Gaming the Past

(Go to Design Lab Diary #1)

Monday, I traveled to Camp Livingston in Indiana to introduce our Cincinnati Country Day School (CCDS on Facebook) ninth graders, who were finishing a weekend leadership retreat, to Design Lab. Engineering and Maker-space educator and Design Lab colleague Jamie Back and I quickly surveyed the program for the 9th graders, including

• the importance of game design as a means of thinking about agency in systems and problem solving
• the role that collaborative work would play in the design process
• the opportunities and exciting challenges of crafting for the final game prototypes in the Maker Space.

If this sounds optimistic, that was the intention: heavy on the joy and excitement and joy of agent-based game design, with the nitty-gritty details to come.

After the quick introduction to the program came the introductory session on game analysis and design. I thought carefully about the game I would use for introducing the 9th graders to agent-based game design. Let me pause for a moment and quickly introduce / reintroduce Agent-Based Problem Space Design A.K.A Agential Problem Space Design A.K.A. Historical Problem Space Design. In the course of the couple of years I spent writing my newest book (Designing Historical Games for Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Educators) I realized I wanted to help more designers, not just designers of historical games, use the Historical Problem Space Framework to design any game about agents in a space (any beings who can make goal-oriented choices — this has nothing to do with AI btw) with goals and action choices, contextualized in that space. Now, mostly, I work on designing and having my students design games around researched, real-world, historical agents and spaces. But I wrote a little appendix in the new book just pointing out that Literature teachers and Sociology teachers and anyone who wanted to design researched games in their field about agents and systems in a world could do so with the Historical Problem Space. But then we could re-dub it an Agential Problem Space. To make this more accessible to ninth graders, I have started calling it an Agent-Based Problem Space, and games about this Agent-Based Problem Space Games (a mouthful of words to be sure).

All agent-based world games, historical or not, can be analyzed the same way and this provides a helpful descriptive guide for design too.

If this framework sounds interesting to you for analysis or teaching or design, I’ve written quite a lot about it over the past 15 years or so.

Okay so back to introducing Design Lab. Other than channeling some joy to my soon-to-be students, I wanted to introduce them to APS as a means for analyzing and designng agent-based games. I wanted a game:

• That was indeed an agential problem space (with player agents, trying to reach designed goals, by making decisions between competing action choices, in a world with other A.R.T.M.O.s (agents, resources, tools, metrics, obstacles — again, if this sound really interesting, there is a book out and a fair number of open-access articles.))
• That was easy to learn
• That had some different mechanics that I could later call upon as illustrations when we got to game design.

I opted not to use my 9th grade history standbys, Roll through the Ages: The Bronze Age and 7 Wonders: Architects, to keep the joy high and in synch with a weekend camp-retreat. Instead, I picked King of Tokyo. Monsters fighting each other to become the Alpha, the King of Tokyo. The game features dice rolling and lock-in mechanics (think Yahtzee), choices about whether to go for points or work to eliminate opponents, press-your-luck mechanics about whether to stay in Tokyo and get more points but be a larger target for opponents, and so on. And it’s a quite simple game to play for the amount of world-building you get, and fun.

The students enjoyed the game. Logistically, I made a stripped down set of rules on a single side of paper, and had colleagues at each of the 8 games to serve as the link should the kids be kids and not hear all my instructions. As appropriate for a leadership retreat where CCDS emphasizes both formal and informal leadership, I reminded kids to lead by talking to each other and ensuring that all students learned how to play the game. (for pictures, see the abridged LinkedIn version Post | LinkedIn)

If you’ve followed my work, however, you know that “fun” is never the end goal for my pedagogies with games. Even here where fun / joy was an important feeling to impart, I wanted to link it to the types of analyses we would be doing in Design Lab. So, at the end of the games, I wrote a few notes on an easel and we debriefed in playgroups.

I briefly explained APS and had the students in their play groups discuss and identify the player agents, goals, action-choices, etc. in King of Tokyo. I floated around to make sure the analyses were on track and they were — KoT is pretty straightforward to analyze. I noted that the game mechanics were meant to refer to / reflect a fantasy world and actions in it. Then, and I was pleased with this improvisation on the fly, I asked them to take a few minutes and brainstorm what the APS might be for a game about a 9th Grade student during a day or a semester at school. They jumped to it — great students!!!!! — and came up with some ideas. We will check in on that during the Sept. 2 and 3 Design Lab bells when each student has to write a rough pass at this 9th grade student problem space for homework.

Next week, we will begin the first in-school 75 minute block of Design Lab, the most-likely subject for next weeks Design Lab Diary #3)