Q: How Can We Use Games & Simulations to Teach Students?

My experience teaching High School Graphic Design & Game Design classes

Project Overview

After working for 5 years as an Animator, Graphic Designer, and Web Designer I began teaching creative career classes at my old high school. I read sixteen books on how to be a great teacher and tried all of the popular cutting edge pedagogies trending at the time. I was looking for the best ways to cultivate creativity and empower students to change their world. Ultimately this investigation led to the use of games and political science simulations to let students roleplay as world leaders.

Inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and John Hunter’s World Peace Game, my high school design students and I set out to reverse engineer these world peace political science simulations and build ALLIANCE The Ultimate World Leader Political Science Megagame.

Research

John Hunter had a Ted Talk, a documentary, and wrote a book about his game, but never released an actual guide book or set of rules on how to play his game. Buckminster Fuller’s world game, according to his address to Congress, relied on real world data fed by computers. We needed actual game mechanisms, structured turns, and odds-based rule sets to adjudicate consequences in order to make a playable prototype. So we began playing economic board games to learn their rule sets and see if there were mechanisms and turn-based rituals we could adopt.

Board Games & Tabletop RPG

We looked at the rule sets of Monopoly, Risk, Settlers of Catan, Archipelago, as well as numerous other designer board games. We also looked at a range of Tabletop RPG game systems which allowed players to contribute with much more open creative storytelling.

Megagames

The biggest breakthrough was when we discovered political science megagames. These emerged in Europe where they had a long tradition of war gaming. Megagames are political science simulations that allow anywhere from twelve to one hundred participants to role-play as world leaders over the course of several hours. The most prolific megagame designer had a rule set available for download which allowed us to run our first simulation event. It was like Model U.N. but with less formality and science fiction thrown in.

First game test - Successes & Failures

We played the European megagame called, “Watch the Skies,” modifying only the schedule. We played it over the course of multiple class periods instead of as one long six-hour event. We recorded photos and videos and posted the turn of events to a popular Megagame Facebook group to engage with the community. We found that our high school students were far more willing to go to full scale war and even nuclear war than was typical of middle-aged European wargamers. There was also concern that students weren’t giving the morality of their decisions and speeches the full weight they deserved.

Designing Our Own Game

Q: By Designing Our Own Megagame, What Features Would Allow for Maximum Playfulness and Moral Seriousness Uniquely Suited for High School Students?

The European megagames had very loose rulesets that relied more heavily on the expertise and roleplaying of its players. High school students have far less experience with role-playing games, less expertise about institutions, less consideration for the emergent consequences of moral dilemmas, and less knowledge of history. With this in mind we decided to make the core of the game rely on trade mechanics similar to Settlers of Catan. By introducing five different in-game currencies and requiring rigid capital costs for arms development we would create interdependence between the different nation-teams. Each team had a surplus in one currency and a deficiency in another so nation-teams would have to negotiate and collaborate in order to acquire the capability to go to war. This is why we named our game, “ALLIANCE.”

To create tension in the game we also created simple straight forward opposing agendas for each nation-team. Each nation-team was named with a simple pseudonym that referenced their nation’s role in the game, giving them an ideal to aspire to. Russia was known as “Strong Nation,” and America as, “Rich Nation,” and each was given three objectives, one of which being the simple goal of using the game’s mechanisms to live up to their reputation. Strong Nation was explicitly told to invade at least one nation, and Rich Nation was told to finish the game with the most capital.

The mechanics facilitated the role-play. A huge war room map that took up two lunch tables had a simplified hexagonal map of the world on which any nation like Strong Nation could move military markers to the border of any nation it threatened to invade. Then players from those teams would inevitably negotiate, trade national assets as represented by five different colored poker chips, and form alliances to appease their invaders or convince Strong Nation to fulfill their objective against a different team. Rich Nation wanted to both police the world and help solve problems, but without bankrupting their surplus of green poker chips.

Rapid Prototyping

Due to the large number of cards and the need to produce a new version after every playtest I developed a workflow that combines spreadsheets, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe InDesign.

Production Work Flow

Spreadsheet
First we manage the card decks and edit their mechanics on Google Sheets. From there we export .csv files for each sheet which can be pulled into Adobe InDesign.
Adobe Photoshop
As a professional Graphic Designer I took great joy in producing detailed graphics for each iteration. We produced templates for each deck and designed iconography which could be used as a visual language as a shorthand for the mechanics.
Adobe InDesign
InDesign has a great feature called Data Merge which allows you to pull the different images & icons created in Photoshop based on the data in the .csv files exported from the spreadsheet pages.

Testing the Game

We ran in-class games at first, iterating the game between sessions, then combined two classes to test the game with twice as many students. We improved the rules, introduced surprising event twists, allowed the adjudication team to make up rules on the fly and then made those rules part of future games, and created player aids to help participants learn the rules more quickly. Eventually we even held a Saturday event game in which we invited the entire high school student population. We hired a videographer and were able to edit, review, and exhibit how the event unfolded.
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Later I was invited to host the game at several universities in Asia among English-as-second-language players. Versions of the game have been translated into Chinese and Korean. This wide variety of use-cases provided many opportunities to improve the game over the years.

Testing the Market

Before becoming an educator I worked professionally as an animator, illustrator, web designer, and graphic designer at various studios. So our game had substantially higher production value than all of the megagames on the market which featured only home-grown graphics. Our photos and videos also showed that the game was well tested among young players and female players, both of which were typically under-represented in the wargaming community. Fellow educators interested in game-based learning asked if they could run the game as well. So I published the game along with instructions on how to host megagame events on my blog www.BestClassEver.org.

Adoption of Lean Startup and Agile Process Methodologies

I began incorporating David Kelly and IDEO's version of Design Thinking from my very first year teaching high school classes. In more recent years I began implementing the methodologies from the popular book, the Lean Startup, and the Agile production process. This helped us to think more like entrepreneurs and prioritize effective tasks. The students like it because it gives them insight into how the creative entrepreneurs of the tech industry approach problem solving. I like it because it offloads the responsibility of staying on task onto capable student leaders and frees me to focus on the vision instead of day to day micro management.

Designing and testing megagame mechanics takes a lot of time, and simultaneously preparing a large event put huge additional timeline pressures on our team. Production methodologies and finding which work to prioritize became critical to creating a successful experience for the attendees.

Emphasis on Validation through Kanban Boards

I love reading. According to goodreads.com I read on average two non-fiction books and one fiction book a week. Through my research and experimentation with productivity frameworks including Lean Startup, OKRs (Objective Key Results), and Agile, I currently have a workflow that uses customized kanban boards through notion.so. Kanban boards allow me to track the progress of multiple teams, tasks, and experiments. It also allows me to validate learning. None of my creative side projects, including ALLIANCE, have ever earned enough revenue to pay back the creative, time, and financial costs I invested. But by taking on these projects I have learned so much! So I don't judge the value of these projects in terms of profit, but in terms of learning. And learning comes from feedback. So to put an emphasis on validation and feedback, we add a validation category to our Kanban boards to make learning and feedback a priority when deciding what tasks we will take on. As soon as enough experiments fill up our validation category, we stop taking on new tasks and prioritize the collection of feedback on completed experiments.

SEO & Google Ads

I also rebuilt the website www.BestClassEver.org changing it from the Wix platform to hosting a Wordpress site on my own server to improve the SEO and test some Google ads. I also produced a weekly educational podcast for a year as well to bring value to the website. Unfortunately the project has yet to find product-to-market-fit.

Accessibility

While the game looks fun and effective for teaching leadership, hosting megagames can be very intimidating for educators due to the following factors.

Steep Learning Curve
The Facilitator needs to learn all of the rules and systems, and then teach them to the referee team. All perhaps without ever having played a megagame!
Requires Too Much Commitment
Even if the Facilitator knows the rules, they still have to organize a large event as well as host the game.
Critical Mass - To have an event you need at least twelve to twenty participants.
Large Printing Costs - The Facilitator needs to print a large amount of components or purchase them through a board game print-on-demand service.
Too Niche
People don't know what a megagame is so you have to educate your audience as you market to them.

The game was successfully hosted by other educators without my presence in the midwest, Canada, Singapore, and Malaysia, but printing so many components, learning so many rules, and the number of volunteers required to host an event were all impediments to achieving the scale required to make the venture profitable or even accessible. This led to questions we are still exploring like
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Q: What licensing or business model would be appropriate for a megagame?
Q: Could such an experience be adapted to teleconferencing?
Q: Could we create smaller versions of the game that can be game tested by as few as four players to scaffold the experience for users new to megagaming?

These are the leading questions that the megagame community continues to investigate and I am proud to be a member contributing my own solutions to this ongoing experiment. But this last question concerning accessibility led me to pivot away from megagames and into creating smaller game prototypes.

Pivot to Small Game Prototypes

To address these issues we created two small scale versions of ALLIANCE, a tabletop board game edition of ALLIANCE with a loose open ruleset, as well as a card game edition of ALLIANCE with a rigid ruleset, both designed for 4-5 players. This way anyone who wants to host a large game and educators who wants to design their own games can build experience and confidence by running our smaller games first.

Loose Vs Tight Systems

Political science simulations, megagames, and tabletop games all fall somewhere on the spectrum between two Extremes. So we decided to create two prototypes to represent the two extremes and compare the experiences.

Tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons fall into the loose or open extreme. They maximize creative freedom by reducing mechanical rigidity, but the tradeoff is that it places a creative burden on the facilitator, known as the Game Master, as they must prepare scenarios to challenge the players, and it also relies heavily on the ability of the players to act out their imagined roles. To simulate this we created a tabletop edition of ALLIANCE, similar to Matrix political science simulations used by National Security Colleges, which is very open, loose, and modular.

On the other extreme you have games with rigid rule sets. These games give you very limited play options which makes it easier for players to make choices. If designed well the mechanics can facilitate very deep understanding of emergent systems which are hard to convey through lecture or storytelling. Board games and card games typically fall into this extreme which also reliably produce similar results among various groups allowing for perfect alignment with specific teaching objectives. For this reason we also created ALLIANCE Trade Wars, a deck-building card game to teach the complications of dealing with global climate change.

Testing with Englsh-as-Second-Language Learners

Some innovative Korean educational associates of mine helped to design and translate the materials into a prototype uniquely designed for high school classrooms in South Korea.

Covid: Pivot to Virtual Game Testing

We also began holding virtual game tests every Friday night over the internet through an app called Tabletop Simulator. People are avoiding large gatherings at the moment, so the pivot away from megagames made even more sense at this time. Smaller games that can be hosted over the internet work well with TableTop Simulator and teleconferencing apps like Discord allow for remote megagames. I am not currently experimenting with this but the megagame community is. We have yet to determine whether the excitement of megagames will be able to sustain both the layer of logistical costs added by hosting remote online events and the loss of big room event energy.

ALLIANCE Trade Wars (3-5 player with deckbuilding mechanics).

ALLIANCE Tabletop edition (3-12 players with open collaborative storytelling mechanics).