Part 5 -- How, Specifically, Were Games Used In Class? (Teaching Strategic Intel Through Games)

Part 1 -- Introduction

Part 2 -- What Is Strategy And What Are Strategic Decisions?

Part 3 -- What Is Intelligence And What Is The Role Of Intelligence In The Formulation Of Strategy? 

Part 4 -- Why Games?

“Indeed, experiments have shown that the more mental work readers have to do to infer a cause from a set of facts, the more memorable the causal inference will be.” – The Trouble With Intuition, Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris

While I wanted games to be a central tool within the context of the class, I established some fairly rigorous pre-conditions for myself before deciding which games and how exactly they would be used in class.

First, I did not want the games to detract from the project.  The experience gained from working on a real world project for a real world decisionmaker trumped, in my mind, any value games might bring to learning the essential lessons of strategic intelligence.  In addition, these projects have significant tangible value to the students beyond the knowledge they gain from them.  In many cases over the years, these projects have led to jobs (or at least job offers) either directly or indirectly.

I was worried that the games might detract in two specific ways.  First, the games were to add value, if at all, to only that 20% of the class that was indirectly involved with the project.  I did not want to create an environment where a student felt they had to choose between playing a game and getting work done on the project.

Second, I did not want the course to become about the game or games.  I know from experience that games can be genuinely compelling.  There are many good strategic simulations (Diplomacy, The Total War series) around which a strategic course could easily be built.  In these cases, I saw the games not just competing for time with the project but actually overwhelming the project completely.

Beyond the potential for distraction from the project, the games I did select needed to resonate in a meaningful way with the core concepts of the course.  I either needed a single game through which I could articulate all of the core concepts of the course more or less in the order they needed to be presented (which proved impossible to find) or find a number of different games which could help me accomplish the same goals.  Of course, if I were to use a number of games, the time to learn the new rules of each game would become a factor as well.

If I were to use a number of games, then I also believed I needed to include a variety of game types and genres.  I know from experience that not all game types appeal to all game players.  In fact, I believe that one of the major hurdles to overcome with regard to game-based learning will be the re-packaging of core concepts in any given subject into a variety of game genres such that at least one approach will work for every student. 

Finally, I was very conscious of the cost.  Textbooks are expensive and I believe that, in many cases, they are unreasonably so.  I could not see adding to that burden.

In the end, I settled on using casual online or downloadable games or games, such as World Of Warcraft, that came with free trials (for a complete list of the games and the core concepts, I will include the syllabus to the course in the last post in this series).  The exception to this general rule was the addition of one "old-school", paper-pencil wargame, Defiant Russia (pictured above).   

Students were required to play the game before each class.  In addition, students were required to come to some defensible conclusion about how the game related to the topic of that particular class and to be prepared to discuss it when they came to class. I indicated to the students that the relationships between the games and the topics were rarely obvious and that in some cases there were many possible defensible conclusions.  In many cases, I informed them, there might appear, on the surface, to be no real connection between the game and the topic.  I wanted them to have to think hard about the possible connections, to evaluate them and to come to a conclusion that they were prepared to defend.

Classroom time was devoted in part to examining what the students saw compared with what I saw as the essential connections.  A careful matching of games and topics yielded a fairly high overlap between what the students saw and what I hoped they would see.  In addition, I had the genuine pleasure of having students come up with unique and deep interpretations far beyond my expectations (I will discuss this in greater detail in the subsequent posts).

To give a sense of how this worked in practice, in the class where we discussed strategic intelligence requirements (i.e. the questions that intelligence professionals are asked at the strategic level), students had to play World of Warcraft (WOW) or some other quest-based game.  While there are many defensible answers to the question regarding the connection between WOW and intelligence requirements, I was able to leverage the student's experience with a well-formed "quest"(typical of the high-end MMORPGs) and contrast it with the consequences of poorly formed intelligence requirements.  This, in turn, gave the students a unique perspective on their upcoming meeting with their decisionmaker where they would be receiving the intelligence requirement relevant to their particular project. 

As a result of my experience with the first two classes, I required the third class in which I used this approach to write down their conclusions and post them to a discussion board on Mercyhurst’s Blackboard course management software prior to class.  This writing assignment was modest (100-150 words) but it allowed me to better prepare for the class itself.

While students were required to play the game and to come to a conclusion, I also made a wide variety of supplemental readings available.  These provided "hints' to the connections between the game and the topic that I saw.  I believed that, in some cases (particularly where the material was more in the way of a review), students would be able to come to reasonable conclusions without any additional reading.  I also believed that students that were not overly familiar with the topic under consideration would be more engaged in the reading if they were working to answer a question, even one as difficult as the one I posed.

Next:
So, how did it all work out?

Additional Readings:
School Uses Video Games To Teach Thinking Skills

Brenda Brathwaite Is Amazing (Game Education Summit -- Part 4)

Everyone has played a game that was enormously engrossing; that became the focus of their lives for at least a short period.

Everyone has had at least one great class in their lives, where, at the end, they "got it"; where they learned the lesson deeply on both an intellectual and emotional level.

Everyone, finally, has seen a work of art that communicated, through its attention to detail, a broad, deep message.

Brenda Brathwaite, a professor of game design at the Savannah College of Art and Design has accomplished all three of these goals in a single "installation" -- and she has done it not once, but twice.

I used the word installation above because I cannot think of a better term for what Brathwaite has done. It is not a good word because it conveys no sense of the dynamic quality inherent in her work. Artists would call it art and educators would no doubt see it as an incredibly effective way to teach a lesson.

Brathwaite is a professional game designer, however, with scads of popular video games to her credit and she proudly refers to these as games. I say "proudly" because one of her explicit goals was to show that games could educate, be seen as art and still be good games. She seemed to me to want to push her understanding of the limits of her discipline in ways that few within the discipline would recognize.

The first game is called Ni ceart go cur le cheile (Where my people come from in Gaelic) though it is invariably referred to as "The Irish Game". It is a game that explores the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the 1600's. In it, the players participate as Irish factions trying to manage the displacement of their people in the face of a relentless British invasion. Failure to find room in a country that is rapidly running out of space results in some of the Irish inevitably getting sent to Barbados as slaves -- a fate that befell many at this time. The faction that loses the least wins.

At some trivial level, this game is like lifeboat (you get thrown off the boat; you get thrown off the island) or, as I clumsily suggested, the zombie level in Call of Duty 5 (relentless assault where you cannot win, only lose the the least).

A single second imagining the playing pieces as members of a family displaced, dispersed or abandoned to the fate of slaves brings a different lesson crashing home. People -- it becomes hard to think of them as game pieces -- had to decide where to go, had to uproot their lives, abandon their property, increasingly move to areas where there were more and more people and fewer and fewer resources.

The game design doesn't allow for momentary pangs of discomfort, however. Each turn, the toll increases; each turn the lesson becomes less of a historical artifact and more real for the student.

The game board (the photo at the right does not do it justice) and associated pieces are filled with the kind of detail that it is hard not to appreciate. The Irish pieces are the "right" color of green, the British pieces the right color of orange. The smooth, sleek beveled glass separating the playing pieces from the ground below is a stark contrast to the burlap "board" that drives much of the game play.

Brathwaite's ability to explore historic and tragic events through the medium of the game is not limited to her own Irish heritage. Her other game/installation on display here at the Game Education Summit is, if anything, more powerfully rendered.

In this game, called Train (see the photo to the right), Brathwaite asks the players to move 60 yellow playing pieces -- "people" -- down one of three tracks to their destination as quickly as possible. Along the way, the players draw cards that result in delays or events which accelerate the trains. To overcome these obstacles, players are encouraged to exhibit an almost ruthless efficiency, to carefully balance the risks and rewards of various strategies to accomplish the goal in the most rapid way possible.

There is a strong physical component to the play as well. The playing pieces do not fit nicely into the toy trains so filling the train cars to the maximum capacity requires players to jam the pieces in. The payoff is obvious. The more pieces jammed into the cars the fewer trips the cars will have to make.

Each time a car arrives at the end of the line, the player draws a card that tells them where the train ended up. In stark black and white the game reveals itself on each card turned over -- Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz...

Then back to the beginning to fill another car.

Again, the attention to detail in the game itself puts the game in the realm of art as well. The three pages of rules were typed on an old SS typewriter purchased specifically for the purpose. The rules themselves help reveal the story (players are required to take a hammer and break a piece of glass before each game). There are few other games that I can think of (Hush is one) that can begin to generate this type of emotion.

Finally, what makes Brathwaite truly amazing is her ability to explain what it is she has done. She is clearly able to communicate to artists on the level of art, gamers on the level of the game and educators on the hidden power of her medium to teach at depth few other techniques can match.

What's In A Name? (Game Education Summit -- Part 2)

Don Marinelli kicked off the Game Education Summit with a rousing "hoo-ah" speech for the academics and game design professionals in the room. He wasn't entirely preaching to the choir but it certainly seemed he knew his audience.

Beyond the high rhetoric (such as video games are the "Lucifer of Liesure" to naysayers and luddites...) there were a number of interesting points he brought up. Rather than focus on the entire speech (which, as I mentioned, was designed as much to inspire as to inform), I intend to simply hit the high points from my perspective:

The intersection between games and education. Marinelli was primarily talking about teaching game design at the University level but he spent a good bit of the speech highlighting the more general importance of games in education. He was quite passionate about it and I think generally correct. Games excel at implicit learning -- learning without knowing that you are learning. Taking advantage of that makes sense.

The inevitability of game-based learning. The shift to game based learning in Marinelli's view is largely generational. As the currnet generation (comfortable with chalkboards, lectures and linearity in general) gives away to the next (comfortable with GPS, SMS and high speed internet) there will inevitably be a shift in the way we educate people. Students want to know that they invested their youth wisely. I couldn't help but think at this point of various theories about why animals play. At least one of the theories is that they play to learn.

Intelligence studies and game design share a similar problem -- perception. Marinelli seemed to be saying that games are considered "fun" and game deigners too often feel like they have to apologize for their profession. Likewise, it occurred to me that intelligence is all too often considered "bad" and intelligence professionals similarly feel a need to apologize for their profession (It actually happened to me here. I asked a question and the presenter asked back, "What is it you teach?" My answer: "You don't want to know." And the cock crowed the first time...).