Gaming and the liberal arts

The site reflected my commitment to designing the class assignments around collaborative mission-based tasks that would increase in difficulty level each week and reward multiple paths of completion. Each week I tried to think beyond discussion topics and create playful mechanics–the real challenge of harnessing gameplay, which no site can provide on its own–and some weeks it was hard to escape giving assignments that would never feel playful.

many of the students appreciated the greater sense of collaboration

Ian Bogost escalated his anti-gamification campaign with a Gamasutra article that explicitly mentioned how the rhetoric of gamification is drawing attention from educators to a trend that threatens “to replace real incentives with fictional ones,” among many other sins. The piece even inspired Darius Kazemi to build a Chrome extension that replaces “gamification” with “exploitationware.”

Instead of always teaching students how to succeed—as is the norm in higher education—it might also be useful to teach them about failure. Understanding failure (that is, why actors fail to reach common objectives in inter-group settings) gives students deeper insight into how to resolve global problems, and the conditions under which success can be achieved. This enhances student awareness of complexity in world affairs, including the nature of inter-group relations. Simulations are a good way to teach students about the possibility of failure, and how to learn from it, because they allow students to go through the learning process on their own. In this article I discuss how a simulation I ran on Middle Eastern politics can be used as an example of how to instruct students about failure as much as about success.

At times, Mr. Loughner seemed to be reaching out to fellow gamers for help and advice, albeit in a disturbing way. Sometimes they offered it, such as giving him pointers about job hunting. At other times, his postings seemed so outrageous that the gamers mocked or ignored him. The online postings, written using pseudonyms, were shared with the Journal by a person who had access to them. Two fellow gamers who participated in the online forums say the author was the accused gunman, and some of the postings discuss incidents from Mr. Loughner's life that others have corroborated.