Stardust Odyssey: City’s Last Stand – Utilising Process Drama and Design-Based Research in Tabletop Game Workshops to Reimagine Active Citizenship in Thailand’s Neoliberal Education Context

• Players embodied characters from different socio-economic classes, making decisions based on limited or abundant resources.

• The facilitator spent 20 minutes explaining game rules and features to establish distancing between the characters and the players

• Distanced settings and fictional game elements served as a critical tool, allowing all players to relate them to the ongoing social context in Thailand.

• Emotional Immersion in Lower-Status Roles: Players experienced frustration with systemic constraints, which deepened their engagement.

• Effective Collective Action: Initially, players did not aim for a collective victory card, but facilitator guidance led them to help a struggling player, revealing collective consequences in the next turn. This experience increased their motivation to pursue more collective victories.

Challenges

• Overlong Introduction: Many found the introduction too lengthy, making it hard to absorb the rules and stay engaged.

• Ineffective People Cards: Players saw the non-playable-background cards as non-functional and unappealing.

• Poor Time Management: Limited time for post-game discussion reduced opportunities for meaningful reflection.

• Reduced the facilitator’s instructive section to under 10 minutes, focusing on introducing character conflicts rather than extensively explaining the rules.

• Redesigned People Cards to be more immersive by adding dialogues that make characters speak directly to the players, enhancing engagement.

• Added game mechanics that allow People Cards to be used for negotiation, ensuring their functional relevance within the gameplay.

• Encouraged facilitators to have players read aloud character dialogues as a short performance, allowing all players to engage with the city’s story collectively.

• Limited gameplay duration to ensure sufficient time for post-game discussions, enabling critical reflection and commentary, a core aspect of process drama.

• Participants stepped into roles reflecting real socio-economic hierarchies, engaging in structured negotiation and decision-making.

• Teachers and welfare activists were encouraged to engage in role-specific improvisation, making spontaneous choices rather than defaulting to their activist perspectives, to enhance role-playing immersion.

• Empathy & Perspective-Taking: Teachers who are social activists gained insight into the limited perspectives of the privileged by role-playing as Stars Collector. The People Cards were well-received by all players for their refined narratives and functionality.

• Effectiveness in Communicating Inequality: A welfare activist highlighted the game’s ability to convey inequality through immersive storytelling and embodied experiences that often ignored in quantitative research and data.

• Impact of Post-Game Discussion: Reflection was most effective when ample time was given for debriefing.

Challenges

• Learning Curve for New Players: A teacher unfamiliar with tabletop games initially felt overwhelmed by game’s introduction, although later grasped the mechanics through observation and experience.

• Focus on Individual Success: Many prioritised personal victories, overlooking the game’s theme of collective action.

• Facilitators should be encouraged to prompt players to explore strategic collaboration when opportunities for collective action arise.

• Reflective prompts were added to guide post-game discussions, ensuring deeper critical reflection on socio-economic inequality.

• The game introduction was further shortened, limiting pre-play instructions to the prologue only, allowing players to immerse themselves naturally and learn through experience.

• Facilitation by Former Players: Teachers from previous workshops guided gameplay using structured improvisation and reflective questioning to navigate role-based dilemmas.

• Active Participation: Facilitators encouraged players to read aloud People Card dialogues, emphasising that, like real-life social connections, engagement requires active involvement.

• Effectiveness of Process Drama Techniques: A drama teacher’s expressive reading on the People Cards enhanced both immersion and critical distance, reinforcing the safety of roleplay even in difficult roles.

• Rich Discussions on Power & Inequality: The game fostered deep post-game discussions, showing that process drama can function without direct creator involvement.

Challenges

• Facilitation Challenges: A facilitator struggled to balance guidance and autonomy, while experienced players unintentionally revealed strategies, limiting discovery for newcomers.

• Mechanics Over Narrative: One participant focused purely on game mechanics, disengaging from the emotional and narrative aspects during the gameplay.

• The facilitator’s role was revised to give players more control over their decisions, allowing them to actively resist systemic constraints.

• People Card dialogues were shortened to help players focused on mechanics engage more easily with the storytelling.

• Facilitator Replay Experiment: A teacher who had previously played and facilitated the game was assigned to replay the most privileged role (Stars Collector) with a sole focus on achieving an individual goal.

• Entertaining yet Critical: The pre-assigned role was further improvised, creating strong tension during negotiations, leading to both shouting and laughter. A player who achieved individual victory felt uneasy about their character’s dialogue, recognising that their success came at the expense of others, highlighting critical awareness of inequality despite mastering the mechanics.

• Recognition of Ethical Dilemmas: Players identified and discussed complex moral issues embedded in the game mechanics.

• Balanced Facilitator Role: The facilitator effectively balanced narration and guidance, ensuring the mechanics supported critical engagement.

Challenges

• Frustration with Role Constraints: Players in lower-status roles felt powerless, reflecting real-world inequalities. While an activist saw this as insightful, it risked disengagement for those unfamiliar with social justice, who felt unable to influence the game.

• Adjusted game mechanics to increase character agency, ensuring players had more flexibility in resisting systemic oppression. For example, the Dust Cleaner character can use the Dust Bag card, which causes negative health effects for all players, enabling collective bargaining among them.

• Players made independent decisions, relying on the game’s mechanics as a facilitator.

• Reflection was voluntary, with written notes and verbal feedback collected after the session.

• Engagement with Inequality Theme: Students engaged deeply by unlocking multiple collective victory cards. Some initially believed they had lost but later realised they were the first group to achieve the most collective victories.

Challenges

• Risk of Misinterpreting Meritocracy: Some players have potentials to see the game as reinforcing rather than critiquing meritocracy, highlighting the need for stronger built-in reflection mechanisms when the game is played without a facilitator.

• Enhancing Independent Play: Reflective prompts were embedded into the game mechanics, encouraging critical engagement without facilitation. People Card dialogues were redesigned as open-ended questions, while the introduction card now includes guiding questions and an explicit mention of the game’s theme.

• A “Memory Notebook” allows players to record reflections, fostering internal dialogue.

• Six blank People Cards enable players to create characters, encouraging improvisation. A conceptual video link was added to reinforce critical reflection.