Month: September 2018

The front of the game box, which has a woman in a red dress with high shoulder pads standing in front of sky scrapers and looking very serious.

Staging a Coup: We Try Out a Strategy Game

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!

Outlining the Game

Last Thursday, yesterday, and today (Thursday, 9/20), Hamad and I outlined the structure of the game. First, Hamad had us browse through some resources that he found in this PDF guide issued by Institute of Play.

I learned in this guide that each game has some consistent features: a goal, a challenge (obstacles that the players will face on the way to a goal), core mechanics (the kinds of “moves” that players make), components (materials), rules, and a consideration of space.

Thinking through these components helped me (Lindsey) to move beyond the thing that I am most inclined to do: make up assignments instead of designing a game. After the archive visit, I kept saying to Hamad “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we had them _________?” and he would (very kindly) remind me that while the ideas were interesting, they weren’t really part of the game framework. Reading the IOP’s guide helped me to understand why this was the case. The whole point is for students to have a way to win, or beat an obstacle, or collaborate toward achieving a goal. And not a learning goal: a game goal.

We decided to start designing the first game in the series: a role-playing game, or RPG. In an RPG, students take on different roles which each have special capabilities, different motivations, and information that only the person who is playing the role knows. In the case of our game, we knew that we wanted students to work on research, writing, persuasive speaking, and revision skill. We wanted them to be able to adjust their messages in order to address different audiences. We wanted some students to work toward “winning” the votes of independent voters.

At the archive visit, we learned that CUNY gathered together an adhoc committee in the late 1960s to study the feasibility of implementing a system-wide open admissions policy by 1975. We thought that for our RPG, we would stage a (fictional) meeting of the committee where they were inviting public comment and soliciting a vote from members of the CUNY community about whether or not they should pass the policy.

To “win” the game, members of the opposition faction and the supporting faction would need to convince the independent voters that CUNY shouldn’t or should pass open admissions. We also wanted to add in some non-CUNY members who have special powers to influence the public, but who don’t have a vote (i.e. community activists and media people).

We started to develop a character list based on real people across the CUNY system who were active in the struggle for and against open admissions. We also started to develop a list of texts that they wrote, or that people who shared their positions wrote, so that students who were playing these characters could learn about some of the nuances of the arguments “for” and “against.”

The trick, we realized, was figuring out a comparable workload for students who will be playing independent voters. Even though they won’t be involved in the earlier speech writing and / or opinion piece writing, we don’t want them to just be passive: we want them to have some kind of involvement.

We thought that one potential way for the voters to get involved was for them to do some of their own research-supported character development. If we gave them a name and a neighborhood that they lived in, what could they find out about who they might have been? What kinds of motivations might they have? What kinds of interests? What was their major? What might they feel about some of the political and social issues of the day, and how could they use research to support the claims that they’re making about “themselves”?

We then decided that it would be interesting, before the first official vote, to have the Board of Higher Education pass a resolution that says that open admissions did pass. So, rather than having students vote “for” or “against,” the new goal would be to have students reconfigure into new groups who would be responsible for coming up with various plans for enacting the new policy. We are going to design these plans ourselves to save time, but then students would be responsible for making the case about why their faction’s plan is the best.

We’re still working out how the vote will happen. If the independent students get absorbed into the plan building, then everyone’s going to just vote for their own plan. I’m wondering if it would be possible for everyone to cast a vote, but to stipulate that no one is allowed to vote for their own plan. Would this take us too far outside of the framework of the game?

Stay tuned! We’ll be back with more updates next week.

The outisde of an archive box which contains reports from 1968-1978 at CUNY.

Archival Visit #1

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!