We had an excellent discussion in my game design class yesterday about emotions in games. I have a stable set of readings and assignments that I have used several years for this meeting, and it's become one that I really look forward to. One little mix-up between my notes and the course plan, though, was that I thought I required them to prepare posters to present their work, but in fact, I had only asked them to post on a discussion board. We ended up having one volunteer share his work, and that was enough for us to have a great discussion.
Because they didn't have posters on the wall, I didn't know who had completed the assignment and who had not. I was surprised, then, when I student came up to me after class to share with me what they did instead of the assignment. (This was a public hallway discussion, so I don't mind sharing it in general here, though I will dodge some particulars.) This student shared that they were feeling frustrated with school in general and so they decided to do an MDA analysis of "school."
The student's conclusion from the analysis was that school is a game of managing diminishing resources. They saw that resources like sleep, socializing, and course grades are always running out, and you have to determine which one to prioritize. An example was that you might have a "B" in a course, but you might let that diminish in favor of putting effort into a course where there is greater perceived need. In analyzing the dynamics, the student observed that the extant systems induce an expectation of particular grades or achievement, which in turn induce a feeling of disappointment when these goals are not met.
We had just briefly discussed in class how theorists like Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois attempted to use play as a framework for describing anthropology or sociology, and I agreed with her assessment: that school seems to have all the properties of being a game. The student seemed a bit pessimistic about it, although by their own admission, they were operating on no sleep. I congratulated her on the appropriate use of the MDA framework to analyze her situation, but I also encouraged her to take a step back and ask why the system is the way that it is. I shared my favorite reference here: John Taylor Gatto's famous essay, "Against School." In it, Gatto describes the six goals of compulsory education as presented in Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education. I expressed to the student something I've said often before: if we understand the goals for which school was designed, we can come to understand some of the deleterious secondary systems that have emerged. However, by the same token, we can also think like designers and consider how to either re-design core systems or hack existing ones. I am a radical, meaning literally that I want to return to the roots, but wholesale redesign tends to tilt too hard against the windmills.
It was a heavy hallway conversation, and I am honored to have been trusted with the story. At the same time, the student did this MDA analysis instead of doing the assigned work. The result was that, while the student arguably had an better sense of MDA and school, they were also not as well prepared to discuss the topic of the day.
Incidentally, I don't think the student's analysis is correct. While it might be true to model school as a game, I think that modeling it strictly as a game of diminishing resources is incorrect. While it's true that time is more measurable than understanding, I think in the common and good cases, the former trades for the latter. The resources that goes into "school" can produce good outcomes, although, by design, they also produce bad. For example, "school" necessitates my making a decision about how to grade a student's participation when they do something personally fulfilling instead of what I asked to be done.
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