Adapting Games for GBL
Issues, Concerns, and Solutions
7-9 June 2024
Adapting Games for GBL
Hello. My name is Mikolaj Sobocinski. Thank you for inviting me to present at GBL Virtual Conference for 2024. So far, I used to work at a few universities in Poland. I travelled around Europe on exchange programmes and study visits. At present, I live and work in Kuwait. I have around 20 years of experience in introducing games in education; around 15 years in gamification in education, and nearly as much in adapting games for my courses.
Today, I would like to share a few of my views on GBL and on adapting games for GBL. But before we can start discussing adapting anything for GBL, first we need to consider what we actually can adapt when we consider games...
Games do not exist! It is a concept which Witgenstain described as undefineable because games fluctuate and change and depend on ever-shifting vocal interactions and the language which is intangible.
We could also follow Huizinga, and state that games are behavioiurs guided by arbitrary rules with specific win conditions.
However, neither of those approaches helps much when you are a teacher trying to make your lessons fun without overthinking it. But, just for the sake of the argument, lets say that we can clearly differentiate the following (although it is not a comprehensive list):
- commercial off the shelf games (COTs)
- games for learning / educational games
- educating games
- serious games
- simulations & models
- RPGs & LARPs
- play (not games)
And let’s not forget that playing, having fun, is not a game. When you wistle for fun or draw for fun or play a ball for fun, without rules... That’s not playing rule-based and goal-oriented games with specific win-conditions in mind.
So, it seems that as a classroom teacher, you have a variety of options to choose from when you wish to use games or adapt games for your lessons.
On purpose, I included here educational games which are made specifically for learning purposes – this means that they may be games per se, but sometimes are not that fun to play. So are they really games or just interactive activities?
I specifically also wanted to have educating games to stress that there is a whole group of commercial and play-for-free games which have extremely high educational value or align with learning outcomes. Let’s say Sid Mayer’s Civilization series.
And then we have serious games, simulations, models, RPG, LARPS... seen as separate entities.
However, this is a distorted view. Those games are interrelated or overlapping. There are commercial games with RPG elements or simply they are RPG. There are commercial games like Harpoon which I tried to play in 1990s . It was so detailed that it was closer to serious games for naval schools students.
These are not separate entities – these are fuzzy categories.
However, if we look at games available today. At those thousands of tabletop, narrative, video, and mobile games availble at the market nowadays, they are all connected one way or another. Well, maybe not all of them, but there are no clear-cut division any more with all games completely different and indepentend from the rest.
Then there is gamification which takes from games but is neither games nor GBL. Don’t get me started on how often I need to make this distinction at conferences and workshops.
So, what do we want to adapt? Games? Which games are we talking about?
Well, when you see that there are so many different games and that their features overlap and classifications break down, it becomes extremely difficult for a teacher to start considering what it means to adapt a game for GBL.
So the first question which the teacher really needs to ask, before adapting a game, is What is my goal? and What is this game supposed to do for me and my students? These questions are more important as they will enable us to chose specific games or game elements for our needs.
Without understanding the purpose of the course we teach, there is little point in discussing what and how to adapt.
Again, this presentation is not going to detail various curricula, educational approaches or philosophies, but let’s focus on a few examples. Different age groups will require different content even from the same skills like reading comprehension or critical analysis. Different subjects have different, distinct, or overlapping collections of knowledge.
Or maybe, our game is supposed to influence and boost skills or kinds of intelligence. After all, games are used as ice-breakers or team-bonding sessions when empathy is more important than any knowledge we might gain.
Understanding the goal of the task we want to build around the adapted game is paramount.
So, to cut a long story short. First, it helps to understand the goal of the course we teach, and individual lesson or task, and the needs of our students, and their wants. They will want to play, but play what, when, how? It depends on your specific group of students and your specific course. Only then we can properly tackle the question „adapt how?”
So how do we adapt games?
From my experience, I can say that... You need to be a player. You don’t need to be a good player, a winning-at-all-costs player, but you must be a player. It helps when you understand games with their components, mechanics, and dynamics to follow Prof. Werbach’s division (For the Win, 2012 and 2020).
When you see what rules and pieces are at play, you may notice that there are the same or at least similar rules and pieces which your students use in your classroom. That’s the real vantage point you’re looking for. When a few core game components mirror some of core knowledge or skills in your course, bingo! That’s what we’re really looking for in games when we want to adapt them.
It helps when the game follows your own likes. You will become invested.
It helps when the game follows your students likes. They will become immediately invested.
That’s the point, right? Suspense of disbelief, the willingess to dive into the rabbit whole, so that playing the game feels natural, and the learning happens nearly invisibly alongside.
How do you do that?
- simplify the rules
- run the game with students
- notice mistakes
- simplify
- run
- notice
- iterate and iterate until you get to only a few remaing elements which still make the game fun to play, and your goal-oriented elements become indispensible for the game
A few examples from my yard are World Peace Game, Once Upon a Time, Alise Is Missing, and Dungeon Quest.
So let’s start with World Peace Game (link). This is and educational game. A game designed specifically for GBL by John Hunter. Please watch his TED Talk to find out more (original talk from 2011 and students' perspective from 2013). To make it simple, it is a game about world conflicts and interdependencies, and about the cost of war, and the cost of peace.
I believe this is one of the best GBL games I have heard about in my life, and also it is one of the least accessible games which will be nearly never used at schools. The game takes around a day to play. To have all necessary warm-ups, analysis, and closing sessions, the game will take 3 days... Who can carve out 3 full days from their school calendar.
This is what I am talking about. Games, even the best games, need to be adapted to the course you’re teaching and to your students. Most games, even education-oriented games, will probably not meet your needs and expectations in practice.
So from overubundance, let’s look at something small that you can hold at the palm of your hand, Once Upon a Time (Atlas Games). The game was developeed in 1993 and it has survived on the market till today. It must be good. You play cards, tell stories, steal stories from others, and try to reach your own ending on your final card before others can finish their stories. It is fun.
Without any changes, Once Upon a Time can be used in the classroom. The producers even added extra sections in the manual explaining how to do it!
However, in my opinion, the game has too many rules and takes too much time to play in the classroom. So, as I said before, let’s think about core elements and core rules:
- randomly distributed cards with story elements
- one card equals one sentence or story part
- one person can speak at a time
- the story can evolve towards any cards added to it
- it is supposed to have an ending = meaningful story from the beginning to the end despite having multiple authors
That’s a set of rules you can explain to your students in 5 points.
Distribute a smaller batch of cards to each student and you will simplify their choices.
Allow support between players, and you turn a competitive game into a cooperative task.
Divide your students into small teams, and have them create different stories, even from the same cards.
Let students compete in writing their stories down, telling them, enacting them.
Whatever they will do, they will practice, revise, and self-correct.
It’s one of the best adapted games for GBL I have seen.
Another of my favourite games is Alice Is Missing (Hunters Entertainment). I must admit that I adapted it and played it with teachers only. At least so far. I am still waiting for the right moment to use it in the classroom.
In Alice Is Missing you need 5 to 8 players or teams who uncover cards about events in a little town where they live, and in the process they try to find out what happened to their friend, Alice. To spice it up, the whole game is played via a chat room, so it is a completely silent game even though it is a card game with players sitting in the same room.
What are the elements? A few types of cards: characters, motivations, secrets, NPCs, items, locations, and more or less this is it. It is a proper RPG verging on a LARP, so there are preparation instructions with lines and veils. There is a pre-set up process, the game itself, and reflection meeting. All of that can take 3 to 4 hours.
It is an amazing game which you will never use in the classroom. Unless...
Unless you can spot the key elements that align with your course. For me, it is communicating effectively and negotiating meanings in a foreign language.
I stripped the game, left only the names of characters without their motivations and secrets cards.
I shifted the timing to go from 90 minutes to 30 minutes, and scaled down the preparations to 7 steps required from students:
- create groups
- choose the writer for the group who will write in the chatroom
- receive a character card
- familiarise students with all names of characters and places (nothing else, just familiarise)
- explain to students that they are in different locations so they can communicate via shared chatroom only
- give the first student the message that they post in the chatroom
- every 2-3 minutes provide students (one-by-one group) with a new clue which they then share in the chatroom.
The game evolves organically from the clues on cards and students’ speculations. It is an amazing experience, and from 4 hours of playtime and 40 pages manual, it can be scaled down to 2 pages and to 30 minutes of meanigful and uninterrupted written exchanges.
My approach to breaking down the rules and deleting those I do not need comes from the goals of my courses. With different courses, the adaptation would look completely different. It’s the learning goals which shape adaptations. But the game remains a game rather than a boring and self-centred educational quasi-game.
However, adapting a game can also mean replacing game elements (nearly) completely. In order to play Dungeons Quest (board game geek page), you need the board, tiles, cards of various types, tokens, pawns, and what not. Nearly all of that can be replaced by drawings on the whiteboard. That’s how far I modified this game.
Just for fun, I retained monsters, figthing, and loot as a spinning wheel in a PowerPoint presentation.
What students do during the adapted game is that they make their moves, marke them on the labirynth map that they keep on drawing on the board, and note down their actions in their own quest log. They also write down what other players do if they come into interaction or visibility range.
After 20-30 minutes the game is over, and each plaer (or team of players) has a plan for a short narrative about brave characters, fearsome monsters, and plot twists worthy of Terry Pratchet. Each story is different as players write down their own perspectives, wishes, and goals.
Again, players/students think they are just playing a game for fun, while they are really practicing outlines, vocabulary retrieval, sentence structures, and finally story or paragraph writing.
Again, for the fun of it, I kept the pawns from the original game, but I asked students do draw their own pieces, which later we stuck with magnets to the board.
So if I were to reach a conlusion of using games in education, or game-based learning if you will, I would say „do not do it!” Don’t play games which are too long, too complex, and diverge too far from your learning outcomes. Adapt them, as you can retain all or most of the fun, while managing play time and game resources much better towards your specific educational goals.
I know it looked like I have just reached a conclusion, but no. Sorry. Always wait for „but.” Everything that is important comes after a „but.”
If we want to discuss GBL seriously, we need to consider legal ramifications and authorsip of games and authorship of game adaptations.
After all, can you take the newest song by Taylor Swift, change it to your liking, and use it in lessons with a few hundred students, share it with dozens or hundreds of teachers, and gain place in the Hall of Fame for wondrous teachers?
Which laws protect Taylor Swift?
Which laws protect game designers?
Which laws protect game publishers and distributors?
Which laws protect the game itself with its components and rules?
Which laws relate to teachers, students, schools, local councils, libraries, or ministries of education?
As far as I can see it, we will not have GBL introduced professionally and globally in education as long as these questions are not addressed and answered adequately.
We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars invested over years and decades into some games. What right do teachers have to change them and adapt them for free?
Who is the author of the game?
Who is the author of the adaptation which sometimes requires skills, knowledge, devotion, and hundreds of hours or re-designing and playtesting?
I don’t have those answers, but I do see the need to discuss legal issues here at the conference focused on Game Based Learning and Game Assisted Learning.
The problem is not trivial or simple. Personally, I buy all the games I play and adapt. However, GBL games are distributed in schools for hundreds and thousands of students. This is mass publication. National schools do not earn a penny on education and application of games. However, private schools do.
Should private/commercial schools share their profits when GBL is introduced?
Should Game Designers invest in schools which introduce GBL and advertise and distribute their games for free?
I do not have answers to those questions, but I would love game developers to take part in this discussion and reach some conclusions. There are tons of game elements and demos available to play, for funs, for free. Are these elements and demos legally available to teachers and schools? So far, I can say I have not seen any decisive step from game dev in the gaming conferences I have attended.
So after all those considerations, should we even adapt games for GBL?
Should we use games in education at all?
I say „yes,” we should use games and adapt games in education. But we, teachers, need to be trained in seeing differences between games. Not just video and board games, but types of games, types of mechanics and elements. Many teachers undergo compulsory workshops on annual basis, others do it out of their own initiative.
We need more courses tackling GBL practically. Teachers need to become active players who interact with gaming community, and eventually become not only consumers of games but creators to some extent.
We need to follow rules and the law, but the law needs to follow the current state of affairs. Nearly all games are widely publicised online with multiple free resources provided for funs. What about the teachers?
What about sharing and cooperating with schools and ministries of education?
If 11-bit studios could do it with This War of Mine, every studio can do it.
So, from this perspective, I would say that we need to hope for a three I’s approach in GBL.
- We need teachers willing to apply GBL and this really boils down to adapting commercial games.
- Teachers do not exist in vacuum and their working week can’t really stretch any more. Teaching 15 or 18 or 20 hours translates to 40+ working hours every weeks. Weekends included. Schools, administration, resources, and whole teams belong to institutions, not to individual teachers. That’s where further insitutional support is required.
- Games industry needs to awaken to the fact that majority of students play their games in schools and courses, state, private, tutored, you name it. Without cooperation, the application of Game Based Learning and Game Assisted Learning suffers, education stagnates, and game industry profits do not reflect their actual reach of the target, the clients.
INDIVIDUAL
- skills
- knowledge
- time
INSTITUTIONAL
- teams, internal cooperation, sharing resources
- TL (team leaders) and HOD (Heads of Departments) support, vertical and horizontal communication, top-to-bottom AND bottom-to-top communication
- administration support, IT support, providing access to institutional resources and facilities
INDUSTRIAL
- free resources for fans - clear regulations for educational usage
- cooperation with individual teachers, teachers' organisations and associations, and with schools
- cooperation of education industry en masse, with local councils, with ministries of education on local, domestic, and international levels
In the end, reaching the real closure of this presentation. Here are more general three points to finish with:
- I believe that in Game Based Learning and Game Assisted Learning , we should consider legal issues and ask game designers and publishers to start cooperating with education industry. Look at Minecraft Edu or This War of Mine available for free in Polish schools.
- I am using the terms Game Based Learning and Game Assisted Learning on purpuse. I believe that the vast majority of GBL is really GAL, where games are used as warm ups, elicitation tools, practice, or revision tools, but never as the main element of the syllabus. Introducing Game Assisted Learning is much easier than pretending Game Based Learning is the same at primary schools and in the simulations used by the military, firefighters, or state administration training sessions. Game Assisted Learning with adapted games is the Holy Grail of GBL.
- GBL works best, in my opinion, when we adapt commercial games. They are fun to play. They have survived on the market and have gone through testing, prototyping and iterating. They are already prepared in clear sets of components, mechanics, and dynamics – if you know what to look for. They can be dismantled and reassembled into the perfect game you need in your class. They want to be adapted! It takes practice, it takes trial and error, but it works. And it’s fun! Arent’s games supposed to do that for us? So adapt games for the benefit of your students.
So there you have it, my views and examples of adapting games for GBL.
I hope you enjoyed the presentation and managed to find some useful take-aways.
If you have any questions, please write to me.
Thank you a lot for your time and I hope to hear from you.
