Play On: Game and Choice in English Classes

At the end of our Teaching with Technology class yesterday, Rory pitched a thinking point to us: "How can we revise our high-school classes to act as games?" That is to say, how can we make our classrooms fun, marked by continuing achievements, and motivating? As James Paul Gee says, "A science like biology is not a set of facts. In reality, it is a “game” certain types of people “play”. These people engage in characteristic sorts of activities, use characteristic sorts of tools and language, and hold certain values; that is, they play by a certain set of “rules”. They do biology. Of course, they learn, use, and retain lots and lots of facts—even produce them—but the facts come from and with the doing." In other words, just like games, academic disciplines consist of goals to be achieved by a player within a given, steady set of parameters; they are complex, difficult, and, optimally, fun.

I'll preface the following thoughts with two reservations. Firstly, I don't like gimmicks in the classroom, and I especially despise them if they aren't well executed. Students can see right through them. At best, they're lame. At worst, they can be downright condescending; the implication seems to be one that says to the student "Yeah, I understand that this subject is inherently lame, and you're not motivated enough to participate in this lame subject, so I'm going to do my best to spice it up. Please enjoy this rap rendition of 'The Raven.' Your essays are due Friday." My second reservation is that I want to be as cautious as possible in my approach to extrinsic motivators. Some fantastically successful video games rely on these heavily; you can earn in-game currency, medals, promotions of rank, etc. We're currently learning how damaging extrinsic motivators can be to a student's sense of self-achievement, so I'm going to try my best to recommend ways in which awards don't have to be the norm, and I'd like to recommend a structure that incorporates extrinsic motivators in short bursts only.

With that, here are some general concepts one could employ to frame a high-school English class as a player's game:

Incorporate Choice
Stephen Totilo writes at Kotaku that "A good video game presents a series of interesting choices for players to make" (http://kotaku.com/5924387/the-difference-between-a-good-video-game-and-a-bad-one). I believe this to be true, and many good video games incorporate choice right from the get-go. Can you imagine a racing game where you couldn't choose your car (the model, the rims, the paint job, the engine)? Do you think World of Warcraft would have been as massively successful if players couldn't choose their character type? What if Starcraft only had the Terran race? Boring. Shoot, even simpler set-ups let you pick the identity with which you engage in the game's universe. Counter-Strike is a terrific example (I used to judge people harshly for being on the "Terrorist" team. Morality something blah blah.)

This lil' guy wouldn't be the Guitar Hero if he couldn't choose "All the Small Things" by Blink-182, now would he?

Similarly, we need to provide students with the choice of identity in the classroom. Even without the framework of a "video game," this is a truth. High school and middle school are so difficult for so many students because there is a fundamental and massive lack of choice; students are required to go to these classes at these times, to do assignments assigned by this teacher. They have no say in the matter if they want to get good grades and the regard of their teachers. I see it as no wonder why so many resist it. For an institution that should teach for self-agency and empowerment, the typical school sure does have a lot of rules.

Within the English class, we can give students choice of identity from the start. It could go something like this:

Each student will choose one of four identities: The Poet, the Prose Artist, the Playwright, and the Literary Critic. Each character type will be required to complete competency achievements of all types, those being creative writing (poetry, fiction, drama, creative essay), professional writing (expository essay, letter, cover letter), and literary criticism (critical essay), but depending on which identity the student chooses, they will be able to specialize in their preferred discipline subset. This is similar to a concentration within a college major. Such character selection allows for the empowerment that comes with choice as well as a method of instructional differentiation. 

Keeping Score
In most video games where score counts as an extrinsic motivator for player achievement, it begins from 0 and rises with each desired action. This seems quite different from the academic grading system, which most students seem to interpret as starting from 100 and decreasing with each undesired action. For this reason, we should stop treating grading as a docking system and treat it as a system in which players earn points instead of having them taken away.

On individual assignments, we should quit setting a maximum point value; students will always compare the grade they receive to what they could have received. Instead, teachers should award points for desired actions (you spelled a difficult word correctly, +1 point; you provided evidence for your argument, +3 points; you used a weekly vocabulary word effectively, +2 points, etc.). Assignments should be returned with a legend that includes ranges of scores in which the student can find their own, and these should be labeled creatively and meaningfully.

For the course as a whole, we do not have the luxury of doing away with As, Bs, Cs, and the like. But we can assemble a system in which earning an A, B, or C depends on the player's performance and effort on individual assignments but does not represent a blind average of scores. Grades should be statistically valid and reliable, but that doesn't automatically mean that we as teachers should be content with plugging numbers into a calculator, pressing average, and mindlessly entering the result into the final report. By looking at students' performance on past assignments, we can assign grades in a more holistic manner that can account for strengths, weaknesses, effort, and -- most importantly -- growth. (Caveat: I don't know how different schools require grades to be calculated; all I do know is that, as important as they are, grades account for shockingly little information about real student performance.)

We should also use principles of video game scoring to create higher levels of transparency in the classroom. For many students, cumulative grades are an abstract concept. They got an A here, a C here, another A here, and a B here, so they figure they must have a B+ or close to it floating around in the big, fluffy cloud of grades. Instead, we should provide students with regular (weekly) reports of cumulative grades, achievements met, progress on competencies, and "Player Tips" for improvement. These reports should be framed in a way that displays scoring and achievement in a positive light.

Reinforce Choice-Making by Using Power-Ups
Incorporate power-ups into the class structure, and let students know that it is entirely their choice when to employ them. The use of these power-ups should be rare (limited to once or twice per year). Here are some examples:

• Double The Fun: Student can choose any assignment except for major ones (long essays, major creative pieces, tests) to count twice in the Final Score. Let students make the choice to double their best score.
• Reboot: Student can choose to retake any quiz besides the mid-term or final exam for a better grade (not to be used on essays, as I feel that students should always have the chance to revise these).
• Freedom Strawberry: Student can choose to opt out of regular journal-writing homework for one night.
• Cloak of Silence: Student can activate the cloak before class for invincibility to cold-calling for the entire class period.
• Turtle of Whitman: Student must clear use of the Turtle of Whitman with the teacher on the day preceding its application; on the following day, the student has 2-3 minutes of devoted floor time to deliver a poem (slam encouraged), short speech, or monologue.
• The Mark of Twain: Like the Turtle of Whitman, The Mark of Twain is cleared with the teacher before class (can be prior to class on the same day). Student will be given 30 seconds at the end of class in which to tell a (classroom-appropriate) joke of their choice.

These are just some starting points. On a final note: it's much less important that we transform a class into a "game" or "video game" than it is that we incorporate elements of great games into coursework. I would argue that choice within a system is the most important of these and, within the context of a school where choice is necessarily constrained by practical considerations, is the element that students will value most.