AI assistant takes the note-taking out of therapeutic role-playing games
Researchers at the SDU Metaverse Lab and SDU’s Department of Psychology have built AURA, a prototype that listens to tabletop role-playing sessions and writes the summaries. This lets therapists and carers focus on the players rather than on taking notes.
Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are being used more and more as a group intervention for neurodivergent children and young people. Players take on characters and build a story together. That gives them a safe, playful setting to practise social skills, emotional regulation and problem-solving. Case studies report better engagement, social connection and self-efficacy. However, there are far too few trained therapists to meet the need.
One practical obstacle is documentation. The game master, whether a therapist, teacher, social worker or parent, has to run a complex, multi-player story and keep track of what each participant does. Taking notes during play is hard and interrupts the session, and doing it well takes training.
A new paper presented at the Foundations of Digital Games conference (FDG 2026) in Copenhagen introduces AURA (AI-Assisted Understanding of Role-play). AURA takes a recording of a session and transcribes it. It then filters out chatter that isn’t part of the game and uses a language model to produce a structured report: a timeline of key events, each with a short summary and the character “in the spotlight” at that moment. The summariser is deliberately small, at 3 billion parameters, so it can eventually run on a phone or tablet. Sensitive recordings would then never need to leave the room.
The team tested the system on 22 episodes of the popular web series Critical Role. They checked AURA’s summaries against episode recaps written by fans. Of the statements that could be checked, almost 88% were confirmed, and fewer than 1% of event titles were contradicted. The researchers stress that this is a first step. Many details could not be verified against the fan recaps, and the system has not yet been tested in real therapeutic sessions, but AURA represents a significant first step towards solving an acute societal need: “Carers greatly outnumber specialised therapists,” says Professor Anders Drachen. “If we can lower the barrier to running these games well, we can help extend this kind of support to many more neurodivergent children.”
The paper is by David Melhart, Alexander Dockhorn and Anders Drachen (SDU Metaverse Lab) and Mette Elmose Andersen (Department of Psychology, SDU). It is open access.
Read the paper: Melhart, D., Dockhorn, A., Drachen, A., & Andersen, M. E. (2026). AURA: Automated Analysis and Reporting of Therapeutically Applied Table-top Role-Playing Games. FDG ‘26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3815598.3815645s
Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are being used more and more as a group intervention for neurodivergent children and young people. Players take on characters and build a story together. That gives them a safe, playful setting to practise social skills, emotional regulation and problem-solving. Case studies report better engagement, social connection and self-efficacy. However, there are far too few trained therapists to meet the need.
One practical obstacle is documentation. The game master, whether a therapist, teacher, social worker or parent, has to run a complex, multi-player story and keep track of what each participant does. Taking notes during play is hard and interrupts the session, and doing it well takes training.
A new paper presented at the Foundations of Digital Games conference (FDG 2026) in Copenhagen introduces AURA (AI-Assisted Understanding of Role-play). AURA takes a recording of a session and transcribes it. It then filters out chatter that isn’t part of the game and uses a language model to produce a structured report: a timeline of key events, each with a short summary and the character “in the spotlight” at that moment. The summariser is deliberately small, at 3 billion parameters, so it can eventually run on a phone or tablet. Sensitive recordings would then never need to leave the room.
The team tested the system on 22 episodes of the popular web series Critical Role. They checked AURA’s summaries against episode recaps written by fans. Of the statements that could be checked, almost 88% were confirmed, and fewer than 1% of event titles were contradicted. The researchers stress that this is a first step. Many details could not be verified against the fan recaps, and the system has not yet been tested in real therapeutic sessions, but AURA represents a significant first step towards solving an acute societal need: “Carers greatly outnumber specialised therapists,” says Professor Anders Drachen. “If we can lower the barrier to running these games well, we can help extend this kind of support to many more neurodivergent children.”
The paper is by David Melhart, Alexander Dockhorn and Anders Drachen (SDU Metaverse Lab) and Mette Elmose Andersen (Department of Psychology, SDU). It is open access.
Read the paper: Melhart, D., Dockhorn, A., Drachen, A., & Andersen, M. E. (2026). AURA: Automated Analysis and Reporting of Therapeutically Applied Table-top Role-Playing Games. FDG ‘26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3815598.3815645s