Gaming the System

Nine Games to Teach American Government through Active Learning

Alexander H Cohen, John Alden, Jonathan J. Ring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780815384342
  9780815384335
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351204491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: American Government

Gaming the System takes an active approach to learning about American government, using novel, exciting, and highly instructive games to help students learn politics by living it. These timeless games are the perfect complement to a core textbook in American government—covering key topics like the Constitution, the Supreme Court, Congress, political participation, campaigns and elections, the federal bureaucracy, the social contract, social movements, and public opinion—and can be applied to specific courses at other levels, as well.

For Instructors: These nine games are designed to be easily inserted into courses, with all but one fitting into one class session and all flexible enough to adapt or scale as needed. Games are designed so that students will be ready to play after minimal preparation and with little prior knowledge; instructors do not need to design or prepare any additional materials. An extensive instructor-only online resource provides everything needed to accompany each game:

• summary and discussion of the pedagogical foundations on active learning and games;
• instructions and advice for managing the game and staging under various logistical circumstances;
• student handouts and scoresheets, and more.

For Students: These games immerse participants in crucial narratives, build content knowledge, and improve critical thinking skills—at the same time providing an entertaining way to learn key lessons about American government. Each chapter contains complete instructions, materials, and discussion questions in a concise and ready-to-use form, in addition to time-saving tools like scorecards and 'cheat sheets.' The games contribute to course understanding, lifelong learning, and meaningful citizenship.

1
Introduction

Orientation: Welcome to Learning Through Gaming!

The Premise of the Book: Games and the Human Experience

We all played games when we were children. Whether it was Monopoly with the family, cribbage in study halls in high school, online games with friends, or simply inventing rules for make-believe at the playground, we have all—at some point in our lives—been captivated by gaming. Today legions of Americans continue to play games in their living rooms, in hobby shops, on their smart phones, and—yes—even in class.

Games are healthy. They help us learn about cooperation, competition, and compromise. They challenge us to think strategically and make tough decisions. They can stimulate our imagination and creativity and help us think critically about the world around us. Games are shared ways of making sense of the world. They are recursive; they transmit culture, norms, and values that shape us, just as we shape those aspects of humanity through gaming. And, most of all, a well-designed game can be a lot of fun.

We wrote this book because we believe that games, as a central part of the human experience, can have a central role in formal education as well. This book is a collection of games both grand and simple that are intended to stimulate an interest in political science, help teach important lessons, and make the classroom more enjoyable by making learning fun.

The Purpose of the Book: Learning Through Gaming

This book provides impactful educational games that enable learners to experience American politics rather than simply read about it. In these games, you will play as congresspersons, social activists, voters, and framers of the Constitution. Your experience will be rich and possibly complicated because each game tasks you with balancing priorities and making tough decisions, just like politics in the real world. This is no accident. The rules and mechanics of these games are drawn from actual challenges, negotiations, and struggles in US politics and society. It is our hope that the authentic nature of these games will help you to better understand the content of American politics and leave you with much to think about.

The games in this book, like the practice of politics, are also competitive. Politicians constantly jockey to get what they want, inevitably resulting in winners and losers. Our games reflect this reality by having players strive to obtain more resources, points, policy priorities, or movement victories than other players. Players in Chapter 4’s Hard-Won Equality, for example, compete as different organizations within a broader social movement, seeking prestige for themselves while also trying to further the goals of the movement as a whole. This sort of realistic competition is not only authentic but also educational. The motivation engendered by competitive gaming stimulates learning and retention.

As much as we stress the authenticity of these games, though, they are not meant to duplicate reality. They are ways to play with reality to better understand it. In this sense, the games are not simulations. They do not replicate a historical event or process, nor are players ever asked to roleplay a particular historical figure. The games do, however, embody key ideas, questions, or challenges. The gameplay of Chapter 9’s The Tragedy of the Lagoon exemplifies this starkly. In it, you play as lagoon monsters trying to survive, but this premise is almost inconsequential because the struggles that the monsters face are universal and easily applicable to US politics and society.

Why Games and Active Learning Work

Educational games like the ones found in this book are part of a broader approach to education called ‘experiential learning’ or ‘active learning.’ This style of teaching prioritizes student interaction and collaboration in the classroom. You have likely encountered various forms of active learning before, such as small group discussions, ‘fishbowls,’ ‘think-pair-shares,’ and other activities that have students investigating and analyzing topics together rather than passively digesting the content of an instructor’s lecture or slideshow.

Some academic disciplines have thoroughly embraced active learning. Nursing is a good example (Bradley, 2006; Lasater, 2007). Intuitively, this makes sense. Nurses need significant content knowledge, but they also need to be able to access that knowledge in a wide variety of particular circumstances. Each patient is unique. Other disciplines, such as history, require significant content knowledge but do not face the same issues as nurses in needing to access that information in high stress situations. While active learning can still help teach historical content, it is not surprising that history programs use it less than nursing programs. In political science, we are arguably somewhere in between history and nursing programs in our using of active learning.

We have written this book because we think that political science should use active learning tools in the classroom more than it already does. Active learning works. For example, it helps students retain the information they encounter (Asal, 2005). Active learning gives students multiple ways to access and understand content. It puts them in a position where they can learn from each other, approach the content in their own way at their own pace, try out ideas, and build off of each other’s strengths. All of this allows for deeper understanding and greater retention (Olson, 2012). Following from these findings, the games in the book encourage teamwork, negotiation, and collaboration that create mutual support networks among students to help them master the course’s content. Our own research supports this as well.

Active learning has also been found to increase student motivation to learn (Petranek & Black, 1992; Asal, 2005). We witnessed this ourselves when testing the games. Students would often end the games fired up, having found new enthusiasm for the class and the content. Active learning also tends to boost learner confidence, which psychologists call ‘self-efficacy’ and is a big part of a person’s motivation to learn (Shellman & Turan, 2006).

Finally, active learning is a good training ground for the post-college world. By emphasizing initiative, critical thinking, teamwork, and, yes, shaking students out of their ‘comfort zone,’ games can help prepare students for scenarios they will encounter in their future careers (Dougherty, 2003; Rackaway & Goertzen, 2008). Lectures can efficiently convey information, but they often do little to help students practice using the information they are encountering. Active learning works to solve this problem by having students use information much as they would in the workplace, such as in collaborative settings and on projects. The skills practiced in our games—critical thinking, strategizing, teamwork, negotiating, problem-solving, etc.—should be useful wherever you go after college. This book is consciously—and at times meticulously—designed to provide all these benefits to learners.

How to Get the Most Out of Games

Classroom Decorum

These games are competitive in nature, but there is no reason why they ought to be cutthroat. You will enjoy your experience the most if you accept victories graciously and losses with a smile. If you find yourself becoming so invested in a game that you are becoming angry or frustrated, it is time to take a step back and remember that this is just a learning tool like any other.

Preparation

Most of these games cannot be successfully played unless you read games ahead of time and prepare a basic strategy prior to the class in which the game is scheduled. Consult your instructor if you have questions about this. While the games in this book vary in complexity, few can be picked up entirely on the fly. If you spend twenty minutes reading a game while it is in progress, you are sure not only to lose but also to lose badly. Most students spend some time thinking critically about possible strategies, forming alliances, and considering opening moves well in advance of the game, and while these are not guarantors of success, they will certainly help you along. Reading the evening or morning before a game is good practice.

The Public Space

While playing your game, be sure to pay attention to the Public Space. The Public Space is utilized in virtually every game as a central place to display and update information relevant to the game. The exact nature of the Public Space will be determined by your instructor: it may be a whiteboard, a projected Excel file, or even something of their creation. No matter its form, though, the Public Space will contain vital strategic information necessary for you to succeed. Use it to make strategic decisions about your opponents, evaluate your own possible decisions, and try to predict what might happen next.

The Golden Rule: Your Instructor Runs the Show

The most important thing to keep in mind as you read this book is that no matter what is written in a chapter, your instructor has the final say in resolving disputes, interpreting rules, or even changing them. There are a number of reasons for this. Different instructors may use the same game to teach different lessons, depending upon the focus of your class, and so they may tweak rules accordingly. They may also opt to change the timing of rounds or make sudden adjustments to rules. Remember that when your instructor does such things, they do them for good reasons, so do recognize that they run the classroom, not this text. Listen to them.

The Rest of the Book

In the following chapters, you will find nine games, most of which should take about forty-five minutes to play (though instructors have the ability to lengthen or shorten them), as well as a collection of shorter games in the final chapter. In Chapter 2, Signing the Social Contract, you will find yourself in a fictional state of nature and must consider the central question of whether you need a government. Your initial situation is grim and illustrates the distressing conundrums inherent to surviving in an uncertain world. You have to gather enough resources to survive both today and in the future while weighing the merits of going it alone, grouping up, or even stealing from a neighbor. As the rounds of the game progress, you will interact through structured exchanges to advance up the ladder of civilization toward government, but not all may like the idea of a sovereign. The winners will be those who gather the most resources, whether under the protection of a state or through the freedom of the state of nature.

Chapter 3, A More Perfect Union, will take you to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where you will serve as a delegation from a given state. Your goal is to re-sculpt Madison’s initial proposal for the Constitution in your favor. To do so, you are given objectives and provided with rules of debate and amendment. Massachusetts, for instance, desires representation to be apportioned on the basis of population, while Georgia seeks the opposite. However, as with the Constitution, the document can only be ratified by three-fourths of the delegations, making it very difficult to assemble a final document without forcing you to make compromises in your initial strategies. It may be quite difficult for three-fourths of the states to agree on one version of the Constitution, and so students will be pressed to negotiate carefully across several well-defined policy areas, just like the actual delegates in 1787. The game’s winner is the delegation that achieves the most points through seeing your objectives represented in a final ratified document.

Chapter 4 brings you Hard-Won Equality. This game conveys the instrumental struggles faced by social movement organizations pursuing legal equality in the United States. Students will work in small groups to create and implement a strategy for a hypothetical social movement organization modeled after key elements of the Women’s Rights Movement of the 1920s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. You will spend finite resources on tactics such as protests, lobbying, and public outreach to overcome the myriad obstacles you encounter while pushing for change in a rigged system. Along the way, you will grapple with tough questions about equality, rights, and civic engagement in a democracy.

Chapter 5, Nomination Scrimmage, explores electoral politics through a hypothetical contest between five imaginary Republican candidates on Super Tuesday. To succeed, you will need to carefully determine your candidate’s ideological dispositions and policy positions and then campaign among an ideologically diverse set of states that feature different rules of apportioning representatives. Successful resource management and an eye for strategy are crucial to beating the other candidates who are after the same goal as you: the Republican nomination for president.

Chapter 6 delves into lawmaking. Written by Committee is set in a heated conference committee formed to resolve disagreements between the Senate and House versions of a bill. The game will be a whirlwind microcosm of lawmaking in which you, a legislator, will succeed based on how closely the compromise bill the committee creates matches your own preferences. You will be able to wheel and deal, bribe and spy, and win favor with constituents and interest groups based on what you accomplish in the committee. No one will get everything they want in this game, but the lawmaker who comes closest wins.

In A Best-Case Scenario, found in Chapter 7, you will quest to reach the highest court in the land and prevail there. You will act as lawyers for the plaintiff in a landmark case that serves as the narrative backbone of the gameplay. You will attempt to make correct choices as you move your case toward the Supreme Court. In order to win, you must seek an expedient path to the Supreme Court and do your best to convince at least five of the nine justices to take your side. Along the way, you will need to use your knowledge of the US judicial system to avoid setbacks that can cost the unprepared their shot at victory.

Chapter 8 offers Agency and Oversight. At stake are the relative powers of the executive and legislative branches of the government in this tug of war over how much independence federal bureaucrats should have. You will play as either a government agency or a congressional committee tasked with monitoring an agency. These institutions want different things and try to outdo each other in a principal–agent interaction that results in lots of opportunities for both conflict and compromise. The negotiated outcomes that agencies and committees reach yield political capital, which can in turn be spent strategically to improve one’s standing in the public’s eye and move players that much closer to victory.

In Chapter 9, The Tragedy of the Lagoon, you will be torn between profit and cooperation in this economic battle royal. The fictional premise of the game puts you in the role of lagoon monsters who have to make tough choices as they try to survive and thrive in their watery home. Eac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Signing the Social Contract: A Game About the State of Nature
• Chapter 3 A More Perfect Union: A Game About the Constitutional Convention
• Chapter 4 Hard-Won Equality: A Game About Social Movements
• Chapter 5 Nomination Scrimmage: A Game About Primary/Caucus Strategy
• Chapter 6 Written by Committee: A Game About Lawmaking
• Chapter 7 A Best-Case Scenario: A Game About the Supreme Court
• Chapter 8 Agency and Oversight: A Game About Bureaucratic Politics
• Chapter 9 The Tragedy of the Lagoon: A Game About Resource Management
• Chapter 10 The People Have Spoken: A Game About Interest Groups and Messaging
• Chapter 11 Game Goulash
• Index