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. 🙂