In the spring of 2013 and 2014 a group of college professors got together to play and discuss games. Overall the group contained two psychologists, an economist, a classicist, a media studies professor, an anthropologist and a biologist. Our main focus involved whether we could pull games or game mechanisms into our classrooms. We were purposefully open-minded about how this might happen (e.g., as content, simulations, mechanics, etc.). Being academics, the discussions often went off into other directions. Time permitting, I will occasionally try and share the gist of some of the conversation surrounding a particular game. Up today:
Image by carthaginian
Consensus:
Very clean design, quick to pick up, and oddly thematic for a worker placement game.
Some found it to be, well, boring and devoid of any real drama.
Others found that it provided them with something akin to a classic “flow” experience (i.e., utterly engaging.)
Our discussion didn’t end up focusing on our gaming experience with Agricola, though. Instead we ended up talking about how the game might serve as a metaphor for classroom learning more generally. Capturing some aspects of that discussion will be the focus for what follows.
Agricola’s Slow Accretion & the Pace of Learning
Image by <PERSON>On BGG there is a criticism of Agricola that goes something like, “Just when you start to really be able to accomplish things, the game ends.” We all could see why that experience would be frustrating for a particular sort of gamer, and yes, the “imposed patience” in the game brought us up short. A player really can’t do very much on each turn, and the impact of any given “play” (e.g., to grab food from the pond, to acquire some timber, etc.) is extremely limited. But those in the group that enjoyed the game the most (i.e., the psychologists and the biologist), stated that this was central to what they enjoyed about the game.
Now, the psychologist has a soft spot for turtles, and the biologist does most of her work in the field. So maybe we shouldn’t hold it against them that they prefer a “slow,” “boring” game like “Agricola.” But whether Agricola is in fact slow and boring, everyone agreed that the slow accretion in the game accurately captures something realistic about learning. 504
Despite what our culture tells us, learning is not “the big cram” or the “stylish finish.” It is the steady effort put in day-in and day-out that you don’t think is taking you anywhere, until suddenly you realize that you’re there. It’s that steady work that permits real panache. It’s that steady accumulation of small outcomes that enables the big finish. Another word for this is “pacing.” Agricola has a deliberate pace caused by limited actions that produce highly restricted outcomes. Outcomes do “stack” and interact over time, but very slowly. You might say that the pacing is “organic” and in that sense the pacing fits the theme of the game.
Pacing is something that all of the profs in our group think about with regards to their teaching – especially with regards to our intro and intermediate courses. As one of the psychologist put it, since he had a sports background, he’d always thought of his teaching in terms of sports analogies: the semester is a season, the final is the championship and to get ready for it, sometimes you have really hard practices, but sometimes you go easy. It’s all about VOx!! [running reference] In this analogy, the coach/professor directly dictates pace, and the athletes/students go along with the workouts. The problem is that in the classroom we have limited ways of “seeing” most assignments getting done (in contrast to the way that a coach observes a workout). In other words, professors have at best indirect control over real, experienced pace. And maybe that’s how it should be…students are supposed to take responsibility for their own education / scheduling given everything else that is going on in their lives.
In any event <PERSON> basically provided us with another analogy / set of mechanisms to think about in a classroom – an enforced incrementalism that mirrors the way that actual learning normally takes place. Maybe reading assignments should not be unveiled until the start of a given week. Maybe, students could “preselect” from a set of available assignments (oral report to prof, one page homework on x, short quiz, etc.) the work that they would do in any week. 873