Learning By Design (Rather Than Play) — DragonCon 2018 Presentation
This is the full transcript that was the basis for my presentation at the Comics and Popular Arts Conference panel “Pop-Culture Pedagogy: Learning Through Engagement.”
Good afternoon. My name is Jason A. Clark. Let’s jump right in and start with some facts about learning first, okay? The extensive studies done on learning by play have consistently shown that play has a significant net positive on procedural based knowledge, the type of knowledge that grants you an understanding you can use in order to learn declarative, or fact-based knowledge easier. Pretend play has been consistently shown to have significant benefits in improving social interactions and empathy. There’s still some research to be done to determine just what impact learning by play has on creativity and general intelligence; research hasn’t been able to determine whether creativity and intelligence facilitate play or if the reverse is true. So far so good? Great. Now here’s the question: Why are we talking about play when this part of the panel is about is about “learning by design?” The reasons why are what I’m here to lay out for you, and I know of few places that embody these as well as tabletop roleplaying.
How many people here have played roleplaying games? How many of your have ever game mastered, i.e. organized and refereed a gaming session for others? How many have you ever tried designing your own game? It’s no real secret in gaming that the number of hands in a given audience would go down with each of those questions. Interviewing tabletop players leads people to believe that game masters are commonly the most experienced players at the table. This perspective is slightly off. Game masters are commonly the most familiar with the rules by virtue of their planning the game session, even though they might not be the most experienced player at the table. Even those of you that don’t game may be familiar with the term “rules lawyer.” The rules lawyer is someone that interrupts the flow of the game to argue a point with the game master. However annoying their interruption, their existence proves something — the game master is not always the most experienced player at the table. So why does the game master seem to be such an authority? The adventure scenario that the adventurers play through is either a module that the game master has found or purchased and adapted to their own use, or one that they’ve created themselves. That’s right, one that they designed. The successful game master is one that has mastered the procedural portion of the game. They understand how the adventure flows, when to introduce a new set of enemies, how to use the players’ stated character history to build engaging story hooks. Rules lawyers specifically understand the declarative knowledge portion of the game, and, at their most intrusive, they’ve gained this knowledge at the expense of understanding the procedural portion.
It can be useful to think of game masters as budding game designers. They may have no desire to create whole systems to generate or resolve conflict; they may have no desire to chart statistics for characters like how far they can move or how many items they can carry; but what they do have is a desire to take the procedural knowledge that they garnered from playing and apply it to create a better experience. Game masters learn declarative knowledge from the rulebooks and then apply it to create situations that the players will enjoy. Not all game masters start on even footing; many start because no one else is interested in the position. However, the greater the procedural knowledge of the game at hand, the more successful the game masters game will typically because their position is one of applied knowledge. A successful game session integrates the procedural knowledge of how to interact with the game system and other players with the declarative knowledge that defines the game’s world and its statistical core. “Combat in this game is particularly lethal — when my players get into a fight, having ways to solve the conflict in a non-violent is valuable. Situations that demand violence are likely to end with significant negative consequences for the player.” Once the game master has internalized these factors, they begin to alter their scenarios and often the game itself with “house rules” in order to reach the optimal balance for their audience. Dungeons and Dragons has licensed online store that will publish content created primarily by players with Game Master level knowledge called The DM’s Guild. The RPG Exalted, which is now on its 3rd Edition, is also a prime example of a game that inspired extensive player designed content and rules to adapt Exalted to other game systems. A little bit of background on Exalted — it is what’s considered a “kitchen sink” setting — there are anime style mecha, there is sorcery, eldtrich abomination elves, mopey goth Deathlords, several Meso-American influenced ancient dinosaur beings, and a God of War that takes in the days best military ambushes with his cup of coffee. The rules, as published, have a very distinct mode of play. Many game masters began to adapt the parts of the game they found most interesting to other game systems — some aiming for simplification of rules and greater narrative control for players, while others aimed to expand on the Wuxia themes present in the game. Full disclosure, I’ve been neck deep in both of these communities, and watched fans slowly become professional game designers and developers, often for the game they originally were a fan of.
Now, let’s take this one step further; the game designer. While the game master internalized the rule system in order to provide a situation in which the game was its most fun, the game designer has to provide both the facts and the process for the player to participate. Put that way, it can sound incredibly difficult. However, as soon as children can begin to play, they begin to design their own games. If you’ve ever read the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes (a great example of Pretend Play… or is it?) you may be familiar with Calvinball, a game created by the title characters whose only rule is that you never play it the same way twice. Children with action figures, dolls, playhouses, or castles all stage pretend play stories with each other, while dictating who has control over which part of the narrative. “You can’t attack my knight with that troll. I have a shield. Shields mean I don’t get hurt. Now I’m going use my high heeled shoes to dig into this tree and help me climb it.” This is the most important part of learning by design — it is how we internalize the systems we interact with and create new methods to address what we consider most important. Dungeons and Dragons historically awarded experience for the defeat of enemies or the accumulation of wealth. This led to players who were murderous looters. As newer editions of Dungeons and Dragons came out, other options for experience such as exploration or finishing an important goal or story arc were published. This allowed game masters to prioritize other types of fun over looting and killing. In this way, the designers adjusted the facts of the system to teach its players a different lesson. This is the most important part of learning by design — learning that we are the ones who create the systems we interact with, as opposed to solely being acted upon.
So how do we implement learning by design, rather than learning by play? We already have some great models for this in classrooms across the country and around the world. Art and shop classes are the easiest examples of this. A student typically studies multiple styles and media in Art, or creates different projects using a range of techniques and materials in Shop. Often, at the end of the period, the students are allowed to propose a project of their own design that will use the skills they’ve learned and test their comprehension. Continuing to use tabletop games as an example, there is no reason a class couldn’t task their students to model economies of varying complexities for Economics courses; to have students design a game worthy country with a realistically modeled political system for PolySci courses. However, these approaches only make sense if a Play/Game element was introduced earlier into the year. If you have already fostered play between students in class with, say, a game like Diplomacy, you’re on the right track. The cutthroat political treachery required to make deals and double cross other players is representative of what many see as inescapable political reality. However, the game itself has built in that a cluster of players can agree to form an alliance and end the game prematurely, derailing the accumulation of absolute power that is the usual win condition. By turning your students on one another with Diplomacy, you’re laying the groundwork for them to address .
When we started, I asked why talk about learning by play, and at each example of using learning by design, you’ll notice that it all begins with play. From play, we become engaged with understanding how our system works and creating favorable scenarios for ourselves. As our understanding grows, our ability to design expands to tailoring systems to our needs. By the time we have fully internalized the procedural, we have finally grown to where we can design new systems that more accurately reflect our goals and our identities. There is, of course, one challenge to this that stands out among all others: if we make our goal to teach comprehension of systems, their strengths, and their weaknesses to our students, we will have to be ready when our students rise to challenge the very systems we teach them, the same way that philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists have challenged their teachers for centuries. That’s the kind of problem I look forward to. Thank you.
If you want to know more about the DragonCon Comics and Popular Arts Conference, visit https://comicspopularartsconference.org/
