Playing with History

By Nick Ward

Gamification-The infusion of game mechanics, game design techniques and/or game style into anything
-gamification.org

Upon learning that he would be teaching second year course ‘The Historian’s Craft’, Professor Shawn Graham faced a dilemma. Being an historian involves a lot of hands-on work. How could he translate the practice, the craft, of being an historian into a lecture hall?

Graham wanted to simulate the realities of the Historian’s Craft; realities that would best be demonstrated by venturing beyond the confines of the classroom.  Ideally, Graham hoped his students would get to experience the full array of techniques, tools and approaches associated with modern historical practice.

In search of an answer, he came across a website post by Richard Landers, a Professor of Social Psychology at Old Dominion University. Landers had created a social network platform for his large enrolment class that he had filled with achievements, goals and various other features of social gaming.  Landers believed that by ‘gamifying’ his class, he would be presenting an innovative and engaging way to challenge students using a platform that they were already familiar with.  Landers concluded by reporting that his experiment was an utter success.

After reading this web post, Graham made a decision.  He would follow in Landers footsteps and set up a social network that would gamify a portion of The Historian’s Craft.  Instead of a dry document repository, he would transform the course website into a social network with achievements, leaderboards, badges and interaction.

“I wanted students to have more opportunities to practice the ‘craft’ of being an historian, beyond the formal assessments in the class. Obviously, I could’ve assigned weekly exercises, but that would’ve gone against some of the spirit of what I was trying to inculcate in my students-that being an historian is about being part of a community, that there is joy and surprise and discipline in being an historian, and that most of all, one has to want to do these things – to that end, the achievements system was entirely voluntary (but with a healthy dose of competition).”

In this gamified approach, the students started at zero and tried to collect as many points as possible.  All participants would get a small bonus to their participation grade, proportional to the number of points they’d collected.  Some of the game challenges included transcribing lines of ancient papyrus, learning the rhetorics embedded in computer code, completing tutorials on logical fallacies, learning some Latin, and participating in online crowdsourcing history projects (including HeritageCrowd.org, Graham’s own experiment in crowdsourcing local cultural heritage knowledge).

Graham’s first semester implementing gamification in the spring of 2011 was a true success.  In fact, he saw about a 40% participation rate for the voluntary gamified section of his course.  This trend continued as the fall 2011 semester Historian Craft course saw similar participation numbers.  Despite the bonus participatory grade having made no real difference on their overall grade, those students who participated heavily tended to have grades in the B to A range. This of course raises certain questions, which Graham acknowledges still need tangling out: did the better students naturally incline to the system, or did the system and its additional practice help hone the ability of students so that their formal assessment pieces were better than they might otherwise have been?

Says Graham: “When I’ve tried other non-traditional forms of assessment or skills building in other classes, there is pushback from the students who have already mastered the ‘traditional’ game of being a student – essay writing, midterms, exams. My suspicion then is that the students who’ve benefitted most from the gamified elements in HIST2809 are not my traditional ‘good’ students, but rather those whose learning styles don’t naturally work well in a lecture-essay-exam format…My career trajectory has involved everything from teaching high school to students who had fallen through the cracks of ‘traditional’ teaching, to adult continuing education, to online education. You’ve got to find alternative ways of reaching people, in those contexts. I was ‘good’ at school, and it took me a long time to realize that what worked for me, wouldn’t necessarily work for others. So once I got over myself, I realized that these alternative methods were more exciting, sometimes deeper, but nearly always affective. I’ve had my share of flops, too – an experiment with the computer game Civilization IV in a Roman history class I once taught foundered on the shores of student expectations, which is an important lesson to learn: it’s not enough to use these methods and approaches, one has to work hard to achieve student buy-in too.”

Watch Shawn Graham’s Prezi “Adventures in Gamification”

The concept of gamification is quickly becoming very popular in many different spectrums, and especially in the world of marketing.  Of course, it has its critics.

Ian Bogost, Georgia Tech Professor and technological philosopher, is one of those detractors.  He has famously declared gamification as “bullshit,” on the grounds that it was “invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.”  Bogost isn’t alone.  Google ‘gamification is bullshit’ and you’ll get somewhere in the vicinity of 486,000 hits.

Despite the criticism Graham makes an important point in support of the educational value gamification:

“Gamification has been grafted on to everything from selling cola to cars. When it’s done like that, it becomes just a mechanism to sell things – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, as far as it goes, if one is aware of it. But the key point there is that the ‘gamification’ has no deeper resonance. For it to work in an educational setting it has to be tied to what you actually want students to know, to learn, as a consequence of being in your course…I ask my students for feedback halfway through every course. For the students who participate, it does seem to make a difference, and they’re not afraid of telling me which parts worked for them, and which parts don’t.”

Graham doesn’t advocate gamification as a panacea for all courses. “Work backwards from what you want students to know as a result of having been in your course. You’ll see if there are opportunities to push beyond ‘coverage’ of the topic that make sense to gamify.”  If students enjoy it, and it functions as an intrinsic motivator for students to make constructive decisions to seek additional knowledge, there cannot be much of a downside.  As Graham says, “History is fun; there’s no reason we can’t be playful in our teaching & learning about it.”

It’s tough to disagree with that.

Read more about Graham’s adventures in Gamification at Play the Past

Read more about the concept of Gamification and the humanities at Digital Humanities Now