Keep the Faith: Learning at Play with Greg Loring-Albright

Greg Loring-Albright is the designer of Keep the Faith, a storytelling game about a religion in transition and about how religious institutions change over time. Greg is also an assistant professor of game, media, and culture at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, where he teaches game design and game studies. 

Greg is also the co-designer of Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, a game about revolutionaries trying to liberate their city from an oppressive police state. He's a proponent of purposeful games, and I invited him on the podcast to talk about the connections between game design and learning design.

Keep the Faith is currently seeking crowdfunding for its first edition through Central Michigan University Press, an academic press that publishes peer-reviewed tabletop games with educational utility. If you're listening to this before March 6, 2025, please consider backing the game by following the link below.

Episode Resources

·       Keep the Faith (crowdfunding), https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/central-michigan-university-press/keep-the-faith

·       Greg Loring-Albright’s website, https://www.gloringalbright.com/ 

·       Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, https://outlandishgames.com/blocbybloc/ 

·       Central Michigan University Press, https://cmichpress.com/ 

·       “Daybreak: Learning at Play with Kerry Whittaker and Matteo Menapace,” Intentional Teaching episode 43, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/episodes/15393666-daybreak-learning-at-play-with-kerry-whittaker-and-matteo-menapace

·       First Player Token, my short podcast about board games, https://www.buzzsprout.com/2292265  

Podcast Links:

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Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas and teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher. Over time. Regular listeners know that I have a more than healthy interest in board games and an interest in the parallels between the design of board games and the design of learning experiences. Recently I heard an interview with the designer of a forthcoming game called Keep the Faith. It's a storytelling game with some board game elements about a religion in transition and about how religious institutions change over time. I could imagine a game like that being used in a variety of college classrooms. So I looked up the game designer Greg Loring-Albright. I learned two surprising things about Greg.

(00:56):
One is that he's not just a game designer, he's an academic. Greg is assistant professor of games, media and culture at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, where he teaches game design among other things. The other surprising thing I learned about Greg is that he is the co-designer of the board game Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, a fairly complex cooperative game about revolutionaries trying to liberate their city from an oppressive police state. I have played block by block, and it was nothing like what I heard about Keep the Faith. I thought This guy, Greg, has some range. I reached out to Greg and invited him on the podcast. Greg and I had a wide ranging conversation about the parallels between game design and learning design. We talked about goals and assessment and play testing and agency and systems thinking and more, and we talked about Keep the Faith, which as I record this, is seeking crowdfunding through Central Michigan University Press. Yes, that would be a university press that publishes peer reviewed board and role playing games that have educational utility. If you like what you hear about, keep the faith in my talk with Greg, and you're listening to this before March 6th, 2025. Please follow the link in the show notes to back the game and receive your copy when it's published. Hi Greg. Thanks for being on the podcast today and taking some time to talk to us about game design and learning design. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you.

Greg Loring-Albright (02:19):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited as well.

Derek Bruff (02:22):
Now on most of my episodes, I start off with a question to kind of get to know the guest a little bit as maybe a slightly more whole person, and I usually ask, can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? And I won't turn down an answer to that, but I would also like to ask you, can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be a game designer?

Greg Loring-Albright (02:44):
Sure. Yeah, I'll answer both. I think, actually, I don't have a great answer to the latter question. When you sent me these questions and I was like, Hmm, I don't know if I can pinpoint a time where I was like, this is what I want to do, because game designers are so, there's not a model of here is who is a game designer. Most of us, especially in the board game space, are not doing that full time. And in the video game space, it's all designer, developer, artist, all these things are sort of mixed up together. So I wasn't, as a kid, I was like, oh, I want to make games, but I was always making games as so many kids are making play and making games. But I think I realized I wanted to be an educator. I was actually working, I wasn't in higher ed, I was working in specialty coffee when I graduated from Swarthmore where I did my undergrad.

(03:34):
I worked for a while in the specialty coffee field, and I sort of found my niche there as a barista trainer and educator. So I would train new hires, I would teach coffee classes to the public. I actually trained, I was a competition coach. There's these, they call 'em coffee sports. They're like international, international competitions. And so I competed and trained in those and I love the customer service side of it, but I really loved the teaching people theory and practice of coffee. And so I think that's when I realized, yeah, I want to be an educator.

Derek Bruff (04:06):
Wow, okay. I could go down that rabbit trail too, but I'm going to restraint. So how did you get into your current area, which is games, right?

Greg Loring-Albright (04:17):
Yeah. Every career shift I've made has just been sort of following the weird path, but actually it happened in Chicago when I was working in coffee. A friend of mine was like, oh, there's this guy, Andy, who you would just purely based on vibes, I think. And so I met up with Andy. I've told this story before elsewhere, so I'll keep it short, but basically Andy ran a company that made event games sort of like this was the hi heyday of Room Escapes, and he didn't have Room Escape facility, but he would do custom scavenger hunts around the city and they were like, you'd like him, you should hang out. And so I messaged Andy, I was like, Hey, do you want to meet up for coffee? And he was like, no, that's boring. We should scout the tunnels underneath downtown Chicago for a scavenger hunt I'm making together. I was like, I like this guy. He is awesome. And he turned me on to game design in general, and also he was more tuned into the hobby board game space where I do most of my designing now than I was at the time, and he really turned me onto a lot of cool games that way.

Derek Bruff (05:19):
Okay, wow. That is one way to meet a person,

Greg Loring-Albright (05:24):
Right?

Derek Bruff (05:25):
Yeah. That's great. So let's talk about some of your games. We'll start there and get into more of your teaching space a little bit later. I'm thinking of three games in particular right now, Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, Ahoy, and then Keep the Faith, which is coming out soon,

Greg Loring-Albright (05:48):
Right?

Derek Bruff (05:50):
So those feel to me as a hobby board gamer as fairly different games in a lot

Greg Loring-Albright (05:56):
Of ways. Yes. They're different from one another for sure.

Derek Bruff (05:58):
Yeah. And so I'm curious if you think about the kind of goals you have for a game for these three different games, what are the things, the kind of player experiences you're trying to create or the other goals that you have for designing these particular games? I know you have other games to your credit, but I'd love a little compare and contrast on those three.

Greg Loring-Albright (06:19):
So Bloc By Bloc, Bloc by Bloc: Uprising is the third edition of Bloc by Bloc, and that game was, I was invited by my friend TL Simons to co-design what was going to be an expansion to his game block by block. And then as we kept sort of tearing into the game and figuring out where we could fit expansion content, we usually were like, let's just redesign the whole game. So that's a game for people who aren't aware of Block By Block is a game about an urban street uprising. Very much inspired by in its early iterations, like the Occupy movement, there was a Mexican teachers protest in the early 2010s, the Athens student protests in Greece and then just continued as it developed through its three editions to be inspired by things like the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. So that's what you do in that game.

(07:06):
It's a cooperative game with an optional semi cooperative hidden trader mode where you are trying to barricade streets, hold marches, occupy districts, push back the police. So it's a very aggressively political game, and that's part of its design goal. I think part of for t, I'll speak for tl, the lead designer, one of his big goals was just to sort of expand the discursive space in board gaming to say, okay, we have games about colonialism, we have games about war, we have games about tough topics that are kind of regressive in some ways, and what if we had a game that people could play for fun, but that was also about left political projects. So that's kind of the design goal there. A hoy, pivoting wildly from an aggressively political game about pushing the police out of your city, to a game that I just designed.

(08:02):
This was one of my earliest designs I ever started on, and it was published years later, but I had played Merchants and Marauders, which is a big sprawling four hour pirate board game, and I was like, the bug bit, I was like, I love this game, but I'm never going to get it to the table. I played a friend's copy, I was sorely tempted to buy it, I didn't buy it and I was like, let me just redesign this into a game I can play in an hour. And so that is the game that ended up becoming a hoy. It sort of took a detour through being a Star Wars pastiche for a while, but core design goals there were just sort of approachability and accessibility to this kind of open feeling, sandbox, adventure game that I love and knew I could not get the big games in that space to my table.

(08:49):
And then the last, what was the, oh, keep the faith. My religion, this is a very different game formally. Although Ahoy and Bloc by Bloc, they actually have some mechanical similarities and thematically are very different, but Keep the Faith is a sort of storytelling game. It's kind of a crossing the role playing game board game bridge a little bit. And it exists between those two. And again, I didn't really have a design goal going into that project. It was my back burner project. I was just interested in thinking about religion and systems. I was listening to Cole Wehrle, the lead designer at Leder Games talk about Oath, which is his game about historiography. This was before Oath came out, and so I just was reading his designer diaries as he processed working on that game. I was like, oh, I can make a game about that. But he has a PhD in the literature of the British Empire and I don't, so I don't have a PhD in religion either, but I was working on a religion game anyway. And so it became, I guess to answer the question, the design goal is giving players a sense of an institution's evolution at a greater than human timescale. You play out 500 years of religious history in this game, and I wanted players to be able to get in and mess around and see what kind of weird stuff they can make happen in that space.

Derek Bruff (10:09):
I was looking at the description of Keep the Faith, and at least in a couple of places, it's described as a game, not about religions, but about religious institutions.

Greg Loring-Albright (10:18):
Yes, correct. Correct. The game does not mechanically set up like your belief system. There's one card of the 51 in the deck is God(s), and so it's obviously important, it's a game about religion, but you might play the whole game and not actually establish are we monotheistic? Are we polytheistic? What are our gods? You might establish it's very much about the observed realities of religion and how those things reflect underlying values

Derek Bruff (10:53):
And it's about institutions and human organization and culture making that happens within religions. Part of our conversation here is drawing parallels between game design and learning design and in the literature on course design especially, you often start with objectives and goals and then often that second phase is how will, if you've met those goals. And so I imagine a lot of that for you comes out in prototyping. You have a sense of where you want the game to go, but then you prototype and you test, you play test a lot. So how does that work for some of these games and what are the things that you're looking for when you're play testing to give you a sense of whether or not you're achieving your objectives?

Greg Loring-Albright (11:35):
Yeah, a hundred percent. If you're me and you're bad at setting your design goals before you start, the first thing you're just testing for is just like, can people understand how to operate the system? Tabletop games, role-playing games, board games are not computer games in that people need to fully internalize or partially internalize the rule set and then understand how to operate it. So that's always test one is I put out a bunch of pieces on the board and show you how to operate them, and then I say, okay, now can you move your troops into Westfalia or whatever. I don't make those kind of games, but I can say to someone like, here's a game operation, can you make it occur? And so sometimes my play testing is just kind of scripting people's turns saying, please do this action in the game and seeing if they can figure out how to do it.

(12:27):
And then that's sort of first order. It's like does it function? And then second order play testing is sort of like, okay, is it fun once they understand how to get their troops into like do you understand why you would do that and not the other thing? Do you understand why you might, I don't know, build a house instead of build a chicken coop? What does it mean? And then the sort of final, if I know it's really cooking, if it's like a game is good and I want to keep pursuing it and put a lot of work into it is players can then internalize those mechanical operations and say, oh, and here's what's happening in the story. Right? I'm working on a very early prototype right now about community disaster preparedness, and so it's very, the art is bad. The graphic design is passable and functional, but there's not a lot of narrative trappings on top of it except for card names. And so players who were play testing it fairly recently with me were like, oh, I'm like, I'm going to go to the grocery store and get some food and put it in my extra freezer in case the power goes out. I was like, yes, it's happening. They have internalized, okay, this little yellow cube means food and the little slot on the card called extra freezer means they're putting the food in the freezer. And that's a very minor thing to have occur at a table, but if it's occurring, that means the game is working.

Derek Bruff (13:41):
Somehow the mechanics are connecting with the stories that you're hoping to tell through the game.

Greg Loring-Albright (13:46):
Exactly.

Derek Bruff (13:46):
And the players are seeing those connections

Greg Loring-Albright (13:48):
And generating them and generating them themselves too, not relying on me to be like, well, now you're gathering water and putting it in a big five gallon bucket in your basement. No, they are doing it on their own, which means things are working.

Derek Bruff (14:04):
Typically when faculty in higher ed offer a course with various assignments within it, we don't play test any of that. We just inflict it on our students.

Greg Loring-Albright (14:16):
And I got your question about this one. I was like, to me that is play testing.

(14:22):
When I run a course I have, even before you prompted me to think about it this way, I sometimes think about it as like, okay, this is a play test and it's like maybe university administration might want me to say this is the finished game and it's published and it's running, but it's like everything is iterative and I feel okay saying this on a public recording because we teach iterative design in my program and it's like, yeah, I shouldn't expect my students to do something I'm not doing. We, I am pretty honest with my students about what's new and what might work and what might not work, and just as I'm with my play testers where we'll play something for 10 minutes, I'll be like, is this going poorly? And they'll be like, yeah. I'll be like, okay, we can stop or we can do something different. And I can't stop in a course I'm running for a semester if three weeks in I'm like uhoh, but I have fallback opportunity. I build in flexibility and I can say to my students, I think something's not working here. Let's change something. And so I do keep the kind of play tester designer model in my head when I'm running, especially a new course.

Derek Bruff (15:29):
Well, and I guess part of that is when you're play testing a game, the game players know their play testing.

Greg Loring-Albright (15:36):
Yes.

Derek Bruff (15:38):
There's a very explicit agreement that they're going to give you feedback and that you might change things based on their feedback and that you want their feedback. And so I assume you have to set that up with your students too so that they realize actually, yeah, I do have a role here to give feedback on this learning experience.

Greg Loring-Albright (15:56):
For sure. For sure. I do. Again, these classes where this happens are classes where I've built up a lot of trust with the students. We have relatively small classes sizes here at Harrisburg, which is nice, and we have a pretty strict cohort model, so I see the same 11 students in the 100 level and the 200 level and the 300. And so by the time we're in a three level class, they know me and I know them, and I can say, okay, we're going to throw something at the wall this week and see what happens, and we have built up enough shared trust that it's going to work or it's not going to work, and they're not going to freak out and think, oh no, I'm going to get an F because my professor doesn't know what he's doing.

Derek Bruff (16:33):
Yeah. So we've touched on this a little bit, but what role does agency play in some of your games?

Greg Loring-Albright (16:40):
Yeah, this is a good question. And for me it goes back to in board games, that sort of thing I talked about with the play test where it's like, do the players understand the system enough to manipulate it? To me, that's one of the most compelling things that board games can do is model a system and let you play with it, whether that's a historical game, simulating a real thing, or just like a Euro game where it's turn the red cubes into blue cubes and understand how to maximize efficiency. Both of those are about understanding and manipulating a system, and that's I think where player agency and board games is most clearly expressed. As I get into the role-playing game space, keep the faith is a storytelling game. It's different. I mean, that game is kind of built on my understanding as a board game designer. It's about manipulating systems, but why I didn't just make it a board game is that I want players to have the agency to be more expressive and describe, okay, here's what the clerical garments look like in this religion. And they can add on little trappings about like, oh, well, this person was that person's mentor, and so now there's a feud. These things that are not necessarily instantiated mechanically, but that because part of the game rules say, describe what's happening narratively that the agency can come out through people just saying words.

(18:05):
There are some sort of board gamey things. It's funny, I was just at Pax Unplugged and I played Keep the Faith with a bunch of different people, and I played it with someone who was deep in the board game space. I'm like, wow, there's almost no game here. It's all about the storytelling. I was like, yeah. And I played it with someone who's deep in the TTRPG space and they were like, this is really mechanical and board gaming. So yeah, it's a mix because of who I am as a designer, this is just the kind of game I can make at the moment. But I love games. I've been playing more role-playing games than I have been, and I love that sense of structuring the narrative potential of saying, you can say whatever you want, but I'm going to give you these specific words and phrases and interactions that will make certain words make more sense, and that's just so cool.

Derek Bruff (18:52):
Yeah. Yeah. It's a kind of creative constraint experience that players have.

Greg Loring-Albright (18:58):
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Derek Bruff (18:59):
I thrive on that. Great. I'm not a role playing guy. I feel like it's too open-ended. I'd have to have the right mix of people that just feels, but this feels like I am a board game guy, and so I like the idea of putting one foot in that direction.

Greg Loring-Albright (19:12):
Well, I may keep the faith for you. You are the target market. This is who I kept trying to get my board game friends and play test just to play roleplay games, and they kept saying no. And so I was like, here, here's, keep the faith. You can handle this board game friends. Okay,

Derek Bruff (19:26):
Good. Good. I want to take this into the education space

Greg Loring-Albright (19:30):
For sure, for sure.

Derek Bruff (19:31):
How do you map some of those ideas onto working with a group of students over a semester?

Greg Loring-Albright (19:36):
Right? What do you let them do? The sort of full T-T-R-P-G. Oh, we are storytelling. We can say whatever we want, versus the more mechanical TTRPG versus the board game space of you must turn in three quizzes and two tests in order to get your final grade.

Derek Bruff (19:56):
Well, and I would say we will talk more about this, I think, but at one end is a puzzle. A puzzle has one outcome, and I'm working on a puzzle with vintage illustrations of birds right now, and it's lovely and I enjoy it. I'm not going to denigrate puzzles, but there's one outcome that I have targeted in that I don't have much agency. I just have a puzzle to solve. And I feel like there are college courses that function that way.

Greg Loring-Albright (20:25):
Yes, yes. You have to put the puzzle pieces together in the way that the instructor wants you to, or you fail or you get a C or a D or whatever. And it's also hard because it's like different people want different things, which makes the course design hard of it. It's like in game design, I can target a market. I can say, well, keep the faith is for the RPG Curious board gamer or the RPG player who loves a little bit more mechanical crunch. Cool. Great. What about people who don't like that? Well, they don't have to play it, whereas in my classroom I have 11 students and six of them might love that and five of them might hate it, and I can't be like, you go play something else.

Derek Bruff (21:10):
Right, right. I mean, I've observed working at teaching centers that this can vary a little bit by discipline.

Greg Loring-Albright (21:18):
Sure. So

Derek Bruff (21:18):
I find that there are some disciplines where the majority of students are wanting a lot of structure and a lot of road mapping and really very little agency in it. They kind want to work the puzzle in part, they value what the puzzle gives them. They value that I'm going to get these skills and these credentials, and so I don't need a lot of agency. My agency came in deciding to pursue this degree,

Greg Loring-Albright (21:42):
And I'll have more agency once I have this degree and can work in my field for which I'm now credentialed. Yeah,

Derek Bruff (21:46):
Right. Yeah. But there's other fields where students are wanting to shape what happens and what they learn and how they learn.

Greg Loring-Albright (21:54):
Yes.

(21:55):
And I'm in a very weird space with regard to that because I am at a tech school. I'm at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, but I'm teaching in a game design program that spun off out of a media studies interactive media program. And so we're sort of the weird art school kind of hidden away inside the tech school, which means that our student population is so interesting because it's people who wanted to come to a science and tech university who chose to take the not science and tech track. Not that there's no tech in games. I teach a lot of video game related classes, but yes, I see both of those students in all of my classes, the person who wants to go full poet. And I'm like, yes, I would love to let you do that. Maybe let's have a directed study in your senior year if we can. And also the student who just transferred out of computer science and is like, please let me do the coding lab and the quiz and just finish it off. And I'm like, you have to bring something of yourself to this. This is a game design program. And they're like, what? I don't understand.

Derek Bruff (22:56):
Yeah. Well, let's swing back into maybe the mechanical space a little bit.

Greg Loring-Albright (23:02):
Sure.

Derek Bruff (23:04):
When I interviewed Matteo Menapace earlier this year about his co-designed game, Daybreak about climate action, and part of what he was trying to do was model some fairly complex real world systems in the game so that by having players work within that space and figure out how the rules work and figure out where their agency is in that, they would actually learn a little bit about how the real world works, these complex systems that govern our climate. So I'm wondering if there are, I was thinking about block by block, but maybe some of your other games too, where the mechanics are doing some of the teaching.

Greg Loring-Albright (23:43):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, a hundred percent. That's the dream. That's at least the kind of school of board game design that I come out of. Yes. The perfect board game has no words, and just by doing the things and performing the actions, you magically understand, oh, something new about the real world. I'm being hyperbolic. But that's sort of how it's talked about sometimes. And I generally, I don't agree at that level of exaggeration, but I agree that's what board games are for in Block By Block. It's interesting because it's like the game doesn't really teach you very much about how to do what it's doing, but it does sort of show how to cooperate, how to act in solidarity, if I'm going to say it from a left perspective,

(24:33):
But not necessarily more so than any other cooperative board game. I generally tend to be skeptical of. Games can change the world arguments, which makes me unpopular in game design circles sometimes. But I think your description of what Mateo was saying, I think is accurate. If board games can teach and can change minds and can do anything, I think where they can do it is around systems comprehension of understanding. Oh, the power does not only rest in individuals, we are shaped by systems around us and learning to at the very least, perceive and then hopefully more so manipulate and understand and work within or against those systems is how we can change the world. And it's not just like do, I'm an individual doing things. Systems are always acting on us and around us, and games can show us that

Derek Bruff (25:26):
In a way that sometimes movies have a hard time doing.

Greg Loring-Albright (25:29):
Yeah, for sure. Movies, and you've tapped into a vein of thought that I've just been thinking about a lot of, yeah, it is hard to make a leftist movie, or at least the kind of leftism I'm into, which is sort of anarchism, which is no heroes, no Gods no masters. It's like, what do Hollywood movies give us a hero who wants to either shoot somebody dead or kiss somebody and marry them, and that's what they do formally at a formal level. And so games are more interesting to me in that they can show us other kinds of stories.

Derek Bruff (26:07):
And I'm thinking of a couple of movies that go in that direction. I think it was an outbreak. It was one of the plague movies where I felt like Gwyneth Paltrow showed up for five minutes, so she was notable, but there wasn't really a central character. It was a lot of people involved in pandemic response in lots of different, and so it gave you a little more sense of the system because it backed away from having a hero.

Greg Loring-Albright (26:34):
But that's remarkable. That is unusual. Or I think about The Wire. I love The Wire for a lot of reasons, but in part because it's doing sort of gamey move of being like, oh, everyone here is chess is a big metaphor in that series. Everyone on screen is a chess piece, and so it kind of asks you the question of who's playing the chess game, and then the show is all about that.

Derek Bruff (26:58):
Yeah. So do you think a college class is more a board game in that respect or more like a movie?

Greg Loring-Albright (27:05):
Ooh, great question. Great question.

(27:10):
I don't know. I think it's more like a game purely in that it's interactive. It's like if I'm a student and I show up in class and I want to spectate, I want to do the movie thing of consume, consume, consume, consume, reflect, I'm probably going to fail. I have students who try and take their classes like that, who at the very end, they're like, oh, can I turn in all the work late? And it depends, right? But that's not how it's supposed to work. It's supposed to be like, take an action, receive feedback, take a new action, receive new feedback, and that's a very game model more so than a movie TV

Derek Bruff (27:47):
Model. Right, right, right. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking of some classes where a humanities class where you might read a novel together or watch a film together and then talk about it, which is maybe mimics what happens when you and I go to the movies and talk with our friends about it afterwards. Right. There's some learning that happens in that context, but that's kind of a micro scale. The course itself doesn't function

Greg Loring-Albright (28:13):
Right. Over the course of the semester, we're going to read either we're going to read one book and we'll do reflections partway through and talk. I've never seen a class except maybe some workshop style studio style classes where it's purely summative assessment where we just go, go, go, go, go. And then we decide, did you pass or fail? That's so high stakes. It's terrifying.

Derek Bruff (28:36):
Right? Right. Yeah. That's how law schools work. Actually.

Greg Loring-Albright (28:41):
I hate that. I'm so glad I've never gone to law school.

Derek Bruff (28:44):
The reason I'm not there. Let's talk about Keep the faith a little more because speaking of I guess humanities and social science classes that are often dealing with challenging topics that have emotional weight for students that have very polarized views, sometimes

(29:00):
I

(29:01):
Can imagine a game about religious institutions has a whole lot of landmines that you might have to walk around.

Greg Loring-Albright (29:07):
Yes, yes. And

Derek Bruff (29:08):
I'm wondering what are those challenges and how have you tried to navigate around that to actually get where you're going with the game?

Greg Loring-Albright (29:15):
Yeah, I mean, the game, so it sort of intentionally at a formal level is trying to create a little bit of distance where it's like, okay, you are not playing a person who believes in this religion. You're playing a sort of lineage. And so that already provides a distancing mechanism where it's like, well, I can play around every turn a hundred years pass in the fiction, so if this turn, I decide to narrate someone who's terrible and using this religion to bad ends the next round, I can narrate someone who's a saint. And so it gives players a little bit of a safety valve there. And because it's fictionalized, I think it really helps. Actually, I just read a paper, I'm writing something about Keep the Faith right Now, and I read a paper about someone who did a fictive religious assignment in his class on cults and new religious movements,

(30:03):
And he makes the point in the paper that being able to be a little bit absurd. Initially, critics were like, oh, this is bad. People are being silly about religion and you're trying to learn real things about religion. And he was like, no, no. The ability to be silly actually provides another kind of release valve and lets them learn the things I want them to learn without needing to necessarily indict their own personal faith of say, well, actually all religions are evil, and so you are bad for being a religious, that's not what anyone's trying to do. That's not what keep the faith is trying to do. And so by having a fictional layer, you can make a bad religion and then you can talk about how is it real religions and the bad things they do, but you don't need to say. And so everything I've been taught since I was a child is bad.

Derek Bruff (30:49):
Right? Right. Yeah. It can give you perhaps a new useful critical lens, but you get to control a little bit how you use that lens.

Greg Loring-Albright (31:01):
You can then come at the real world as sharply or not as you want to based on your play of keep the faith and sort of socket it away and say, well, okay, that was a game, which is people are always people in the board. Game space, people, which people am I talking about? Reactionaries are always like, whenever anyone levels any kind of political criticism against the game, you're like, oh, it's just a game. It's just a stop being so mean about Catan. And now the people I was thinking about are the people in sort of the scene I roll with and the school of design that I am a part of, and it's like everything's political. Everything has a viewpoint. And so being able to thread that needle and say that we can tell a political story with Keep the Faith that is critical of the real world, and then we can also kind of hold that critique back until we're ready for it is one of my design goals with the game. And yeah, that's one of my hopes. Both my parents are ordained Mennonite ministers, and they were regular play testers of this game, and the first time he played it, my dad said, I think this game might be heretical. And the second time he played it, he said, I think they should use this game in seminaries. So massive improvement from play test one to play test two.

Derek Bruff (32:15):
Okay. Wow. Because trying to design, it sounds like you're trying to design it so that it enables people to do maybe some deconstruction of their own religion, but does it require them to do that in order to participate in the game?

Greg Loring-Albright (32:31):
That's great. That's a perfect summary. Thank you. Yes. That's exactly my design goal. I designed it sort of going through my own religious deconstruction, and I wanted to invite people to do that on their own without forcing The game isn't like, now tell me about religious trauma from your childhood. It doesn't force you to, but you can if you want to.

Derek Bruff (32:53):
And part of that is the agency that comes through the storytelling format of the game. Exactly. I can make a choice to lean into that a little bit more and maybe make up elements of my fictional religion that do echo a lot of my own experiences, but I don't have to. I can also kind of keep that fictional distance as long as I want to.

Greg Loring-Albright (33:14):
Yeah, correct.

Derek Bruff (33:16):
Yeah, that's fascinating.

Greg Loring-Albright (33:18):
Thank you.

Derek Bruff (33:18):
Do you have to have any prior knowledge of religions

(33:21):
To play game?

Greg Loring-Albright (33:21):
I didn't have any when I made it. I mean, aside from my own experience growing up, but yeah, no, it's more helpful. I've played it with people who have no touch points, and there's a little bit of difficulty there, and they're like, especially in a mixed group playing with people who raised atheist diagnostic, whatever, with people who were raised Catholic, and the Catholic folks are like, okay, well then we can talk about the smells and bells and the incense. And on the atheist raised, I like, hold on, what are you talking about? Right. But that's a general, I mean, that's just a general sort of frame of reference problem with any TTRPG. Right. I'm playing in a game right now, it's like a sci-fi campaign, and I'm not as well versed in general sci-fi as the other players. And they'll say, well, this thing from Babylon five, and I'm like, you're going to have to send me a reference image. I don't know what you're talking

Derek Bruff (34:09):
About. Right, right. Yeah. Maybe it matters less when the entire context is fictional, right?

Greg Loring-Albright (34:20):
Yes.

Derek Bruff (34:20):
Maybe there's less writing on those differences,

Greg Loring-Albright (34:24):
And the cards in the game are designed to give you anchor points where the card doesn't just say, tell me about the altar. It then says, what do we place on the altar? What does it signify when we put it there? Where does it sit within the meeting place? And so those questions are there specifically for the player who's not familiar with the keyword at the top of the card that if they can answer one or two of those questions, even if they know nothing about religion or this thing that they can still play and they can hang.

Derek Bruff (34:53):
Well, I'm going to go on a slight rabbit trail here because Awesome. My wife has a doctorate of ministry and she did her big doctorate project on visual art

Greg Loring-Albright (35:04):
In very cool,

Derek Bruff (35:06):
Largely Protestant evangelical contexts.

Greg Loring-Albright (35:09):
Right. Wild. Wild.

Derek Bruff (35:11):
So the Catholic context on visual art is very different, right. But she argues that in a lot of Protestant denominations, there is a kind of blindness to the role of visual art in spiritual formation, that there is art, there is architecture. You walk into a church building and there are things your eyes land upon, but often people aren't able to articulate why that thing is placed on the altar and the fact that it was an intentional choice to put the altar in that part of the church and not some other part of the church. Right.

Greg Loring-Albright (35:45):
Right.

Derek Bruff (35:46):
And so I can imagine a card you just described, even for someone who has a lot of experience in a religious institution, if they haven't done some of that critical reflection, it might give them very specific questions that would be useful for them to think about in their own context.

Greg Loring-Albright (36:02):
For sure. Yeah, and I mean those kinds of questions like this thing about, oh, why is the altar there? What does it signify? That's kind of the central question that I was picking at when I was designing this game of like, we do stuff. Yes, true. Correct. Why? And the sort of easy answer if you were raised in a relatively conservative Protestant and a Baptist household like me is because God told us to or because that's the way it's always been done, and keep the faith is kind of about lifting up the veil from that answer and saying, really, and I mean, that's part of why game to Zoom out a little bit. That's part of why games are so cool. It's like you can have a systems heavy game like Daybreak and you can have a more, I mean, block by block is pretty systems heavy, but a game that's more about something else that's using these components, these little bits of wood and plastic and paper and sending a different kind of emotional message.

Derek Bruff (37:03):
Yeah. I love that. Well, and we need to wrap up. Our time is short,

Greg Loring-Albright (37:10):
Sadly,

Derek Bruff (37:10):
But thinking about that in the kind of traditional college teaching environment, how do we design courses that create these types of experiences for students? Sometimes it is. We want them to develop a certain types of systems thinking, and other times we want them to have a deep understanding of how other people experience the world or how the world could be at some point in the future.

Greg Loring-Albright (37:32):
Or I teach a lot of game design classes, and part of what I want them to understand is what does it feel like to work on a game? I make them work in weird, quirky little engines where they have to bang their heads against the wall. I'm like, yeah, it's frustrating, isn't it? I'm not trying to torture you, but this is what it feels like. Every creative project you have these moments, and so to get that kind of qualitative affective teaching is also important.

Derek Bruff (37:56):
Yeah. Well, thank you, Greg. This has been really, really interesting. I appreciate you coming on the podcast and helping us find some connections here. Thanks for doing this.

Greg Loring-Albright (38:05):
Thanks for chatting. I had a great time.

Derek Bruff (38:08):
That was Greg Loring-Albright, assistant professor of Games, media and Culture at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, and Designer of the forthcoming Storytelling Game. Keep the Faith. Thanks to Greg for taking the time to come on the podcast and explore all these connections between game design and learning design. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, keep The Faith is Seeking Crowdfunding for its first edition. If you'd like to see Keep The Faith Become a Published game, please follow the link in the show notes to become a backer. You'll also find links to more info about Greg and his games, as well as Central Michigan University Press, which will be publishing Keep The Faith.

(38:42):
And I can't pass this chance up to plug my other podcast. First Player Token. It's a short monthly podcast where I review board games that I play with my family and friends.

(38:54):
I often interview my kids about the games I review, so it's great fun. I'll have a special episode about Keep the Faith with a different Cut of my interview with Greg.

(39:01):
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEAwebsite where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.