As work continues on this game, I (Hamad) started thinking about what type of copyright to license it under. Since this project was motivated by open-source and OER frameworks, we always understood that we would choose some type of a Creative Commons license. Before this, I never really thought too much about the how’s and why’s of copyright nor used Creative Commons. Lindsey has created some projects which she has licensed under Creative Commons, and our in-house OER expert Pamela Thielman provided invaluable guidance as well, and I credit most of the information and analysis here to her guidance. My very first thought was, ‘if this is going to be completely open, then what’s the point of a copyright license anyway?’ Pamela pointed out that, A. anything that is created through funding by CUNY should have a Creative Commons license of some type, and B. any creative work is automatically copyrighted under the usual assumptions of use and distribution once it exists. A particular copyright license, then, is more like a communication tool that tells potential users what they can and cannot do with that product. Indeed, when I started the process of choosing a type of Creative Commons license, I was surprised to discover that you can just ‘grab’ the appropriate license and attach that jpeg file to your website or other tangible project components without ‘registering’ the project anywhere. Instead of relying on standard copyright assumptions, Creative Commons licenses give you a particular set of language within existing international copyright laws that is easy to understand and communicate to people who may want to use (or do other things with) your work.

There are several types of Creative Commons licenses depending on how you want someone to interact with your work. I thought that I would be able to easily make choices around how I want people to attribute, share, and remix the game, but I soon found out that I would need to think a lot more carefully than I had imagined. The Creative Commons license ‘picker’ makes the process a little easier by asking two seemingly simple questions: 1. will you allow adaptions of your work to be shared, and 2. will you allow commercial uses of your work? Since this work is open for all to use, adapt, and share, the first question was easy enough to answer with a ‘yes’. But Creative Commons actually allows for two ‘yeses’ – a simple no-strings-attached yes, and a yes with the promise of sharing it under the same license (‘yes, as long as others share-alike’). Answering this also partly depended how you answer the second question – will you allow commercial uses of your work, particularly if you don’t want to allow commercial uses and also want any derivatives of your work to do the same, thereby keeping the work free in perpetuity. This was difficult to answer, especially since the definition of free culture includes making your work available for commercial uses – in other words, someone remixing it and then selling it either to maintain costs (like printing) or turn a profit (example of an open-source work that allows for this is Cards Against Humanity). For us, this question pitted the ideal of free culture against what we understand is the ethos of OER – i.e., keeping OER work (even potential adaptations of it) within the free and open realm. After talking with Lindsey and Pamela, we decided that that ethos would be violated if we opened the work up to commercial adaptability. So we chose the options that would embed and keep the OER nature of the work intact in it and in any potential work derived from it: a noncommercial share-alike license. According to Creative Commons this is not a free culture license, but we believe it is a license best suited to OER works like this one. 

 

 

(Image credit: ‘Choose a license’ tool from creativecommons.org)

After a bit of a hiatus, I (Hamad) started working on the player manual. Lindsey and I had been discussing the ways in which the game would play-out, going back-and-forth about what rules to build around the game so that the experiences of most of the players would be balanced, and so that each faction and each player would have a chance to do well in the game. We wanted to have the fewest rules possible, given that the central mechanism of a role-playing game is the relative freedom players have to enact their characters. However, we also acknowledged that students often crave structure and guidance. So we agreed on a set of four hard-and-fast ‘rules’: players need to be in character during game-play, players cannot change factions, they can only use their character’s powers once per game-session, and the only time they cannot move about freely or interact with other characters is during closed faction meetings. The rest of the player manual recommends moves and strategies that may be helpful during specific parts of the game, describes how a game-session is structured, and lists and explains the different powers for each character. 

I then used Canva to design and produce a draft version of the manual. Choices about font type and color were hard to make. I recalled the color palette we had chosen for the poster at the CUNY Games Conference, and went with that, as some people commented that the color scheme was very 70s. I chose the typewriter font to mimic some of the archival resources (reports and memos, for examples, to the NYS Board of Higher Education), and to give it a dated, but official feel. Designing this in Canva was really helpful (and free!), but I soon realized that if we need to change something (even a typo) then I would have to edit the file in various places before uploading the final version – the master copy on Google drive, then the copy on Canva, and then the game website. I also kept the guidelines on accessibility in mind, especially color contrast, font, alternative-text for images, and creating accessible PDFs. The accessibility checker on Acrobat was super helpful and ran some accessibility scripts within the program, though I think this option is not available on the free Adobe version. Note: since we are trying to make this as OER as possible, I still need to figure out how to create and upload a template version of the manual for instructors and/or other game designers to download and remix. More on that later.   

As we’ve been writing our character descriptions, we’ve started to think about how these characters are going to actually interact with one another. It’s not really enough to just have the final goal of “recommending” or “not recommending” the passage of open admissions. We want students to have stuff to do every day.

We’ve started to visualize the web of connections between the characters as we currently understand them. And then we started to think about how factions, voting members, and non-voting / non-faction players would actually spend their time every day in class.

We wanted to make sure that players between factions (and especially non-voting / non-faction players) would have enough to do, but would also have meaningful reasons to interact with other people. This gave us an idea: wouldn’t it be cool if certain players had certain kinds of special advantages or “powers” that would give them the chance to interrupt or influence business as usual, and that would encourage players to interact?

So far, we have developed 4 types of these powers:

1) Voting Power: This one is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the power…to vote! This can only be given to the voting committee.

2) Influencer Power: Players with this power can disrupt what happens during a Town Hall meeting. If there’s a person giving a speech, they can disrupt the speech with a protest. If there’s a faction that is distributing a manifesto, they can decide who should not have it. It’s important for people with Influencer Power to use this power sparingly and wisely though: the members of the voting committee might start to feel annoyed if they use it too much.

3) Employment Protection Power: This power is given to tenured professors or professors who have famous reputations as poets (for example). This power allows a player to talk to the press without penalty. They can also write letters to try to influence individual committee members.

4) Charisma Power: Someone with charisma power is allowed to sit in on (otherwise closed) faction meetings and to “spy” for their faction or the faction that they’re leaning toward supporting.

We’re still deciding if we want to limit the amount of times that someone with each of these powers is allowed to do each of these things, and if so, how we could help the game master (professor) to check.

We also decided that we might try to make various “relationships” between characters that limit or enhance how they can interact with one another. So far, the relationship types we’ve defined are:

1) Colleagues

2) Friends

3) Classmates

4) Boss / Employee

5) Admirer or Critical Admirer / Admiree

6) Mentor / Mentee

7) Informant

8) Dating

We haven’t yet decided what these relationships will mean and how they will influence interactions, but we are hopeful that we can flesh this out a bit more as we’re writing character descriptions.

Stay tuned!

Over the last two weeks, Hamad and I have started to write character descriptions for the players in the game.

Most of the game’s characters are real people from history, so we’ve turned to biographies, autobiographies, interviews, profiles, obituaries, and material on the digital archives to reconstruct a brief and descriptive portion of the person’s life. Because of the way that we needed the factions to be balanced so that the voting members could genuinely decide whether or not open admissions should pass and the decision could genuinely go either way, we also needed to fictionalize some characters who were less decided or even apathetic about the decision (but who may not have found it necessary or appealing to write about their apathy).

Both of these profile types can be challenging to write for their own reasons. Deciding which details from the life of a historical person are important to highlight for the purposes of this game can cause us to worry that we’re leaving too much out or that we’re choosing the details that tell a very specific story. But writing a profile of a fictional person can feel daunting too: are these characters fully developed people? Are we relying on stereotypes and assumptions?

This exercise has helped me to consider the potentially complicated dynamics of the role of empathy in this game. To be clear, there are some characters in this game who I don’t want to empathize with. I also think empathy is a vexed concept: marginalized people are constantly confronted with the perspectives and opinions of people in power. Being acquainted with those perspectives can be a survival and navigation technique, but not necessarily a choice. And yet, the door doesn’t have to swing in both directions — there’s nothing that forces someone with power into understanding the perspective of someone without it.

And yet, in writing these character descriptions, it can be so easy for me to just make a caricature of a person without considering all of the complex factors that influenced the things that they wrote and thought — especially when I disagree with them. It’s a lot harder to build in some dimension. How could this person have arrived to a particular conclusion? Is it as simple as I’m making it out to be? Did X lead to Y? Would the historical people we’re characterizing recognize themselves in our characterizations? Maybe, and maybe not.

This all leads me to wonder how we’ll help faculty (and especially newer faculty) to navigate the “hot” classroom moments that could arise when students play this game, and how to do this with care. This doesn’t feel like something that will just “happen naturally” without some thoughtful pedagogical structuring.

I’m wondering, too, if playing a character with a massively different perspective than the one that you hold in real life will help a student to understand that perspective in greater complexity, or if it will just feel minimizing and damaging and violent to have to play a character who may have devalued your humanity or your right to access a quality education.

I will return to this soon, but now I’m off to collaborate with Hamad on a network of the connections that are starting to emerge between characters. Stay tuned…!

For the past couple of weeks Lindsey and I (Hamad) have been focusing on the scenario game (the RPG) since we already know how to structure it. We’ve come up with an outline which we’re fleshing out day by day. In doing so, we’ve thought about and tried to solve many issues like:

• Should we base characters more closely on real people or create factionalized amalgams?
• What should the setting look like? A town hall or a committee? Should every character vote? Should there be other characters in other (non-voting) roles?
• What should assignments look like? Relatedly not every class using this game will have the same learning goals, so how do we generate a list of assignments that most classes would find useful?
• How would we get instructors who are not familiar and comfortable with the game’s content but into the game itself?

Some of the above questions were easier to deal with than others, and in general we found that they were all connected in some way. For example, the question of what kinds of characters to include was related to what types of assignments the students filling those roles would end up doing, and how that would satisfy the learning goals of the class. Specifically, if we correlated voting character roles with learning goals on research, then how could we incentivize non voting characters to also achieve similar learning goals? 

Thinking through these issues led us to create a complex structure for the game where we tried to work toward:

• balancing ‘what really happened’ with incentives for the players to also create their own story
• how each player would be motivated to achieve most of the learning goals in order to fulfill their character’s own goals
• creating suggested class sessions and assignments for instructors use so that they can focus on the learning goals rather than learning or trying to become an expert about the game’s content
• acknowledging that this game will not be a good fit for many classes, and, while keeping the learning goals broad enough, still tailoring them (and the game) to research and communication-oriented courses

Oh, and we also created a mock-up of the game’s website. Designing the site came with a whole set of its own questions and decisions, but more on that in the next post. 🙂

We’ve passed along our research and the design of the first scenario and asked our collaborators to take a look, so while we’re waiting for some feedback, Hamad and I decided to try to play some games ourselves to see how we might be able to adapt them for this resource.

A few weeks ago, Allison (the CTL director) told us that her son had been playing this card game a lot over the summer. She offered to bring it in to the center so that we could try it out. It’s called Coup: The Dystopian Universe. The premise is that in the “not too distant future,” the government has been taken over by “a new ‘royal class’ of multinational CEOs'” (sooo, maybe the future is now?). The players are all powerful government officials who are fighting their way toward absolute power by diminishing the influence of rival officials.

In each round, each player gets two “influence” cards with characters on them who have different kinds of power. Some influences can block assassinations. Others can prevent a player from collecting money that they need to perform certain tasks. The object is to knock out other players’ influences, to gain other influences, and basically to become as powerful as possible.

What was really interesting about the experience of playing the game was how long it took us to understand what was going on. There were a lot of characters and rules! Once we actually started playing, though, the rules started to make much more sense. It was easier to dive in and just figure out how we were making mistakes rather than reading the rule book.

This reminded me of active teaching and learning. Rather than explaining everything that a student needs to know before they start using a concept, in an active learning classroom, it’s important to get the student engaged with trying out the material as soon as possible, even (and maybe even especially) when they don’t totally understand it yet. The game book became a guide to help us when we needed to know something rather than a body of content that we needed to completely master before we started playing.

It was also a good reminder of how vulnerable it can feel to learn something new! I kept making dumb strategic moves: partly because I wanted to see what would happen, but mostly because I didn’t really understand what I was doing. Even though there were literally zero stakes, I was surprised to find that I felt a little embarrassed when Hamad assassinated me and amassed a ton of influence (he is a Coup pro). I wanted those gray coins, dangit!

We took our first visit to the archives today!

When we arrived, Jessica Wagner-Webster, the Digital Initiatives librarian at Baruch, had pulled some materials that she thought we might find helpful. First, she showed us four student yearbooks from the years between 1969-1972: the year before the start of open admissions, and two years after its implementation.

Jessica pointed out how different the books were in their style and in their content. The 1969 book looked much more like a “traditional” yearbook, but the one from 1970 (which would have been the year before open admissions began, since it started in the fall of 1970), was full of mostly pictures of various protests. It was unclear whether the people in the pictures were Baruch students, New Yorkers, or residents of another city because there was very little other text or contextualizing information, but it was such an interesting artifact of the time.

The 1971 book was very multimodal. It was shaped like a box, and it contained a record, a literary magazine, a poster, a few booklets that gave information about students and clubs, and a booklet with pages that were completely blank, among a few other things. There was also message from the editor that mentioned that the staff wanted to make something that was a complete departure from all other books that had come before it. The message indicated that the previous book (the one with the protest pictures) wasn’t very well received.

The 1972 book had a long, somewhat rambling essay on whether or not Open Admissions was a success, but the essay cuts off in the middle and doesn’t resume. I wondered whether this was an intentional editorial choice or an error.

I (Lindsey) was also really interested in a conference proceedings booklet that I found in one of the boxes, which included a keynote and several other speeches from CUNY’s first-ever Open Admissions conference in 1971. The conference was lead by Allen Ballard, the Dean for Academic Development at CUNY at the time, who initiated the SEEK program and whose oral history appears in the CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA).

The keynote speeches were fantastic. I was particularly interested in a speech by Melvin Taylor, the principal of Benjamin Franklin High School an a CCNY grad himself, and I was also really interested in this talk given by a math faculty member about why the remedial tests in reading and math fail to test what they suggest that they’re testing. This essay feels especially relevant today, considering the recent conversation in New York City about racial discrimination and the tests used to place students into specialized high schools.

When we got back to the center, we started to map out which archival materials we had found, which game-based learning models we wanted to learn more about, and which kinds of skills and learning goals we could see this game addressing across a wide variety of courses. Here’s what those lists looked like:

Tomorrow, we’re going to do some brainstorming about the structure of the game based on what we found. Looking forward to it!