Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Pedagogy Games!

I recently started teaching my first college composition course. I’ve been building towards it for a while, prepping for nearly a year now in small ways, but I’m still overwhelmed by the endeavor. Mostly because of the freedom being given to me, an almost overwhelming amount of leeway with how I develop my course syllabus and actually conduct and assess my class. This is my first time attempting this complicated job, and I’ve had to suss out potential problems as I develop and implement my own framework for teaching.

While I was building up my teaching philosophy, I was even more unbound, but I spent a great deal of my time beforehand thinking about the way that the subject actually influences (and correlates) to bigger, seemingly unrelated aspects of life (overall GPA, income, problem solving) and how it can be taught in a way that makes students feel empowered as they acquire skills, rather than frustrated as they attempt to enter into a discourse which can seem geared towards excluding them. I also thought, because I do this every time I think about anything that involves scaffolding, about how game theory can help influence learning patterns.

Some definitions. When I talk about “video games” I’m discussing a narrative form, literary in nature, which uses feedback systems conventionally associated with “play” in order to convey a story. You’re asked to occupy a space in a narrative, taking up some sort of role, and in so doing you are capable of experiencing said narrative. When I discuss “game theory” I’m talking about the framework of how those tiny interactions work: how do players interact with their environment and know that they’re winning (iteratively moving towards the completion of a rewarding task) or losing (failing at said task). The latter is oft ignored by elder scholars of pedagogy who perceive games as a maturing or alien medium: they see the technological elements as more important than the psychological elements. These are usually (but not always) people who are unfamiliar with some of the most interesting and informative structures forming the basis for games to influence behavior outside of their frameworks: the alternate reality game.

Alternate reality games, or ARGs, are a genre of game that involves the utilization of technology to make typically non-game related objects such as websites, payphones, stores, advertisements and normal human interactions, into game processes where players are attempting to complete a task in order to unlock pieces of or clues towards decoding a narrative of some sort. ARGs are famously great marketing devices, as well as being occasionally wondrous storytelling frameworks. They’re also a great model for how we can get people to perform very non-game-like tasks in a game-like framework. But any analysis of this falls apart quickly, because traditional problems with basic writing instruction are usually related to students feeling as if they’re being purposefully excluded from a discourse, usually on grounds of class, gender or race (though most discussion of these qualities in academia seems to center around and even code the other categories into the lump category of ‘race’). ARGs usually work by forcing players through an exceedingly high barrier of entry and then providing them with tiny glimpses of a larger picture, telling a story to people who look hard enough, making them feel as if they’ve entered into an exclusive club of people “in the know” as they acquire more knowledge.

So the method of encouraging entry and engagement isn’t really important in this discussion. But the feedback loop of “task, progress, reward” that ARGs use is. This isn’t always equivalent between ARGs, but one of my personal favorite ARGs was ILoveBees/The Haunted Apiary, which I’ve discussed at some length before. ILoveBees asked players to take a series of GPS coordinates and a set date and time and answer a payphone at said coordinates upon said time. It was a pretty crazy model, and it went extremely well. Players managed to pick up every single phone in the country, across thousands of miles, without missing a beat, weather and work be damned. And as they picked up these phones they received a clear cut assessment of their progress: four phones down, four to go before you unlock a tiny audio clip (reward!) that lets you know a little more about Durga and her people.

These are the elements of ARGs that I’m most interested in integrating into my teaching: expectations, directives, progress and feedback should all be transparent to students to make them feel both engaged and empowered in an activity where they do not have direct control (and usually lack any insight into) the framework under which they’re assessed. So I built my course around that.

The week-to-week schedule of the course is looking pretty inelastic at this point, even though the assignments aren’t. As such I had the opportunity to develop a framework for grading that I could share with students, a framework that allocated a specific point value to each task they’re being asked to complete. I put this on the syllabus (the best place for information you expect to have ignored) and specced out the distribution of these assignments throughout the year in a course schedule that the students have access to. I also provided them with a point by point breakdown of how they’ll be graded. This many points for each informal assignment, this many points for turning in your response paper draft, this many points for turning in your final research paper. It’s all laid out, and it adds up to a hundred.

The philosophy is that students will be engaged and understand their progress towards an end goal (grade). They’ll also understand how their actions influence their performance in the classroom, eliminating the sense of powerlessness or subjugation that nebulous guidelines can often fix students with in a classroom (something I often encounter in graduate level courses where the instruction occurs at a very directive, basic level wherein feedback is not provided – an unpleasant experience at the best of times).

The game parallels are pretty apparent. Students are being told the rules they’re going to have to play by. They’ve being given a tracker for their progress towards a goal (a convention of modern gaming that I hate from a narrative perspective, but quite like from a feedback loop perspective). They’re being told, very clearly, what they have to do to succeed and what will make them fail. I’m optimistic for how it’ll work: our discussion of the grading system came at the end of a twenty minute syllabus read-through and was met with a sudden rush of attention: students visibly perked up when I began describing the system by which they’d be assessed. They wanted to know the rules they’d be playing by.

There’s more to the system than that: I’m also asking students to turn in graded drafts, a “sticky wicket” in pedagogy, because you’re essentially asking students to potentially turn in a substandard or formative piece of work for very permanent assessment. There are a few approaches to this. A friend of mine used a “game review scale” as we both jokingly called it, to assess the drafts, grading on a subset from 3-5 out of a 5 point scale so that students would, even in the worst scenario, be able to get a B if they put in an exceptional effort. Still, this system penalizes initially weak work, potentially undermining scaffolding techniques and potentially discouraging weaker students (usually the ones who can benefit most from these feedback systems). So, in order to fix that, he began providing students with a free 5 points for turning in a draft and including the grade they’d receive were that draft turned in tomorrow, a system that also introduces game-review like qualities (you get 50% just for getting released!) but effectively insures that students will be scaled accurately for their effort (on a literal 1-5 scale of A-F).

Still, the idea of giving a freebie, to me, eliminates the sense of consequence associated with a draft, which is a necessary part of making failures meaningful learning experiences. You should never punish a student (or player) for failing, but you should make sure that the act of failing is grueling to some extent, that an assumed risk accompanies any attempted task. By providing clear stakes, you engage your student/players in the task and make sure they’re trying to surpass the task instead of lazily sniffing at it. To this end, I decided to create a system where students can turn in drafts for a theoretical score of 1-5. Clear enough so far, right? The draft is assessed as a finished product, and a number grade is assigned based on what students would receive if they were to turn this in as a finished product. This number grade, however, isn’t permanent.

Rather, the grade is elastic, tied to their finished paper score. The finished paper score then fills in the draft score, subsuming it because drafts are almost always (though not quite always) going to be weaker than finished products. The end result: a system where real consequences exist, but wherein effort is rewarded. Your D paper can always become an A, but if you stick with your initial D score, that’s the grade you’ll end up with.

Will this second system succeed? Will the first? I have no idea. I’ll be writing about that as the year goes on and I understand more about how my students relate to my systems. I’ll probably tweak them for next year as well, but for now I’m optimistic and excited to use these systems, these methods of feedback, to make students see writing as something more than a rote exercise.