The Multiplayer Classroom

Designing Coursework as a Game

Lee Sheldon

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000039122
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Go beyond gamification's badges and leaderboards with the new edition of the book, first published in 2011, that helped transform education. Going far beyond the first edition of The Multiplayer Classroom, forthrightly examining what worked and what didn't over years of development, here are the tools to design any structured learning experience as a game to engage your students, raise their grades, and ensure their attendance. Suitable for use in the classroom or the boardroom, this book features a reader-friendly style that introduces game concepts and vocabulary in a logical way. Also included are case studies, both past and present, from others teaching in their own multiplayer classrooms around the world. You don't need any experience making games or even playing games to use this book. You don't even need a computer. Yet, you will join many hundreds of educators who have learned how to create multiplayer games for any age on any subject.

Lee Sheldon began his writing career in television as a writer-producer, eventually writing more than 200 shows ranging from Charlie's Angels (writer) to Edge of Night (head writer) to Star Trek: The Next Generation ( writer-producer). Having written and designed more than 40 commercial and applied video games, Lee spearheaded the first full writing for games concentration in North America at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the second writing concentration at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he is now a professor of practice. Lee is a regular lecturer and consultant on game design and writing in the United States and abroad. His most recent commercial game, the award-winning The Lion's Song, is currently on Steam.

SECTION 1

Introduction

QUEST 1

Good Morning. You All Have an F.

“Good morning. Welcome to the first class of the semester. Everyone in this class is going to receive an F”.

One thing I will always regret when I look back on that first day of a new way of teaching is that I didn’t have somebody with a camera standing by to record the expressions on the students’ faces when I said that. The mixture of disbelief, shock, fear, growing umbrage, and more was something to behold. I had a fleeting thought: What if … what if I just walked out after delivering that first line?

At this, the beginning of my third year in the halls of academe, I still wasn’t certain I wanted to be a college professor. There was much to like about the job. My colleagues first and foremost; the intellectual engagement and discussion (something that wasn’t always available during my years in Hollywood); the opportunities for me to learn; and the Bloomington campus of Indiana University itself, regarded as one of the most beautiful in the United States and rightly so.

My office looked out on the Arboretum, the green expanse of grass, gurgling stream, trees, and flowers crisscrossed by walkways at the heart of the campus. To my right was Wells Library. Beyond the Arboretum loomed more monolithic buildings built with the limestone that region of southern Indiana is noted for. The bucolic scene that often captured my attention was once the university’s stadium, the site of the Little 500 bicycle race featured in the film Breaking Away.

Not only did the Arboretum welcome my wool-gathering when I turned bleary-eyed from the computer to refresh both sight and mind, but it also served as a primary location in the first ARG I designed while at IU. That red clock with its eclectic repertoire of chimes, those stone gazebos, bronze statuary—all would take on greater significance in the story of mystery and mayhem we told. They were the unrecognized beginning of the multiplayer classroom.

Not all aspects of college life were as welcome to this refugee from the real world. The bureaucracy can grind as slowly as a limestone wheel, crushing ideas and new initiatives beneath its weight. Faculty meetings at times reduced my reasonable, intelligent, witty human colleagues to priests droning in what seemed like a dead language with an arcane liturgy only the academy understands. And, of course, grading. Grading. I’m haunted by the first class I ever taught at IU; that attempt at grading where I gave letter grades based not on percentages, but feelings, and then tried desperately to translate them into real numbers. My poor students. The tears. The horror.

I didn’t walk out after announcing everyone had an F that first day of class in my third year. Although some students might disagree, I’m not quite that sadistic. Instead I continued, “Unless …”

MOB

Short for “mobile,” the word coined by Richard Bartle, along with Roy Trubshaw, the two creators of the first MUD (Multiuser Dungeon), the precursor to today’s Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOGs). It means any opponent controlled by the computer, rather than another player in an MMO.

Unless they embarked on quests, defeated mobs, and crafted goods from raw materials that would help them earn their way through the brave new world they had just entered. It might look like a classroom, but it was not. And what they experienced there would count, just as it did in a video game. They could level up. Even to an A.

There was an immediate and perceptible shift in the room from shock to interest, and something more: challenge. The gauntlet was thrown right back at me.

OPENING: THE SLIDE

In chess the opening sets the tone for the entire game that will follow. Once the opening moves have been made, the character of the game is established as surely as fate. Win or lose, each player’s role is clearly defined.

On February 19, 2010, the chairman of the Department of Telecommunications, Walter Gantz, and I received an email from Jocelyn Bowie, the Director of Communications and Marketing for the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences. Jocelyn had come across a news report written by Kris Graft (2010) from Gamasutra magazine, a magazine for video game developers.

The talk I mentioned in the Preface, “Beyond Facebook: The Future of Pervasive Games,” given at the Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (DICE) Summit by Carnegie-Mellon professor Jesse Schell, had a surprise in store for us (Figure 1.1). Two-thirds of the way through it, my smiling face suddenly appeared on a PowerPoint slide.

FIGURE 1.1 He could have at least found a good picture of me.

The DICE Summit is held once a year by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences to recognize outstanding achievements and contributions in the gaming industry. As Bryan Ma (2010) described it in a later Gamasutra article, Professor Schell’s talk “starts on the topic of the rise of social media games and moves to discussing convergence of social/new media, technology, entertainment, and so on through game-like constructs; essentially, gameplay being incorporated into everything else we do.” The gamification of society that had been going on underground, yet in plain view for years, suddenly became a hot topic with this one talk. And much to my surprise, I was participating in it.

GAMIFICATION

Simply put, gamification is the application of game mechanics to nongame activities. Its underlying idea is to increase engagement.

As Jesse Schell points out in his talk, we are being bombarded by rewards to modify our behavior from choosing a certain product to making healthier decisions. In my case, the reference was to that class I taught at Indiana University in Fall, 2009, called “Theory and Practice of Game Design.” We will examine this first, stumbling iteration of the multiplayer classroom in detail when we reach Quest 3 and discuss the motivation that supports gamification during Quest 4.

Professor Schell highlighted one aspect of the class that fits the theme of his talk: my grading system used experience points, or XP, to track student progress, not letter grades. The first wave of inquiries from the press and educators hit almost immediately. A second wave struck when Professor Schell’s talk was picked up as the first non-Technology Entertainment Design (TED) talk to be highlighted as part of a weekly series on the TED website.

Again, most of the focus was on XP. When I began to explain that, in fact, the entire class had been designed as a multiplayer role-playing game (RPG) in the vein of World of Warcraft, enough new questions were being asked that a graduate student of mine created a blog with attached forums to answer as many as we could. What a number of those inquiring minds didn’t realize was that we weren’t playing World of Warcraft, or any MMO. This also was not creating a classroom in cyberspace, a concept many educational institutions experimented with at the time such as the one in Figure 1.2. The class is the game.

FIGURE 1.2 A virtual classroom on the Ohio University Second Life campus in 2011.

The multiplayer classroom space was in a real classroom. The class itself was the game—played out in real time in the real world of that classroom with students as players and teacher as the Game Master.

Here’s my edit of a useful definition of Game Master from Wikipedia.

GAME MASTER (AKA GAMEMASTER OR GM)

A Game Master is a person who acts as an organizer, official source for questions regarding rules, arbitrator, and moderator for a multiplayer game. The role of a Game Master in a traditional RPG is to weave the other participants’ player-character stories together, control the nonplayer aspects of the game, create environments in which the players can interact, and solve any player disputes. The basic role of the Game Master is the same in almost all traditional RPGs, although differing rule sets make the specific duties of the Game Master unique to each system.

Why base the classes I designed on World of Warcraft? I was simply using the adventure game and RPG tropes from MMO’s because these were the types of games I enjoyed playing, whether single- or multiplayer. It is not a requirement for a successful multiplayer classroom.

What I didn’t realize in the beginning was how these types of games also supported a concept I mentioned in the Preface that became even more useful as the multiplayer classroom developed: collateral learning, particularly through narrative.

MIDDLE GAME: THE SHIFT

The middle game in chess is wide open. The overall course of the game may have been charted, but here many options present themselves. The number of possible positions is great. The players have multiple decisions to make.

I remember when I first proposed the idea of designing classes as games to my colleagues in the Department of Telecommunications in May of 2009. Professor Edward Castronova, an innovative teacher and economist who focused on massively multiplayer games, had been experimenting with bringing elements of games into the classroom. He was immediately taken with the idea. Others were more skeptical. It was here I first heard the concern that such an approach might not work outside of the area of video games. Yet whatever my ...