Games Without Frontiers

"Just one game," they said, and started to play – that was yesterday.  –  Chinese proverb

In my everyday life, I'm a gamer.  To a lot of people, especially the younger folks, a "game" means a video game, or maybe a Facebook game, and a "gamer" is someone who plays a lot of video games.  There's been a fair amount of research on video games and their use in education, and at some point I'm sure I'll be talking about using video games, but that's not what this is about.

For me, being a gamer is also about other types of gaming: card games, board games, and role-playing games (RPG).  Everyone is familiar on some level with board games and card games, if only the more popular board games like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Life, or the standard 52-card deck of playing cards.  "Role-playing games" may seem confusing until I mention arguably the most famous of them: Dungeons and Dragons.  Which is good, though it can present some challenges in the overcoming of stereotypes.

We almost never sell our souls to Satan these days.

That games can be used in an educational manner is nothing particularly new.  Monopoly, for example, got its start as "The Landlord's Game", and was meant to show players the dangers in the tenant/landlord dynamic.  The rise of the "Euro game" has opened up the possibilities even further. 

"Settlers of Catan", a popular Euro game

The Euro game, as opposed to the more traditionally American "thematic games", tends to be more abstract, requiring a fair amount of strategy and critical thinking in order to be successful.  Luck (in the form of dice rolling or card selection) is still present, but tends to be minimized.  Katrin Becker, in discussing the way video games balance luck and user interaction, says "One of the key aspects of successful games is how well they balance between randomness and predictability – a game that is too predictable quickly becomes boring, yet one that is too unpredictable appears random, and players do not feel in control." (p.3)  By focusing on player strategies, Euro games tend to be pretty good at striking that balance.

Brenda Brathwaite is primarily a video game programmer.  She's worked on the seminal RPG video game Wizardry 8, and currently works on reclaiming Facebook games from the horrors of farming and clicking-as-gameplay.  In 2008, however, she decided to delve into the world of physical board games as a way of abstractly explaining and engaging with emotionally heavy historical concepts.  In her Ted talk in 2011, Brathwaite describes using game play as a way of explaining the Middle Passage slave trade route to her daughter, then 7 years old.  The daughter describes what she had learned, then asks "Can I play a game?"

And so I happened to have all of these little pieces. I'm a game designer, so I have this stuff sitting around my house. So I said, "Yeah, you can play a game," and I give her a bunch of these, and I tell her to paint them in different families. ... So then I grab a bunch of them and I put them on a boat. ... And so the basic gist of it is, I grabbed a bunch of families, and she's like, "Mommy, but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things." And she says, "They want to go." And I said, "Honey, no they don't want to go. This is the Middle Passage. Nobody wants to go on the Middle Passage." So she gave me a look that only a daughter of a game designer would give a mother, and as we're going across the ocean, following these rules, she realizes that she's rolling pretty high, and she says to me, "We're not going to make it." And she realizes, you know, we don't have enough food, and so she asks what to do, and I say, "Well, we can either" -- Remember, she's seven -- "We can either put some people in the water or we can hope that they don't get sick and we make it to the other side." And she -- just the look on her face came over and she said -- now mind you this is after a month of -- this is Black History Month, right? After a month she says to me, "Did this really happen?" And I said, "Yes." And so she said, "So, if I came out of the woods" — this is her brother and sister — "If I came out of the woods, Avalon and Donovan might be gone." "Yes." "But I'd get to see them in America." "No." "But what if I saw them? You know, couldn't we stay together?" "No." "So Daddy could be gone." "Yes." And she was fascinated by this, and she started to cry, and I started to cry, and her father started to cry, and now we're all crying. He didn't expect to come home from work to the Middle Passage, but there it goes.

Gaming, any kind of gaming, is about connections.  You're not actually killing orcs or fighting a fire, one assumes, but if you can't IMAGINE that you are, then the game fails.  (Assuming you're playing a game that involves killing orcs or fighting fires, of course.)  You're not really building a farm, being a pirate, or making your enemies sleep with the fishes.  Games allow you to simulate situations that you will never find yourself acting out in life, and can allow you to make connections to difficult concepts in a safe environment. What impressed me most about Brathwaite's game concept, apart from just being envious that she was able to come up with it on the fly, is that she didn't have to didactically spell out anything.  She allowed the game conceit, and her daughter's decisions, lead her daughter to an understanding of the larger context at work.

Another game she designed, mentioned briefly in her Ted talk, is called Train.  This isn't a commercial game, nor could it ever be.  The eponymous trains are meant to be loaded with people, and the destination of those people, well, I think you can see how that game ends.  Blogger Tracy Wilson had an opportunity to play Train, and as the players realized early on that they were loading trains in Nazi Germany, she empathized with these virtual victims to the point where she attempted to derail another player's train, and refused to move her own out of the station.

I should stress here that this is one of those areas where parents may have more ability to explore than teachers.  Most games have a social component to them, but they are generally designed for 2-6 players.  Many of them, due to the somewhat complex concepts which they're simulating, can take more time to play than is possible in a single class period.  Some of them can wrap up in less than an hour, it's true, but there are games that require several hours to play to completion, and that only goes up the more players there are.  I think this is one of the ways in which Brathwaite's game is particularly ingenious, in that her daughter didn't have to play it to completion to understand the concepts that were being played out.  Other more traditionally-designed games can not only teach concepts, but also teamwork.  A game like Pandemic, for instance, introduces cooperative play as a prerequisite for success.  The players are fighting disease outbreaks, and each player has a particular role to play.  If they don't work together, they can't succeed.  And either everybody wins, or nobody wins. 

I'm trying very hard not to turn this into a "cool games Brian likes" post.  Part of what makes a good game is in details that are very difficult to explain in a blog post.  A game like Settlers of Catan isn't fun because collecting resources and building settlements is inherently exciting.   It's the strategy and interaction with the other players, the mechanics of the game, which fuel the "action" of the game.  But the thematic elements provide an emotional hook that, when it works, can provide the teachable moments.  The interaction between players, and between the players and the game, allows the exchange of information and skills that they can then take out of the game and into the real world.  As Brathwaite says, "We change as people through games, because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so."