About Gaming Together
What We Do
Gaming Together offers after-school gaming groups, summer camps, and school break camps. Dungeons & Dragons is our main activity: kids each play a fantasy, Lord-of-the-Rings style hero they create, and they work together as a group to make decisions, defeat monsters, solve puzzles, and finish quests.
Our Story Tellers (STs) are young adults with experience running D&D and a commitment to mentoring and working positively with kids, trained by our founder in her unique way of supporting growth and development. Director Honor Doherty provides mentoring and supervision for social-emotional guidance as needed. Since every student—and Story Teller—is working on something, together we create an accepting and supportive space for growth. Most importantly, this is a skills-development program that your student will want to go to—and won’t be embarrassed by. Gaming is cool!
The Benefits of Gaming
Gaming Together activities are more than just fun!
Cooperative gaming teaches
- teamwork,
- communication skills,
- imagination,
- negotiation,
- problem-solving,
- coping skills,
- perspective-taking,
- and more.
Gaming is great, creative fun—and has been shown to develop social skills, confidence, self-regulation, and resilience. Through gaming, participants connect to others through a shared interest.
Resources
We recommend these articles and blog posts for more information.
- Paul Darvasi, “How ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Primes Students for Interdisciplinary Learning, Including STEM,” Mind/Shift, 18 October 2018.
- Annalee Newitz, "Why the Cool Kids Are Playing Dungeons & Dragons,” The New York Times, 6 April 2019.
- Mayim Bialik, "D&D Therapy" [video], 11 January 2018.
- Neima Jahromi, “The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons,” The New Yorker, 24 October 2017.
- Kendall Ashley, "Dungeons & Dragons as Therapy," Geek & Sundry, 19 May 2016.
- Chris Berg, "Dungeons of the Mind: Tabletop RPGs as Social Therapy", Kill Screen, 25 October 2015.
- Elisabeth de Kleer, "Dragons in the Department of Corrections," Waypoint, 27 October 2016.
- Emily Begley, "A Women-Centric Dungeons & Dragons Group Fosters Friendships and Fun at the Downtown Library," CityBeat, 1 February 2017.
- Carol Pinchefsky, "Role-Playing Gamers Have More Empathy than Non-Gamers," Geek & Sundry, 13 January 2016.
- Charlie Brown, "The Truth About Mental Illness and D&D: How D&D Is Saving Me," Medium.com, 11 March 2016.
- Ben Riggs, "Science Suggests Geekiness Leads to Happiness," Geek & Sundry, 27 April 2016.
- Anissa Rivers, Ian Wickramasekera II, Ronald Pekala, and Jennifer Rivers, "Empathic Features and Absorption in Fantasy Role-Playing," American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 58 no. 3 (2015), doi: 10.1080/00029157.2015.1103696.
- Lusha Zhua, Kyle Mathewsonb, and Ming Hsu, "Dissociable Neural Representations of Reinforcement and Belief Prediction Errors Underlie Strategic Learning," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 109 no. 5 (2012): 1419–1424, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1116783109.
- Josh Kramer, "An Illustrated Guide to Why Grown-Ups Are Playing Dungeons & Dragons Again," Washington Post, 1 June 2016.
- What Is Empathy?, Greater Good: Science of a Meaningful Life, U.C. Berkeley, n.d.
- Changing Our Minds, Greater Good: Science of a Meaningful Life, U.C. Berkeley, n.d.
The graphic below is a portion of a 2016 Washington Post article, "An Illustrated Guide to Why Grown-Ups Are Playing Dungeons & Dragons Again."
(Click the graphic to view full-size image in a new window)
Photo used with permission from the artist, Josh Kramer. joshkramercomics.com.