Gaming For Education
Gamification and Role Play
Successful gamers are able to decode the processes that govern their activities. Gaming is an act of reverse engineering, requiring the participant to intimately understand the systems of rules, representation, narrative, and technology in which they become embedded. Gamers continuously optimize their behaviors based on system feedback. - Amanda Philips
In its most simplified form, Gamification takes aspects of games and play, and applies them to educational practices. Gamification has been used in a multitude of fields including Literature, Language Acquisition, Maths, and Sciences in primary, secondary, post-secondary, and graduate education. While Role Play is not used in all Gamification, it is particularly useful in Literature and Narrative studies, allowing students to more fully embody the characters in the narrative worlds they are reading. Role Play also promotes class discussion by encouraging students to envision the narratives from multiple points of view, often dissimilar to their own.
Ungrading and Failing Safely
Additionally, Gamification and Role Play presents students with an opportunity to fail safely, as students can fail to complete their in-game mission, while still succeeding in playing the game to its narrative end. In this way, cheating, while still possible at certain junctures in the game, will only impact the game’s narrative, and not the student’s performance in the assignment. Which is to say, the only way to fail the assignment is to choose not to play the game. The outcomes of the characters the students are embodying are not direct representations of their understanding of the material. As such, these games are not meant to replace other forms of assessment and should accompany class discussion and/or other assignments to gauge student engagement and knowledge acquisition. For the games built specifically for this project, there are suggested assignments and questions for discussion available for download in the “Game Download Links” section.
Other Benefits of Role Play and Gamification
Inhabiting a character (a staple aspect of role-playing games) has clear parallels in English and History classes, but simulations have been used in a number of disciplines, and going digital allows the computer to handle the variables while students negotiate peace in the Middle East or defend against network security attacks. The secondary benefits of Role Play in the classroom are Socialization & Confidence. Because the students are inhabiting characters in a narrative world, the repercussions of failure are almost absent. Meaning, if their characters fail to complete their mission, the in-game narrative will either continue or allow them to start over and try again, making different choices or attempting different tactics. In removing the pressures of failure from the game, students are able to build confidence, safe in the knowledge that failure is not final. Subsequently, the games built for this project come in pairs, one to be played alone, as a way to construct a character, and the second to be played in small groups. “The structures of games both demand and reward teamwork and use systems of clearly-defined roles and objectives to create better outcomes than any individual could achieve.” (Salter – “Games in the Classroom - part 1”). Having to collaborate with other students in a game setting, absent the consequences of failure, invites students to examine their strengths and weaknesses as an individual and in a group setting. Specifically, the game designs for this project call for a group of characters with different strengths in order to successfully complete their in-game mission. This means the students need to communicate with each other to understand which player should be making which rolls of the dice. This need is communicated throughout the small group game, and students are reminded to discuss and agree on choices based on the strengths of their characters, before moving down one pathway or another. In these games, certain branches of the narrative are only open to characters with specific roles, while others ask the group as a whole to roll dice, with success or failure based upon the average of their rolls. These cooperative aspects of game play incite socialization through working together toward a common goal. Finally, as these games are narrative based, the students collaboratively author certain aspects of the in-game narrative, either through their own description or because of the choices they make together.
The Power of Inhabiting Characters
Lastly, inhabiting diverse characters taken from the pages of these novels allows a more fully realized version of Rudine Sims Bishop’s “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” The experience of playing as characters in the narrative worlds the students are reading about creates a deeper understanding of different points of view, belief structures, and backgrounds. While Orwell’s 1984 is the first novel being Kitbashed, the method for Gamifying other narratives opens a world of possibilities for promoting empathy and understanding. It is my hope that, in Kitbashing novels with diverse characters and worlds, students will gain a deep understanding of cultures, locales, religions, and life-roles vastly different to their own, promoting a future of inclusion and respect.
*For full video source list, please see the "Works Cited" section of this site.
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- Kitbashing The Classroom 2.0 Matthew Aaron Hernandez