In the fall of 2012, during my first semester as a middle school language arts teacher, I taught my classes as a multi-player game (MPG). At the start of the year, I invited my students into a world I'd created and dubbed Veritas, and I asked them to take part in an adventure that would weave together tales from our literature study and narratives of their own making. I had a mountain of research to support my instructional choices, but truth be told, standing before them on that first day, I had absolutely no idea if it would work.

p: Tony Dowler via photopin cc

Then they started asking questions.

“I live on this island,” said one eighth grader, pointing to a tiny circular land mass on the map of Veritas. “What's it called?”

“What's the mail system like? How'd we get invites to come train in the capital?” asked a seventh grader.

“My family is from those mountains up north. Do I ride a donkey or something?”

They may seem like simple questions, but they showed me something incredibly important. In asking about the most basic infrastructure, my students revealed that they were buying in to this world, choosing to suspend disbelief, and taking on my challenge to be heroes in an epic story of our making.

My answer to all their questions: “You live there. You tell me.”

In the days and weeks that followed, my students added many points to the map. They invented family bonds, developed my skeleton of a narrative into a rich history, inhabited the texts we studied, and took on active roles within them. They spoke out in defense of their personal interpretations, researched extensively, and wrote pages and pages to tell their own stories.

They became world builders and engaged in powerful literacy practices along the way.

Why Games?

Play, and specifically playing video games, has been a part of my learning process for as long as I can remember. I fondly recall hours spent munching numbers and travelling the Oregon Trail in my elementary school computer lab, and online games like World of Warcraft have made me rethink both how we teach and how we tell stories.

However, we don’t have to be hardcore gamers to incorporate gaming principles into classroom learning activities. We simply need to be willing to take a few lessons that games have to offer. Good games get teaching right in so many ways.

Games offer personal choice and individualized pacing. When we play a game, it might take me multiple tries to master a level or figure out a puzzle. That’s okay. On any given day, I might focus on different areas of gameplay than other players I know. That’s allowed. How can we build similar opportunities for students to work at their own pace and make decisions about how and when they’ll learn our course skills and content?

Some of the best games out there immerse us in their worlds and the tasks at hand because they allow us to decide who we are and how we’ll conduct ourselves. How often do our students go through the points-grabbing motions because they don’t own anything that takes place in the classroom? Allowing my students to make decisions about the world we created together and to build that world for themselves helped them to take ownership of everything aspect of our class learning. The level of agency offered by games and the opportunities for developing identity and voice can be incredibly powerful when leveraged for classroom learning.

Gaming experiences often support teaming opportunities and collaboration. We want students armed with the skills to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and tackle problems together. Ideally, the classroom is a tight-knit community of individuals bound together by a common purpose and similar beliefs about how to get the job done.

Good games nail it when it comes to assessment. Gamers get constant updates about how they’re doing, what their teammates or opponents are up to, and what steps to take to accomplish the next objective. Feedback beyond just a grade is crucial for motivating students to improve their skills.

In games, we stand in fire, die, and learn not to stand in fire again. We fail spectacularly when fighting a boss, research and confer with group members, alter strategy, and win. Learning happens as a result of those failures, and we are okay with failing in games, yet we so often fear failure in the classroom.

However, if we’re looking for mastery of skills, risk-taking, and creativity from our students, failure—followed by reflection and growth—has got to be an option.

Ways to Incorporate Games

When considering making games a part of classroom learning, I believe there are a variety of ways to go.

• Playing Games Designed Specifically for Education
• Engaging Students in a Multiplayer Class Game
• Utilizing Commercially Available Games
• Designing Games

For my initial foray into games for learning, transforming our class into an MPG offered the most opportunities for addressing my students’ literacy goals. This means that students developed their own personas, or avatars, and continuously imagined themselves as characters in a story that I initially developed. Class activities addressing content standards were designed as quests within that imagined world, and completing these quests earned students experience points which allowed their game characters to level up, advancing through the game’s narrative and class content and growing stronger in their abilities over time.

To cap off our school year, and to provide a final method for students to demonstrate skills mastery, we built a final project in which students became game designers themselves. They chose specific content standards from one or more of their other core classes and worked in teams to develop a game that demonstrated those standards. Using the Learning Games Network’s Game Design Tool Kit as our guide for this project and Google Drive for collaborative writing allowed us to address numerous language arts standards, as well.
 
Tips for Getting Started

If you are thinking about using games or gaming principles as a part of your students’ learning, consider the following:

It’s not all about points, badges, and achievements. While these features may be some of the most commonly discussed aspects of gamification, they don’t necessarily lead to greater engagement or more meaningful learning. 

Check out online communities for educators interested in gaming. The folks at 3D GameLab have created a platform for turning any course content into an online game. They’ve also developed a supportive community of educators interested in learning more about the intersection of games and learning and offer both free and paid accounts, as well as a variety of teacher camps for learning more about gaming and other digital learning topics. Additionally, the Games MOOC offers an open online course designed to help participants explore how to use games for learning, and Twitter hashtags like #gbl and #gblchat provide access to ongoing conversations about similar topics.

Start small. My students and I dove immediately into the deep end of gaming implementation and got to learn from many mistakes along the way. Consider applying gaming principles to a single project or unit of study, then build from there.

Communicate with administrators, parents, and students about the learning goals attached to gamified activities. Though a class or project designed with gaming principles in mind may include many of the same learning activities as a more traditional class, those activities may look quite different. Help students to articulate that learning when it is different from what they have experienced in other classes, and help administrators and parents to understand that powerful learning is taking place via class work that looks like play.

Remember one of the best lessons that games have to offer: Be brave. If you’re willing to take risks and learn from failures, you just might achieve something epic.

Laren Hammonds teaches 8^th grade language arts at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her interests include media literacy, cross-curricular collaboration, and the design of learning spaces. Connect with her on Twitter where she goes by @_clayr_, or read more at her blog, Game to Learn.