By Matt Shoemaker
Two weeks ago a group of Temple students, faculty, and staff came together to explore a land poised to fall into the hands of a dark force. Those in attendance had to work together to advance their own agendas while attempting to save their shared kingdom. Or were they? Within this group lurked a handful of participants with less than honorable intentions. This was Temple’s first Megagame.
A Megagame is a play experience with a large number of players. The game we played on February 8, 2025 could support from 12 to 48 players, but games that can handle up to 200 or even 300 participants are not unheard of. These games are highly social experiences that combine elements from board games, role playing games, and social deduction games. Think Diplomacy with a healthy sprinkling of Dungeons & Dragons. The players are thrust into a potentially dire situation and tasked to solve it using diplomacy, resource management, strategic thinking, and occasionally a little deception.
Megagames and other games that share some similar characteristics, like Reacting to the Past, have potential as pedagogical and research tools. They allow the players to step into the shoes of people in difficult situations to try and better understand some of what they might have gone through to try and resolve the issue at hand. This can be beneficial to use alongside of more typical classroom learning, particularly if paired with primary sources, to give students and researchers different perspectives on the given scenario.
For this particular event, the Charles Library and Tyler’s General Activity Fund joined forces to bring Riley Nixon of Philadelphia Megagames in to run members of the Temple community through the game Touched by Darkness. In this game, an evil once thought defeated made a return to the land thanks to the failing of the beacons created to keep it out. The game was held to introduce Megagames to Temple and show how they could be used as a pedagogical or research tool, as well as train LCDSS staff in how to run their own Megagames in the future either on our own, or with faculty interested in holding one for their classes. Fun was also had, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of post-game survey respondents said they wanted Megagames to happen multiple times a semester.
If you are interested in learning more about Megagames, or want to explore using one in a class, for your research, or event designing one, please reach out to Matt Shoemaker in the LCDSS. You can also explore similar gameplay through Reacting to the Past, which you can explore in the library’s collection. We’ll likely hold another Megagame in the LCDSS for the community, probably in the fall of 2025, so if you are interested in participating please reach out to LCDSS staff and consider joining our campus wide Games Interest Group run by Matt Shoemaker and Renee Jackson of Tyler.