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.