Exploring the socio-emotional benefits of playing TTRPGs

While it is abundantly clear that roleplaying games can easily provide lifetimes of fun, in recent years the reality that they're also a phenomenal outlet for socialization, connection, development and growth have also become not only incredibly apparent, but heavily documented. For us at SendingStone (as well as many tables around the world), the therapeutic elements of this wonderful hobby we all share became crystal clear during the several years of global pandemic, in which the many game systems we love not only continued to be a cherished hobby, but one of the main socialization methods we had to share space with each other.

Under this lens, and in conjunction with our nonprofit partner PLAN (the Peer Learning Adventure Network) Gaming, we began to examine and expand on supporting the therapeutic benefits of shared roleplay and broad-based creative games across our platform.

Exiting the pandemic, this link between gameplay and socioemotional growth for everyone enjoying roleplaying has entered the mental health mainstream. With this, a bevy of public-facing therapeutic practices have built games into their practices, and we're fully here for it. As we quickly learned through our early phase work with PLAN, SendingStone's core recipe of a fundamentally simple VTT meshed with this goal perfectly, as there was no initial challenge using our platform as one might otherwise experience on a traditionally convoluted digital space. Avoiding that dire bottleneck which causes many players of all calibers from adopting digital solutions to gaming, we were off to the races to develop the finer points of how our system could be both fun and functional.

Now, many years later, we have moved beyond basic implementation and are exploring expanding the platform with higher end functions to support therapeutic practices, such as end-to-end encryption and HIPAA compliance. Further, we have advanced beyond internal friends and family testing and are actively reaching out to practices to try SendingStone both as a way to support their work as well as give us constructive feedback so that we can ensure we cover as wide a range of use cases as possible.

While the roleplaying world is as vast as the imagination, the therapeutic world extends both across our entire minds as well as further beyond to the grander bounds of the human experience as a whole. Capturing this nuance in a safe space such as a gaming environment is both an art and a science, constantly requiring polishing, but in a setting in which experimentation can be healthy and an effective tool to support peoples’ development and growth. We are proud to be a partner in this work, and welcome anyone interested in exploring its capacity to reach out and see how we can better people’s lives through gaming together!

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