My game studio preproduction class (CS390) is reading Richard Lemarchand's Playful Production Process, and I think it has been a good fit. This same semester, my other studio class (CS490) is working on an Immersive Learning project in collaboration with Minnetrista. This latter group has been struggling with the "Validation" column on our task board and particularly how it relates to playtesting. Many weeks ago, I copied chapter 12 from Lemarchand's book for the CS490 class in order to help them. I referenced it a few times in conversation but did not get a strong sense of traction from it. During the retrospective meeting at the end of the last iteration, it became clear that the students still did not understand playtesting and did not read the chapter I gave them. Funny how that works.
The way I structure the retrospective meeting is that, as we walk through the board of sticky notes, anyone can bring up potential action items. These are tracked on a side board. At the end of the meeting, individuals can champion items from this list, and then the team decides whether or not to invest team effort into making the corresponding change to our methodology.
When it became clear that no one done the reading, there was an awkward pause, and I suggested to our volunteer scribe that I could give the team a quiz about the reading. There was some nervous laughter from the students, but I reminded them that we were not committing to anything yet, and that this was actually a helpful way to put some weight behind the expectations to read this chapter in an otherwise completely project-oriented class. Someone (and I cannot remember if it was I or a student) then added the idea of a structured discussion group around the chapter, which serves the same goal but is a bit less hamfisted.
With the sticky notes all read, we moved into the discussion of the potential action items. I was surprised that a student raised her hand and said, "I think we should have a quiz on the reading." That turned some heads! Her argument was basically the same as mine: it is actually important, and if we put a grade on it, she--and others--will be motivated to do the work. I took a straw poll to see who would be interested in this, and it was only her. I applaud her honest self-evaluation here, even if the rest of the team didn't want to go that direction. However, right afterward, we agreed to set up a structured discussion around the reading, so the first student's momentum was definitely not lost.
A series of unrelated events have me thinking again about the Socratic method, and I decided that this would be an interesting way to approach the discussion of the reading. I asked each of the students to bring either three good questions about the reading or two good questions and a good observation about it. I gave a brief explanation of what I meant by "good," pointing out that the questions should be open-ended, thought-provoking, and designed to move us toward better understanding and improved practices.
When it came time for the discussion, I asked the students to sit in a circle. My plan was to have them toss Cosmo the Space Monkey from speaker to speaker, but when I picked up Cosmo, I realized that his shiny jacket was badly shedding glitter. We ended up tossing Anzen the Safety Pig around instead. I did not have a good method for choosing who would start, so I asked them to pick a number, and the first person to guess became our first speaker. (More specifically, I asked for a number between one and 8 bazillion. A student guessed 58,412 (or something), and I told her she was right. Another student sighed and said, "I was going to guess 14." I told them that they were also right.)
I took many pages of notes, summarizing each question and each response that came up. Having them speak one at a time certainly helped my ability to keep notes. The first question may have been my favorite one since it got into a specific and important part of the reading: is the system image (how the game presents itself) of the game close to your image [designer's model] of the game or something else, and why? These are powerful concepts from the text, and I was disappointed that the discussion immediately turned away from the text and toward an undisciplined sharing of perspectives that were not clearly related to the reading. This was followed by a comparatively meager question of whether we should set aside time for playtesting. The answer, which the was the first response from the team and which you and I both know already, is yes.
After a few questions, I noticed that the same people kept speaking, so I wrote "Pig equity" on the whiteboard without saying a word. Most of the students certainly noticed this, but I didn't see any change in who was speaking. The team seemed to already lay the groundwork that whoever wanted to speak would get the pig rather than what I preferred, which is whomever has the pig decides who should have it next.
Most of the questions had a practical bent, such as, "How do we deal with the awkwardness of staring at people while they play?" A few struck me as real, intellectual attempts to understand the concepts in the reading, such as, "The reading suggests that grumbling about playtesting can be good for a team as long as it is controlled and short-lived. Would this be good for us?" There were a few disappointing questions that unfocused the discussion and moved people toward armchair philosophy, but in a few cases, the students themselves were able to draw conversation back to the text.
This whole time, I was seated in a corner taking notes. A friend in classical education told me that, during such discussions, he likes to walk around the circle, peek in at questions on students' papers, and use these and gentle nudging to help shape the conversation. Ours was not overly chaotic, but I do wish I had set up the room to permit me to do a bit more of this shaping.
I told the students at the beginning that we'd timebox the discussion to half an hour, and I was faced with incredulity. I set the timer for 25 minutes, and at the end, I felt like we could have kept going fruitfully. It was not entirely clear to me that all the students recognized this. Yes, they had had a discussion, but they had not actually made any decisions. That is, despite facing questions like, "Where are we going to conduct testing?" no one actually did anything about it. I wonder if they were trapped by the pattern that most of their classroom discussion has been completely unproductive, as if the talking itself is the goal rather than the discovery of truth and appropriate action taken thereupon. Generally speaking, though, this group, despite its strengths, has shown that it has challenges perceiving opportunities for fruitful action. That is, it is not that they are avoiding activity but that they don't see the opportunity for it. Indeed, this is reflected in the validation problem that gave rise to the need for a discussion group in the first place. Since the beginning of the semester, I have told them that validation is context-dependent: there is no one way to validate tasks, but instead, we have to think about how we really know whether any particular thing is done. We make small steps toward better understanding, but I am still trying to think of ways to help this team see and then seize these opportunities.
