How can playing a character in a fantasy world help you explore the real world?
Welcome to Gaining Advantage.
Welcome to Gaining Advantage.
We are using tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons to help you make lives better.
Now there's a lot of fear going on right now, about 2025 and what it's going to look like
in the United States with new administration, how it's going to affect the lots of different
disadvantaged populations, and thanks to some pretty cruel threats by the incoming administration.
Well, let's just say we're not sitting still, alright?
We are proactively doing what we can to help.
First of all, we're helping locally through volunteering with local organizations that
are helping out with immigration and a number of different areas that are being threatened.
That's what we're doing in our community, and we're calling it DefiantKindness and even
using the hashtag #DefiantKindness and we're talking to local officials and helping wherever
we can.
But we want to help and encourage you to do the same in your community
so whatever kind of happens from the top down, that we grassroots bottom up and make
a difference, can help to those who are struggling with this.
Now of course, everyone has different resources, different possibilities.
I happen to be in a position where, besides game development, I'm in a position where
I get to do a lot of volunteering and things like that just as part of my full time job.
I have the freedom to do that.
Not everybody has that opportunity.
So I encourage you to look at what you have:
Resources, personal energy, capabilities, connections, whatever it is, whether it's
writing letters to various representatives, whether it's just whatever you can do.
This is the action economy that we talk about in Dungeons and Dragons.
You can have a big, powerful, big bad evil guy and if you have it all boils down to the
number of actions that can be taken.
So even though they might be able to have some big, powerful, damaging actions, if there's
a whole bunch of other actions that are taken during the same initiative around, they're
in trouble.
And so I want to encourage you to be a part of that economy and let's see what we can
do from each of our ends to make a difference.
We also have a big project that's coming.
We believe it's going to make a lot of difference to the tabletop gaming industry and hobby.
And so I encourage you to follow that link in our show notes to join the Hoard for more
updates if you haven't.
That's our email list and we send out updates every couple of weeks or so.
And we've got some big news coming.
So if you're not already signed up for that, I encourage you to do that.
And if you are signed up, make sure you watch for those when they hit your email inbox.
And then hang on after the interview, we have a little bit more information with another hint along those
lines about some more projects that we have coming up.
And so moving into the interview, just want to let you know that Stefan's camera failed
right before we started the interview, but we had a great conversation.
So just let's get right into that.
Today, I'm speaking with Stefan McNich, an educator turned nonprofit founder who has
transformed his D&D tutoring club into UnboxEd, an afternoon program that brings game-based
learning into classrooms.
UnboxEd uses games to build real world skills like teamwork, problem solving, and persistence.
Welcome Stefan.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to have been invited.
And so what would you like us to know about, first of all, you personally, specifically
speaking to the tabletop gaming crowd?
Sure.
The biggest thing going on in my life right now is probably the biggest thing that's ever
happened in my life.
My wife and I welcomed our first child, a little baby boy recently.
So a lot of my thinking has drifted toward a longer term horizon.
Wow.
Tell us a little bit about your experience with tabletop games.
Yeah.
So I started a D&D tutoring and mentoring club when I was a special ed teacher in elementary
school.
By the fifth year, about 50% of our students were actually special ed at which point.
I realized that it was more of a vehicle for embedding content and mentoring skills than
it really was just a recreational hobby.
I took a break from education for a while, and then during COVID, I deviated and dreamed
up a non-profit and came up with UnboxEd.
And now we serve underserved campuses and student populations, and we use board games and RPGs
to try and engage them in traditional content.
That's so cool.
All right.
So tell us, how does UnboxEd use tabletop games to teach those skills?
Our flagship is an entrepreneurship RPG.
We've noticed in those certain communities are drastic needs, an unsung need, I would say,
for alternatives to college and preparation for life skills outside of the classroom.
So we have an entrepreneurship RPG that's a lot where a lot of my time goes into right
now.
It's teaching financial literacy.
In all of our classes, we have a savings account.
So the reward points and behavior points, they can bank them.
It teaches them interest, and hopefully instills a sense of delayed gratification for them.
Universally, with game-based learning, the reason I got into the whole thing as a program
is for a large amount of students, the project-based learning that's inherent in games, I think
is a lot more engaging.
And a lot more engaging because they can see their choices have immediate results and immediate
results being immediate feedback, which means a lot more frequent opportunities for iteration.
And over time, we've seen that more frequent iteration translate into an attitude that
failure is not a negative, but rather a step toward success.
And that hearkens back to the persistence you mentioned, which is one of our behavior
tenets.
And reframing, "I can't do this," into, "I need to figure out a different way to do this."
Cool.
So is this for any classroom or specific, like special ed classrooms, or what's it designed
for specifically?
Right now, it's an after-school program.
So it's opt-in.
It's students on campuses that have a choice of extracurriculars.
They can opt-in to UnboxEd as an offering and after-school setting.
Okay.
And do you notice like a particular demographic of kids, besides just kids that like tabletop games or something like that?
Yeah, actually, most kids who join aren't really well-versed with tabletop games.
We get very few who have ever heard of an RPG, let alone played it, not many board gamers.
Obviously, many kids, especially young boys, will have a fair amount of experience with
video games.
But it's mostly boys outside, probably 95% of our overall just lifetime population has
been boys.
And I think that goes back to that project-based utility.
And I think it's one thing that boys don't get a lot of in education is that tactility,
that hands-on, that ability to move around the room, to kind of like yell across the room
to negotiate things like that.
And as well as we don't shy away from conflict or violence necessarily in RPGs, which I personally
believe is developmentally appropriate for boys when you handle it in an appropriate
manner.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I remember years ago talking to a couple of Harvard professors who, and this
is video games in this case, talking to them about a study they did on Grand Theft Auto.
And they found that teens who played that game were more socially adept than those who didn't.
And what it had a lot to do with was not so much the content of the game, but kind of
the fact that everybody was playing it.
So that way, when the subject would come up, they knew what was going on and stuff, they
could join in that conversation.
And so just having that connection was really helpful.
Yeah, exactly.
There's a lot of really interesting research, including that being able to engage and have
the practice of engaging in conflicts and violent play will develop the prefrontal
cortex so that when people actually experience those situations in real life, they can actually
slow down the situation a lot more competently than people without that experience.
And they can also remember, it's embedded in their memory, muscle memory, how certain
outcomes or certain behaviors result in certain outcomes, especially undesirable outcomes.
And they can then generally make better choices because they've already gone through that system
of failure and iteration and have that muscle memory in terms of conflict.
Yeah, that makes total sense.
You sort of practiced it already.
Right.
Yeah.
All right.
So how do you measure success in game-based learning then?
So we have five main behaviors that we watch out for and measure, engagement, persistence,
problem-solving, collaboration, and curiosity.
Empirically, we'll use student-led or student-reported, self-reported student surveys where at the
beginning and end of semester, we'll have questions, prompts for kids to fill out how
they think they're behaving and interacting with those five points of behavior.
Then we also have all of our instructors have an app called ClassDojo where they award behavior
points for each of those five specific traits that the kids will bank and then they can
use those points to buy rewards.
Then we can chart their growth and we can also separate that by new versus returning
students as well as RPGs versus board games and more internally, we separate it by the
different projects we did, the specific games we did, the certain warm-ups we did that way
to try and get as granular as possible.
Curiosity, I will say, has been my white whale.
It is a different beast in terms of we haven't figured out how to measure it, how to prompt
it, largely necessarily how to define it that well.
One of the crowning achievements in my whole education career is in our entrepreneurship
group and one of our teams was designing road-safe rocket boosters for cars.
One of the more shy disengaged students was crafting a model rocket as a clay prototype
and then he paused and he turned to me and he asked, "Can we research how rockets actually
work?"
I was speechless.
I was stunned.
I hadn't remembered ever gotten such a direct, transparent question about learning something,
especially so complex.
Yeah, so that sort of question is what I'm after every day and it's so hard to figure
out where it comes from, how to prompt it more often in kids.
Yeah, that's a really interesting conundrum.
I know that for me, growing up, playing D&D, I learned a lot of history, just personally
researching because I wanted to learn more about the kinds of weapons and things like
that that were used in the Middle Ages.
But yeah, I was self-motivated that way and so yeah, that's a challenge.
So what surprises have you encountered through this process?
That's a great segue because I now believe that curiosity and imagination are not innate
in children.
I think that they are skills that need to be developed and exercised.
I would consider them a form of literacy or literacy adjacent, and I don't know if it's
the amount of digital input and output the kids experience, the nonstop stimuli that prevents
short-term memory transferring into long-term memory, or just a lack of practice with visualization.
So for instance, we returned to schools the year we served third through sixth graders
and we returned the year the campuses let kids back in on a full-time basis.
We started with our third graders and our third graders had missed the previous two years,
first grade and second grade, which are the primary literacy and numeracy years for learning
and we asked them what books they had read while at home for the last two years and not
a single student could recall a single book that they had read in those last two years
and if you think about where we get that visualization muscle of imagining things that aren't there,
aren't in front of us, that is not immediately input into our eyes and we don't have to do
all that back-end work, a lot of that I imagine comes from literacy and being denied that,
I think, does create a gap in your ability to be curious or to imagine just the amount
of unstructured daydreaming that I think is no longer a mass part of childhood.
And then also, I worry, threatens what also is potentially a skill of visualizing
things that aren't there because I think that can include things like skepticism and empathy.
And so I think, and that's another reason why curiosity is so important to me, is I
think it does inform those later skills of skepticism and empathy and things like that.
Wow, that's a tragedy but so insightful.
Just pondering, yeah, empathy is imagining someone else's perspective.
And also being curious about how their experience, how they're feeling, how they're reacting
to the same stimuli that you are.
Yeah, oh sure.
And you can see the difference just when you go through an election cycle, this is pretty
recent and there's most media outlets have some kind of bias one way or the other and
they don't really spend a lot of time on, like, okay, so maybe you don't agree with this candidate,
but have you thought about where people on the other side are coming from?
And I know that just for me, because I have a lot of friends that don't agree with me
politically, that I've kind of had to come to terms just with, but just kind of, hey,
they see things differently and just trying to understand where they're coming from.
And thinking, okay, this is a pretty decent person, and so why don't they see things the
way I do?
And I mean, the way our world is now, our culture at least, there's so much of that,
there's no emphasis on understanding where other people are coming from.
Yeah, I mean, that's a whole different podcast, but absolutely, and I'll plug a book that
I really enjoy, it's called, I Never Thought Of It That Way, I forget the author, but that's
the premise of the book and I found that book really enjoyable and helpful in practicing
those ideas of asking why would someone, what is their motivation instead of assigning a
motivation?
Yeah, and so yeah, then putting it back in the fantasy realm, being able to sort of practice
that to understand, it's an interesting first step, if they haven't developed the skills,
to be able to say, okay, well, what is your character feeling?
So there's still, even though it's a character that they're controlling, and is to some degree,
an aspect or an extension of themselves, at the same time, it's still someone else in
a different situation.
And so it does give them at least the opportunity to see things through even a self-created
different person.
Oh, that's completely true.
Yeah, one of the observations that we've had with RPGs and creating those avatars is it
gives a safe, abstracted buffer between trying out personalities, especially for kids whose
ages are young enough to where they're still developing their identities and their personalities,
and they're getting thrown a lot of different, like, it's okay to be this, it's not okay
to be this.
So we've seen a lot of kids experiment with gender-bending avatars or avatars who are
contradictory to certain things that is going on in their life, or avatars who are extremely
vulnerable in something that they can't actually express directly in their own lives.
So they kind of live it through their avatar, like, seriously.
I'm so fascinated by this, and just kind of the, I just want to dig in with all kinds
of research because I think about just like Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how much does
their home life, socioeconomic situation, things like that have to do with curiosity
and creativity.
If you're just trying to survive, do you have time to develop those things or are you just
kind of, hey, whatever works and go and stuff like that?
Yeah, that is a great question.
I wish I had a more definitive answer to it.
Yeah, I just have anecdotes here and there about students who have responded to it, but
also it's not necessarily, well, I shouldn't say that.
I haven't noticed that it's as sustainable as I would hope.
They can meet those same students a couple years later, and it doesn't seem like they've
gone the same trajectory as they had in the program or at least don't express any sort
of gratitude towards it or the same attitude that they came out of the program with.
But that could be one of those things that takes years and years to express.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's so many other influences in everyone's lives.
So it's easy for that to kind of get shoved aside and say, "Well, yeah, that was nice."
Or whatever, or just completely forget about it or something like that.
Yeah, so if it's not a long-term thing, it's funny when I talk to people that when I say,
"Oh, you know, roleplaying games, D&D, something like that."
"Yeah, I think I played that once," you know, for me, I think, "How can you not remember
playing it?"
No, absolutely.
Hmm.
That's a...
So I know we have a lot of educators and researchers and stuff that watch this show.
So I want to just encourage those of you who do to think about there's some lots of great
research to be done in this field if you're looking for a direction to go.
Yeah.
Okay, so you just rescued a djinni from the hands of an efreeti, and it offers you three
wishes to help you achieve your goals to improve lives.
What do you wish for?
I don't know why, but this question feels like a trap.
One of my...
It is not that kind of djinni.
It's appreciative of you rescuing it.
I think just having that sort of power and authority, I'm just maybe less comfortable
with.
One of my core beliefs is that there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
So I feel like no matter what I choose, there's going to be unintended consequences for somebody.
But off the top of my head, I would say the proliferation of nuclear power.
This is a personal one.
However, it affects everybody else.
I need at least eight days of rain in Austin every month.
Yeah, that's just for me.
I get that one.
And then third, more directly, snapping my fingers to figure out the perfect solution
for community reinvestment.
I just feel that we need to give education back to the local communities that it serves
and ask them more what they needed to be for their particular demographic.
Some ideas I've heard are subsidizing low-income parents for the hours of three to five p.m.
because it's such an integral time period for kids.
Most people don't know that the learning gap, the amount of hours by middle school that
those two hours consume in the learning gap is something like six to 7,000 hours.
It's an enormous amount of time between doing those two hours.
And then Andrew Yang also talks about in response to universal basic income, some sort
of community credit system to where you're developing a local kind of barter economy
to give people meaning and purpose and still interacting in some sort of credit barter
economy with each other and still being able to provide services and products to one another,
even if it's not necessarily part of their job.
Well, those are fantastic ideas.
I love that.
So often people may be reluctant about where to invest funding in one place or another.
And then, boy, you just look for the gaps for where things and how that impacts the future,
how that impacts generations and stuff like that makes a huge difference.
Yeah, those are great ideas.
All right.
So what one message would you give educators who are interested in integrating games into
their teaching?
First thing I would do is clarify gamification versus game-based learning.
Gamification is taking existing content and then pasting on a layer of game-based elements
to it.
So you can think of a quiz turned into Jeopardy, like that sort of thing.
Game-based learning is you start with the game and you start with ideally a quality
game that is already engaging and fun, and then you figure out ways to introduce learning
opportunities, specific learning opportunities into the game.
So I think the most important thing there is with game-based learning is, number one,
pick a game that is fun and a game that you believe is fun.
Because if you are having fun, then that gives students permission to have fun.
If you are not having fun, that gives students permission to be bored and disruptive.
And fun takes a lot of preparation.
If you're going to use a game to introduce learning opportunities, you need to treat
it like a lesson plan.
You need to be proficient with the game and the rules and how are you going to teach it
in an engaging way, because that can be kind of a slog with students.
You need to play through at least half the game and take notes of how and when to introduce
learning opportunities.
Another thing, most importantly, is you need to create a thorough debriefing post the
game.
And I'm talking about, as transparent as a script, the Q&A so that the kids can vocalize
and internalize the choices they made during the game and then talk about those choices
at the end of the game.
And I use the what-so-what-now-what method, which is, what did you do in the game?
So what happened as a result of that, now what would you do differently?
And that's the framework I go with to get more in-depth reach for those parts.
But I think those are the elements that you need to have in place before you even think
about running a game.
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
Do you have any thoughts on, because as I think about this, and the idea of starting
the game first, and wow, did I have a lot of, when I was in school, a lot of Jeopardy
preparing for quizzes and things like that.
If you're starting with a game, but you have specific curriculum requirements and things
like that, any tips on how to bridge that, how to find the right game, or how you do
that, starting with a game?
That's a great question.
Start simple.
Think a game that I feel like you're familiar with, and dissect it, and think about ways
that you can adapt it, whether it's kind of low-hanging fruit, like vocabulary.
There are plenty of games that are already STEM-based.
There's plenty of games that are already economic-based.
There's plenty of games that are historical.
And then I think that's where it takes a lot of the preparation, and I honestly wouldn't
necessarily recommend it as a general practice, unless you find a game and you think, "Oh,
that could work really well.
I'll have to do some work to adapt it, and probably smooth off the edges, and maybe even
simplify the rule set, get it down to a really tight teach, and then know exactly why I'm
teaching this, or why I'm running this, where the learning objectives are."
Yeah, it's not a small thing.
I don't know that as a general teacher these days.
At this point, I've already kind of developed custom games to introduce a lot of different
curricula, but I don't know that I would use too, too many games.
I would say RPGs are probably a lot friendlier and a lot easier to adapt and introduce specific
learning objectives, because you can invent and mold the world a lot better.
You can point skills in those directions, themes in those directions, and you can turn
it into more of a simulation, I think, more easily than trying to take a board game and
really cramming too much into it, into where the actual game falls apart.
Yeah, no, it makes sense.
Yeah, RPGs are usually so flexible that it's just a lot easier.
Even thinking of what you said about vocabulary, ways that that can be integrated, you could
take a semester's worth of vocabulary and try to build a campaign out of it, and they
would know those words by the end of that campaign really well.
What one message did you give to educators and parents who are skeptical about game-based
learning?
We've already flirted with the violence.
I think if you're concerned about that, I think that's a question of doing your own
research, and there's plenty on there to debunk some of the old bad research about
violence in games or video games.
Personally, that's definitely the number one complainer concern I get.
But I think it's also tied into the conflict competitive nature of it, and I would remind
everybody that all games are cooperative.
By that, I mean everybody who sits down to a game agrees to a set of rules.
They agree that they are stepping into a magical circle, being this invention of play.
They're being vulnerable, and they are potentially losing and being cool about it in the interest
of having fun.
It's an agreement that everybody has.
Competition does not mean a lack of respect.
Yeah.
No.
Wow.
Yeah.
And more frequently, if you hear that, I've seen too much of people jumping into the competition,
but in the sense of losing that respect.
And I think that was just what a day or two ago, my kids are asking me about sportsmanship
and things like that.
We had a really good conversation about that.
So yeah, no, that's really valuable.
And you mentioned vulnerability.
We could do a whole other thing about that.
But I've been recently speaking to some groups about the value of vulnerability.
And I see that more in younger generations seem to, at least the ones that I've worked
with, have an easier time with it than some older generations that are used to kind of
putting up walls and things like that.
Yeah.
Sure.
I can see that being an emotional vocabulary thing too.
I think kids just have way more words and ideas to use about feelings and emotions than
older generations did.
Yeah.
All right.
So what projects are you working on next so you can talk about?
My heart and soul right now is going into our Entrepreneur's RPG.
It is a project-based simulation where teams of students will start and grow a fantasy
business.
As I mentioned, it's our response to giving low-income students alternatives to college,
giving them vocabulary for community reinvestment, financial literacy, and just options beyond.
So we surveyed our students one semester about, maybe a couple of semesters, about their dream
jobs.
And we got most responses fell in one of two camps.
It was either social media influencer, that was 75% of students.
All students responded social media influencer, and then 25% responded with fast food, some
form of fast food service.
And so just to grow their vocabulary of what is out there, what their options are, how
they could turn just skilled labor into starting their own business, running their own business,
giving them the skills to, or even the desire that that is a possibility.
That's where a lot of my time is going into that entrepreneurship RPG.
Wow.
That's fascinating.
Just being able to imagine the possibilities and having that limited scope.
Well I learned something today, boy.
Oh, that's...
Hmm.
Okay.
Well, I, but I love that idea.
It's like a fantasy internship.
Yeah.
With any luck, we'll have an at home version maybe Kickstarted next year.
Keep an eye on for that.
That would be, that would be a dream to actually have something that we could, yeah, a physical,
a physical product that we could send, send home with people.
That's cool.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I think of so many just situations that I've been career and otherwise, where
I kind of walked in not feeling entirely comfortable or qualified to be in that position, especially
when it's something new, when you can give somebody practice and so they can build confidence
in that.
And so that once they actually do step into that, when those opportunities arise, sometimes
they'll say, "Oh, I couldn't do that."
And they don't even attempt it.
So just being able to give that confidence, say, "Yeah, try it."
And to be able to say, "Oh, yeah.
I've got a pretty good sense of what that's like because I've kind of mentally walked
through that step, through those steps in a simulation."
Yeah, it makes a big difference.
Yeah.
And that's the thing.
All right.
So we'll have all your contact information in our show notes, but where is the one best
place that you'd like people to start to learn more about you or to contact you?
Our website, UnboxEdClassroom.com.
There's a blog there as well, which goes into more depth on most of these answers.
And we are a nonprofit charity, so you can consider donating as well, if that's your
desire.
All right.
Well, Stefan, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Everyone, check out those links in the show notes.
Yeah, thank you so much, yeah.
I really had a lot of fun.
Before we wrap up, I want to take a moment to thank our incredible Patreon supporters.
Your support enables us to create and share our work, making tabletop roleplaying games
more inclusive and accessible to everyone.
And that means so much to us.
I'd like to give a big shout out this month.
We have three new patrons, Richard Stahl, Divergent Dryad, and Juusu.
Thank you so much for your support.
And in preparation for some of those proposed changes that we were talking about at the
beginning of the show, especially to those on disability benefits and Medicaid and other
supports that just a lot of people rely on, we want to use fantasy to imagine a better
world and hopefully make our world better in the process.
So we are restructuring our Patreon tiers to make more Community Copies available so
that those of you who can't afford to buy them, you get them for free.
And we use support from our patrons to finance that program.
Now this month we made over $500 in Community Copies available.
And I'm thrilled about that and just really appreciate all the support from our patrons
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So I encourage you, if you can, to join us on patreon.com/wyrmworkspublishing and become
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