Game-based learning

Games can be fun, but they can also be serious. But whether playing in earnest or not, games teach you a lot. You learn the rules (aka, "procedural rhetoric), how to use the rules to win (usually), and you learn to imagine yourself in the world of the game. In this class, I hope to make use of games to lighten the mood amidst the never-ending pandemic, but also to encourage real learning. Much of the student work will be linked to a co-operative game, Divided Kingdoms, 561 (part role-playing game, part introduction to Merovingian author, Gregory of Tours), where we imagine ourselves as the different historical actors making up the elite world of sixth-century Francia (aka, Frankish Gaul/ France).

We are running the course as a game as a result of conscious pedagogy. Playing games makes you think about history differently - the students become actors/player agents and thus become responsible for deciding what you (and your character) need to learn.

Why Games? University is a bit of a game. When you first come here, you need to learn the rules, and then over the course of your undergraduate degree you pick up tricks and strategies that help you do better and better at it – like learning to play boardgames or videogames. One of words of advice from one of my professors that really stuck with me was that all students need to "Fake it until you make it", by which she meant that you need to put up a professional facade or appearance of doing well in order to do well. This is not to say that you need to feel like you should never show weakness (wrong!), but rather the first stage of learning is making an effort to try to feel like you are a student and to try to believe that you belong in university. The advice was especially helpful to me when I was in grad school because it made realize something important: that even though I might feel like a fake for not knowing everything, I didn't need to know everything at the outset. University is about testing the limits of your knowledge, maybe failing at something, and then playing another round to do better by learning more. In this class I want to take this process of re-imagining yourself a step further. I don't want you to think of yourself as a Carleton student stuck somewhere you might not want to be (?) in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. Clearly, you would prefer to be stuck in the bloodthirsty political and religious world of Merovingian Francia .... at times also ravaged by plague....

After the first few weeks of class, I will assign characters students and the games will begin!