Social Skills Checklist

This article covers the Game-To-Grow Social Skills Checklist. This is a simple but useful model for social learning. Recognizing opportunities for your players to practice these 5 Core Capacities will help them to grow as individuals.

Game-To-Grow Core Capacities: Regulation, Collaboration, Planning, Perspective, Pretend Play.

• Regulation: The ability to be calm and regulated is easily the most important capacity. Without it, individuals may struggle to develop higher levels of thinking, executive function and a strong sense of self and community responsibility

• Collaboration: Collaborative storytelling is at the heart of all role-playing games. Creating opportunities to practice and enjoy collaboration will inspire players to not only see other people as a resource for assistance in solving problems, but to seek them out as a source of joy and meaningful connection.

• Planning: Players are most successful when operating somewhere between impulsive action and unnecessary overthinking. Storytellers should strike a balance between the two, rewarding decisive action based on critical thinking as players are encouraged to blend in-the moment spontaneity with logical reasoning.

• Perspective: Because building the capacity to see the world through other’s eyes is an essential component to developing empathy with others, it is important to reinforce the Perspective capacity whenever possible

• Pretend Play: Any experienced Storyteller knows the value of imaginative play, so I wanted to highlight something in particular. You are encouraged to modify the rules of the game as you see fit to support player enthusiasm and engagement. When players are truly playing, they will care less about the specific rules and more about the meaningful interactions they are having.