Right 2 Roam - board game design for civic engagement and perspective-taking

Right 2 Roam (R2R) is an original tabletop boardgame designed in response to media coverage and personal stories of women walking alone in public spaces. The game utilises mechanics of imbalance to foreground an applied understanding of systemic inequality of movement and access to public space, including (but not limited to) the experience of gender.

Right 2 Roam is an intentionally imbalanced game of chance which aims to mirror systemic injustices and imbalances of power. Players are randomly assigned a D6 or a D10, which affects their chances at safe and fast progression. Each player starts in a corner of the board with the aim of making their way home to the centre of the board. They can choose one of three routes home. Longer routes are safer with lit spaces and chances to take shortcuts or hop on the bus. Darker routes are shorter but with more chances to encounter danger. Players take turns rolling the dice and progressing across the board with the aid of Guardian cards, which offer protection. Meanwhile, if they draw Threat cards, they may find themselves forced to run backwards to safety. The game is won if all players get home safely.

We used the game as part of a series of workshops designed to examine how boardgames can be used to I) catalyse discussion and civic engagement around equitable access to public spaces and 2) capture lived experiences of the inequalities of accessing public space and walking alone. This research indicates that this type of board game design can prompt discussion, elicit civic engagement around serious topics, and generate an archive of lived experience through game customisation features and post-play discussions in a workshop setting, using Dundee students as a use case.

Through thematic analysis we observed that people engage with the game as a prompt for reflection on past and future behaviour, sharing lived experience and meaning-making by drawing from experience, as well as broader knowledge and understanding of the context.
We observed that players: 
1) shared lived experience and exchanged resources and practices pertaining to safety as a result of the game itself but also of the social context of play and the trust and collaborative strategy established through play. 
2) recognised and connected the systemic imbalance in the game to unfairness in the real-world as a result of randomness and chance-based progression. 
3) critically reflected on own and others perceived privileges and/or vulnerabilities as a result of providing context at the level of representation whilst also creating broad interpretive space through ambiguity in the board design.

This enabled us to conclude that it is a combination of
1) systems design (intentional imbalance, uncertainty, randomness and chance),
2) embedded narrative in the cards and board,
3) context of play (social, communication, collaboration)
4) and affordance for player expression and creativity (custom mode)
that fulfil the potential of board games to create critical engagement with serious and personally impacting topics and prompt meaningful exchange of perspective and lived experience. 

Players make sense of and contextualise the gameplay experience by evoking their past lived experiences whilst also proposing their own possible interpretations of the game components and rules. The space for reflection provided in custom mode offers the players the opportunity to capture their own lived experience, reflecting on past behaviour and planning future actions. As players start interpreting the game through the lens of their own lived experience, they start drawing connections to real-world situations and imbalances which move beyond gendered inequalities to reflect on intersectionality and privilege.

Carnegie Trust
Grant number RIG013191
£14,904