Narrative Games 5 Quest: This is Not a Game

Well, as the whole of this blog indicates, I'm a real fan of alternate reality games and I'm convinced that they are the future of narrative games in education.

In order to show that whatever is being taught is relevant to our students, we have to make the connection between class topics and what students experience and care about outside of the classroom. It's not that RPGs and MMORPGs can't do that. An advantage of virtual worlds is that the stakes are lowered and failure is not a catastrophe; you can always reset and try again. That's a huge benefit of "gaming" the learning process, failure becomes an opportunity to try again, rather than a judgement of a student's capabilities in the class. And ideally, the tasks and knowledge learned in-game should transfer seamlessly out to the actual world. But that just doesn't seem to happen very often. The social and problem-solving skills learned in current MMORPGs may have tangible effects on their players, but that doesn't seem to reliably translate to higher grades or better coping skills. If it did, the idea that video games can have a place in education wouldn't be so controversial.

ARGs, on the other hand, allow for a space to play without fear of failure by the imposition of a storyline on the learning task, without moving students into a virtual reality. As the saying goes, it's not role playing, it's real playing. And it is therefore easy to see how those real-life skills sharpened in a game context could then be used in other venues. The skills to research a topic online or in a library is the same, whether the task is to uncover the history of a house reputed to be haunted or to understand the role that photography played in the Civil War. And either of those topics might be a part of a game or a part of a class assignment. The line between reality and game is blurred in an ARG like no other type of play.

However, it is that ambiguity that may be the biggest point of concern in using ARGs in education. How do you maintain the TINAG philosophy without allowing your students to confuse what is invented for the game and what is factual information? If you invent a character to lead students through a historical mystery, how do you ensure that they achieve the learning objectives without assuming that the character herself is part of history? This will be a delicate balancing act, one that might demand debriefing with players after the game has ended, to clarify what was deliberately obscured in the game itself.

I am very excited by the potential of ARGs for education, especially their potential to gamify the very skills and qualities we want our students to develop: collaboration, research, evaluation, skepticism, curiosity, independence. Our future literally depends on fostering the critical and creative thinking that will be needed in the 21st century. And that is not a game.