That doesn't mean Roberts has sought to eliminate all potentially difficult moments. Players are free to pass over any letter they don't feel comfortable responding to, for one reason or another. Rather than simply being a way to avoid challenging topics, the passing mechanic is an essential part of the game.
“It's really important to me that people can take their turn,” Roberts explains, describing a session in which her sister, whom she describes as “quieter,” passed around several cards. “My sister took maybe half of her turns, and what was so interesting is that she was so happy with how it worked, because they were still really enjoying it.
“It is important for me to think about those things [quieter] “players in my design.”
Designing For the Queen provided Roberts with plenty of opportunities to apply her counseling skills, particularly when it came to offering a space for players to feel comfortable speaking up and being heard. “The experience of being acknowledged and treated as a valuable human being who is listened to is powerful,” she says. “Being able to say things you may never have said before and have it accepted as okay.” Roberts compares the feeling of playing certain role-playing or storytelling games to that of a group therapy session: “What can happen in group therapy is being seen with empathy by people with a shared experience.”
“We often talk about therapeutic relationships as if they were a rehearsal for other relationships; these things can also happen in the role-play space.”
Even though the game’s story and settings are based in fiction, For the Queen and similar titles can offer players a space to express emotions or perform behaviors they might not otherwise engage in. “I’m interested in the healing that happens when you express emotions that you don’t express on a daily basis,” Roberts says. “I want that person’s anger to come out, I want to hear about their sadness.” The designer highlights the “hypergenetic” nature of certain emotions (such as stereotypes of sadness in women and anger in men) and how playing certain games can offer an opportunity to subvert those gender-based behavioral expectations: “These kinds of restorative experiences are so often things that people should have experienced when they were young or with their families, but that didn’t happen for whatever reason.”
Manage cookie settings
Role-playing games and storytelling games—spaces where players embody characters in a meaningful way—can be an opportunity for people to become someone they might never have been otherwise. Beyond just being fun, playing the role of these characters or acting out these moments can be a therapeutic experience. “We often talk about therapeutic relationships,” says Dr. [between counsellors and counsellees] “This can be seen as a rehearsal for other relationships,” the designer explains. “These things can also happen in the role-playing space.”
Roberts describes how she has personally felt the positive effects of being able to roleplay in a space where she felt comfortable doing so: “A lot of the ways that roleplaying has changed my life for the better is doing it at a table with other people I liked and respected, during a time when I felt insecure and low on self-esteem, offering my opinions and having other people say, ‘That’s cool! ’”
“One of the reasons I think games are therapeutic is that they don't have to be an active therapy to provide some of the healing benefits.”
Despite the positive impact of the popularity and acceptance of individual therapy methods, there remains a tendency to downplay or fail to properly acknowledge other modes of therapy and healing. Roberts offers a specific example through a program based in Rwanda, where people offered individual therapy by counselors declined it because they preferred to express and interact with their trauma in other ways, such as by grieving in their communities.
“I like to remind people that ‘therapy’ as we know it hasn’t been around for very long, but people have always suffered and found ways to work through that suffering,” Roberts says. “One of the reasons I think games are therapeutic is that they don’t have to be active therapy to provide some of the healing benefits.”
However, the designer also stresses the importance of finding the right group of people to play games like For the Queen with, if players want to experience the more therapeutic side of roleplaying. “I think it has a lot to do with the culture of the game at the table – it’s perfectly legitimate to not want to be in anyone’s therapy session.”
However, if they play the right game, in the right environment, and with the right people, Roberts encourages players to let those cathartic emotional or behavioral moments play out. “You don’t know when something profound is going to happen in a roleplaying game. Gosh, play with people you like and trust.”
You can purchase For the Queen: Second Edition from the Critical Role store.