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Social interactions are a key objective in cultural experience design and museum games are often aimed to foster conversations between visitors. However, the participation of cultural creators is hardly explored. In this paper we examine how the artists may participate in storytelling games played over their artworks. We present a field study at a museum exhibition, where the artist joined a group of visitors crafting and sharing stories over his paintings. We investigate how the artist's participation affected the group experience, considering the visitors' perspective along with the artist's. Both sides reported positive outcomes, indicating an engaging social cultural experience. Furthermore, we discuss the effects of bystanders in traditional as opposed to game-event settings. Building upon the later, we pinpoint limitations and challenges over the artist's participation, and explore varying levels of engagement, sketching good practices and new directions.

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Violence-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the context of war and terrorism has become an increasingly pressing public health issue relevant to refugee children and families. PTSD and related psychopathology in children can adversely affect all domains of development and, in particular, interfere with learning and socialization. When the experience of violent trauma and related loss is shared with the entire family, resulting impairment and distress may prevent caregivers from being psychologically available to process their traumatized children’s emotional communication and otherwise meet their children’s developmental needs. When children suffer from PTSD, it may be impossible to put their experience and related thoughts and feelings into words, let alone a coherent narrative. The latter difficulty can be even more pronounced when the child displays dissociative symptoms, possibly signaling a dissociative subtype of PTSD. Thus, the narrative within the child’s play during psychotherapy becomes all the more important as an indicator of the child’s internal world. This case report is an example both of evaluation and of psychotherapy that is both psychodynamic and trauma-informed with a 10-year-old Afghani boy who suffered the violent loss of his father at age of 3 years, leading to his immigration to Switzerland. This paper addresses the question of how the psychotherapist can accompany the child through the elaboration of his trauma and how the therapist can contribute to the co-construction of a coherent narrative of the child’s experience and to the restoration of an intersubjective connection between the traumatized child and caregiver.