Replaying history: learning world history through playing

It is important to be mindful of the amount of time required to become familiar with Civilization III in order to the game in classroom contexts (which means anticipating both intended and unintended emergent outcomes). Given that a single game can easily take twenty or thirty hours, building and play-testing custom scenarios is a significant investment of time for teachers. Teachers need not only play through the customized games, but be mindful that they will be played by other players -- which means anticipating different ways in which they will be played and debugging features that might confuse novice players. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a number of teachers are starting to build custom modifications for Civilization III, but these cases show how teaching with Civilization III is really a hobby unto itself.

If good games are difficult to learn and meaningful learning occurs through analyzing failure, then instructional designers need to be balance the tension between allowing students the freedom to think through game problems and providing tools that reduce frustration and failure. Part of this design challenge means ensuring that students have access to information to solve their problems. The design of this information is tricky; instructional designers need to walk a line between providing information that is useful in game play and that encourages students to think about the game as a simulation. From a semiotic perspective, these just-in-time resources need to illuminate the semiotic system of the game while also making connections to the world behind the simulation. In these cases, a classic example of this tension was how to mediate students’ struggle with managing civil unrest. Consider a few of the options available: I could explain how the game represented citizens’ happiness and describe the rules of the simulation; I could describe historical anecdotes of civil insurrection, and describe details of the social period in hopes that students would derive lessons for their own games; or I could share the one or two most obvious solutions and help students move on to explore more aspects of the game. In these cases, each strategy was appropriate at different times, and a primary instructor practice was managing how each of these just-in-time resources was deployed. As the primary tool for supporting students’ game play, I had considerable flexibility and power in managing how students’ play was mediated by outside information; at the same time, this places a lot of burden on the teacher and requires a deep knowledge of the game, subject matter, and places where the two intersect.

One obvious solution is to provide more tools and resources for players and instructors. In these cases, the Civilopedia and tutorials alone were insufficient tools for mediating game play for these students, both in terms of teaching them the game and in drawing connections to world history. The Civilopedia was of little help for students in recovering from failure states, and when something went wrong in the game, such as a city falling into disarray, the Civilopedia was of little help for debugging play and devising new strategies. The Civilopedia is written at about an eighth grade level, and the way that the Civilopedia is organized may have also impeded its appropriation. Because the information is arranged by topics (like an Encyclopedia), as opposed to by problem (like a F.A.Q), students did not immediately perceive it as useful to their ends. Once students were committed to learning the game and engaged in the unit, the Civilopedia became a valuable resource, even though it was written at a level more advanced than most could read. Dedicated gamers enjoyed just browsing the Civilopedia and reading about concepts. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was relatively little evidence of reading the Civilopedia in the Media case, where time was scarce, and much more in the camp cases where reading the Civilopedia was a nice break from game play.

One way to ease the burden of the teacher would be to create learning aids for common problems. In these cases, these problems were, in order of problem encountered (1) How do I defend my cities against barbarians? (2) How do I avoid civil unrest? (3) How do I create new cities? (4). A list of common problems encountered while playing this scenario are summarized in Table 8.1. Consistent with minimal instruction techniques (Carroll, 1998), providing answers to these four common problems would account for a majority of the problems and questions in the first few days and perhaps alleviate student and teacher stress. In the YWCA case, I introduced this kind of problem identification and problem solving exercise as class discussions, the results of which are captured in Table 8.1. Some strategies, such as “keeping two spearmen in every city” flowed quickly through the room (as when Marvin shared this information with Jamal) and appeared to only add to students enjoyment of the game and learning from the game. These cases suggest that managing students’ questions and failures may be particularly important early in the unit, as students orient to the game and adjust to the feelings of frustration and the failures common to game play.

Table 8.1: Game Play Issues and Solutions

Increasing happiness	Temples Coliseums Entertainers Luxury items Connecting cities with roads
How do you increase defense?	Keep two defense in every city Explain attack / defense / movement
Natural resources / and land bonuses.	Incense Dye Furs Trading natural resources
How do I build stuff faster?	Build Mines Choose the terrain carefully (hills)

Ultimately, how to support students in learning games and managing success and failure may be less an issue of particular instructional resources and more one of learning culture. It is worth reiterating the contradiction between predominant approaches to curriculum and instruction where information is broken down to easily processed chunks of information and “failure” is to be avoided, and game-based learning environments, where problem spaces are complex, information must be gathered from disparate sources, and failure is the norm. Learning in game-based learning units means resetting expectations so that problem spaces are way too large to be fully understood, information must be gleaned from multiple sources (particularly other games), and failure is accepted, even valued. Learning, as it predominantly occurs in game playing communities is driven by goals (which are often going unmet due to failure) and is iterative, multi-modal, and ongoing. In most schooling environments, learning is about mastering a pre-determined body of knowledge for the purposes of gaining “exchange value,” that is, learning is in order to earn a degree, credential, or to gain increased access of some type. These cases showed the difficulty of porting a gaming culture of learning (which also happens to be closer to how learning occurs outside of schools) into schools. Games are complex artifacts, and learning through them looks very different than learning in most school settings.

In each case contradictions emerged between activity systems, namely, playing (or learning to play) Civilization III for enjoyment vs. using Civilization III to learn social studies. These tensions rendered many of my curriculum ideas impractical. Given the steep learning curve, maximizing students’ interactions with Civilization III was necessary. This left relatively little time for in class research or discussion. Further, once students did become engaged in the game, the seductiveness of playing Civilization III as an object of activity superceded other activities I introduced. More successful were activities where students used their games as data to ask questions, reflected on their game play experiences, and were able to share their game experiences. This last point – that students took great pride in their games and saw value in using them as a point of exploration -- suggests ways that the game can be used to spark discussion and debate.

In both cases, most offline activities such as discussion of readings or discussions of history also failed to enter the activity system, although activities such as the classroom vote on civilizations suggests how offline activities might feed into game play more elegantly. The classroom vote on civilizations encouraged students to articulate and discuss their beliefs and knowledge about civilizations to enhance game play. One can imagine other similar assignments; one the second day of the unit for example, students might locate their civilizations on a map, research the history of their civilization and report what luxuries were important during that period. Game play for these students was a creative act, one which they enjoyed reflecting on and documenting for others, as when students took special pride in comparing their games to history or identifying places where the game was unrealistic. These activities leveraged students deep knowledge of the particulars of their game, including a systemic awareness of how and why events unfolded and channeled them toward making connections with academic content. This study is but a beginning in understanding how offline activities can supplement game play, but it suggests that activities that leverage students’ investment in their games is a good starting point in designing curriculum.

More creative offline activities that involve students doing outside research, consulting maps, or critiquing games in order to directly impact game play seem to be the most effective means for encouraging reflection in action while also respecting the power of games as seductive objects and avoiding contradictions between academic learning practices and game play practices. Of course, other studies of other games in other academic contexts might find that students have more of an interest in academic study, a higher tolerance for engaging in activities that do not immediately impact their games, or greater ability to build connections between academic understandings in school. These students’ disinterest – even despise for the formal study of history and anti-authoritarian postures -- color these cases and raise caution about -generalizing from these findings. Nevertheless, integrating curricular activities directly with gaming has certain elegance.

Supporting reflection within naturally – occurring game communities. A second strategy for teachers is to leverage the game communities that games seem to naturally spawn. Across both cases students showed a desire to observe other games, learn from their friends, share stories, and engage in friendly competitions. From an educator’s perspective, some of the most intriguing and productive talk arose naturally from game play, as when students sought justification for imperialist practices, satirically adopted the language of cultural imperialism, or made connections between their games and the Cold War. Teachers might benefit by supporting and encouraging these kinds of discussions and more explicitly building connections between students’ talk and historical events. Such instructional strategies may be difficult for some teachers as they are completely emergent from game play, making them impossible to plan for.⁶³ The emergent nature of game play is also part of what makes gaming and simulation so interesting for both students and teachers, and as instructional designers, we need to be careful not to over prescribe and overplan activities so as to kill the emergent learning that is part of the power of this approach.

Students’ interest in other games may be used as a way for broadening students’ exposure to different aspects of the game. Just as Chris and Tony began watching games to anticipate challenges they face in their own game, other students might be paired in order to create similar conversations and knowledge. Pairing up students to compare games leverages both their interest in sharing games and the social power of gaming in the service of analysis and reflection. These activities also encourage students to discern patterns across games, which is one more inroad toward helping them reflect on their games as simulations as well as engaging experiences. Placing students in roles where they are helping each other understand their games and examining multiple results from simulations mimics both the ways that researchers examine simulations and the ways that gamers learn from one another. Further study of game play communities may result in other useful strategies for facilitating learning in both gaming and non-gaming experiences.

As games enter their way into schools, undoubtedly there will be even more fear and fascination with how they remediate students’ thinking. Mention using games for learning among people – both educators and the lay public -- and the kinds of answers one hears are striking. Common questions include: Are games good for all learners? How do we really know they are learning from games? Aren’t games biased? or Do we really want kids learning from games instead of books (or people)? These questions reveal more about the uncertainty and uneasiness that many people have with games than anything particular to the medium; one can easily imagine similar questions being asked of books; in fact, most of them were. The fact is that games are not good for all learners, we do not know exactly what people learn from playing games, games are in fact biased, and no one really expects that games will replace other media. Rather, the interesting questions are in understanding how learners orient to games, who they seem to work for and in what situations, how learners come to understand their bias, and how games relate to other media in instruction.

In this dissertation, I have gathered data pertaining to these questions and offered some preliminary answers. Most striking among these answers is that in these cases games (and simulations) seem to be a very disruptive medium. Students who had failed history found ways of constructing and enacting identities with games. Games recruited some learners while repelling others. Static textual resources became tools for action and concepts were tools for solving problems. Power relations were negotiated as gaming practices emerged through relations among students’ goals, the games’ affordances, and the broader social context. These patterns are not entirely new and not entirely the province of games; researchers examining project-based, modeling, and other constructivist learning environments have made similar observations.

One way to get at these issues is to invite students into this inquiry alongside research communities. Encouraging students to consider how they learned through games and how this differed from other forms of learning produced interesting conversations. Students like Tony identified that games “forced” him to learn history, and that history became a tool for game play. Students themselves had sophisticated ways of reading games, as most students detected many sources of bias in the game, clearly understood ways in which the game was unrealistic, and had intuitions regarding kinds of problems the game as a simulation was good for answering and which ones it brought little to bear on. Talking with these students about their experiences also helped point the way for how discussions, timelines, and other resources could be brought into play. Students have very sophisticated ways of interacting with and understanding games as a medium, and teachers and researchers alike can learn a lot from the skills they have developed growing up with gaming.

At the same time, students also seemed blind to some of the ways in which learning through Civilization III was different than through other media. When Tony said, “No matter how history plays out in this game, it’s all based on the same rules – kind of like in real life,” no one in the class (other than me) blinked. The idea that the world may be governed by a few simple set of rules may be taking hold in science (i.e. Wolfram, 2002), but it is hardly well accepted, particularly in history. Whether it is growing up interacting with rule-based systems, an uncritical accepting of Tony comment, or experiences in this unit that caused such a comment to be so easily agreed upon, it is important to note this kind of understanding emerged from a game-based learning environment. If such an understanding is more than an anomaly, then perhaps Marshall McLuhan is right and the medium itself is the message here.

Meeting these students and learning from their game play suggests the importance of talking with students about how media fits into their lives. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, educators face a number of importance choices, one of which is how do we want schools to relate to media. Will we shut the doors and lock out emerging media, preserving the school as a pantheon for the technologies of generations gone-by, or do we want to embrace students’ worlds and enlist the media that speak to them, co-creating learning environments that engage their experiences and identities? Do we expect students to appropriate only the worlds of orality and print (and possibly film and television, media over a hundred years old), when increasingly they encounter worlds such as Civilization III in their lives outside of school? Do we expect students to be satisfied with only the experiences of listening to lectures and reading books, and on the odd occasion doing projects or discussing ideas, when outside of school, they can negotiate meanings in communities they help define, lead civilizations and build whole virtual worlds?