Games

Image source: Methodkit.com

what

Games are an excellent way to provide a deep, immersive learning experience. They can also be useful for researchers to view actual behaviors (instead of, say, interpreting "real" responses on survey items) based on rules, boundary conditions, and use of game artifacts. This is new territory for management researchers, maybe less new for psychology researchers, but still amazingly promising as a research method. Why? Because games offer "sophisticated yet well-defined challenges for AI practitioners" (quote paraphrased from Bard et al, 2019; full cite below).

Playing tabletop games (and by extension, probably card games) brings you four key 'literacies' that they foster: psychological literacy, social literacy, systems literacy, and the novel term procedural literacy (Informit.com).

Need more evidence? This is the opening sentence of a recent research study of challenges facing the "new frontier" of AI research: "From the early days of computing, games have been important test-beds for studying how well machines can do sophisticated decision making." (Bard, N., Foerster, J. N., Chandar, S., Burch, N., Lanctot, M., Song, H. F., ... & Dunning, I. (2019). The Hanabi Challenge: A New Frontier for AI Research. arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.00506. There are 15 co-authors on this paper. More cooperation! Good luck with the P&T reviews.)

"The Hanabi Challenge" generates nearly 300 hits on google scholar. I bet it hits over 3,000 within the next two years. More on this to come...

read

Hanabi Card Game highlighted in Wall Street Journal

Why the Card Game Hanabi Is the Next Big Hurdle for Artificial Intelligence (Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2019; pay-walled). Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become really good at winning games based on competition (chess, GO, etc), yet is far behind humans in its ability to simulate cooperative games. Hanabi is a cooperative card game in which each round of play results either in all the players winning or all the players losing. The trick to the game is interpreting the limited verbal cues players can give each other about the cards you are holding; everyone can see your cards except you, and vice versa.

Why should you care about cooperative games? Nearly everything you do in your professional life will require you to cooperate with other people. Developing empathy for others and an understanding of quick chemistry through game play are valuable skills. And imagine how much more productive you could be with an AI assistant that has been trained in "theory of mind" as your everyday collaborator.

10 fun learning games to share in google classroom with bookwidgets

This link from bookwidgets describes how to gamify the google classroom; they're officially listed on the #withClassroom website. THe Randomness app looks particularly promising to use as a tool for developing skills in creating meaningful stories from randomly appearing emojis. You could use it as a pitching or writing exercise. Check out the screenshot below.

I ran a summer course completely off of google classroom in 2017; reactions from students were mixed, but they were all relieved not to have to use Blackboard. Actually I ran the course off of my old wikispace with schedules and activities for each session posted on both the wikispace and google classroom. (By the way, dear reader, if you have come across a way to use google classroom to share grades with students I'd love to hear about your experience and what you did.)

Research

This section is mostly for me so I know where to find the research studies from which I'm drawing insights and inspiration.


<-- Here's an example (TED TALK) of how you can conduct both research and classroom teaching by hacking a board game. For research you can vary way more artifacts of the game than Paul Piff did, but he chose some simple variables to hack that produced interesting research. This approach is great for researchers like myself who are comfortable with allowing the experiment, behaviors, or data surprising you. Paul demonstrates other experiments in this Talk that would never pass my IRB but are worthy of some watch time...

In the classroom you can use rigged or hacked games with students so that they can experience the phenomenon or "theory" you're teaching. A great immersive experiential learning activity!

VIEW

I make a lot of my own card games based on research (theoretical and empirical) and practice in entrepreneurship and management. Shown here are some useful resources for making your own card games. Full disclosure, I usually start with 3x5 cards made on the fly and create as many as I can until I reach a saturation point; then I model the game based on what I have and repeat the process. I also have the luxury of working with great students who enjoy collaborating in the process by playing the games and giving immediate feedback. Build-measure-learn.

The students enjoy the process even more when they know the professor is eating his own dog food!

Here are three good ways to make playtest cards for your game in development. From Cheapassgames.com

Presents two methods for prototyping playing cards you developed so that you don't have to send it back to the professional printer for a revised deck; work out the details with prototype decks first! (7:06)

You can get card holders for cheap on Amazon and other friendly neighborhood shops. (Yes, I harbor a certain bias against unfriendly neighborhood shops. And clowns. But just the unfriendly ones.)

It's also worth it to get a dedicated corner rounding cutter. I got this one ( <-- ) from Hobby Lobby in the scrap-booking section, paid less than $4. Yay.

This one is for 5 mm rounding. This works best for playing card and 3x5 card sizes IMHO.

Make your own board games kit on Kickstarter - August 30, 2020