Swords and Socrates? The Role of Role Playing Games in Classical Pedagogy

The idea of games being at all useful in education is a fairly new one. It was only in the early 2000s that the idea of play as a tool to teach has been popularized. Now, however, it is a widely-accepted pedagogical method. Games “offer a more active and multimodal learning model than many traditional pedagogical approaches. Importantly, games represent Seymour Papert’s notion of hard fun, that is, something that is doable but challenging, or is pleasantly frustrating.”[1] Unlike other potential pedagogical methods, games “emphasize engaged, inquiry based instruction including interacting with new objects and information, participation in simulation activities, and exploring complex questions... By immersion in new challenges and environments students solve problems and acquire knowledge and skills in a way that is transferable and long lasting.”[2]

 These scholars are not speaking about a specific type of game, and the word is broad. What comes to mind, when you hear it? Some might say “Monopoly,” or “Call Of Duty,” or “Poker.” So, a narrower focus and more specificity is required. In this case, Role Playing Games, RPGs for short, are the focus. Specifically tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons, D&D for short, is based on a simple system of dice-rolling. Each player creates a character with certain abilities based on their species and profession, and the players go on adventures together, rolling dice to battle monsters, engage in diplomacy, explore caves, et cetera. The first edition of D&D was based on tabletop wargames, where players managed entire battlefields of miniatures, and fought one another in ruthless combat. Unlike these tabletop games, D&D is deeply flexible. Modern D&D requires no miniatures or table maps and is focused largely on narrative role-play, instead of battle. It is fundamentally an advanced, complicated collaborative storytelling framework. “An RPG game session creates a collective narrative through the efforts of all players at the table,”[3] states C.W. Marshall, author of Classical Reception and the Half Elf Cleric, an essay exploring the use of Classical monsters and characters in D&D. This narrative setup is especially useful in the larger scene of game pedagogy, and fits well with all of the goals described above. RPGs are actively engaging, challenging, and encourage both collaboration and competition, depending on their setup.

So, RPGs have a place in pedagogy. What, exactly, is that place?

In the late ‘90s, history Professor Mark C. Carnes of Barnard College began developing a new mode of teaching, which he called “Reacting to the Past,” or RTTP. RTTP was designed as a framework for teaching history through immersive role-playing games. Today, RTTP is host to tens of games, spanning a myriad of time periods, historical events, and educational contexts, from the single-session “microgames” to multi-week courses. RTTP won the 2004 Theodore Hesburgh Award for pedagogical innovation, and has been funded by a vast amount of educational foundations.

Although based on the role-playing systems of games like D&D, RTTP features no dice or combat. Instead, most RTTP games function around speeches, debates, or voting, where players collaborate or compete with one another via rhetoric. This structure encourages preparation on the students’ part, leaving their success up to their own skills of persuasion and research, instead of the roll of a dice. RTTP provides a wonderful example of how RPGs can be used to teach. According to a study on its educational effects on college students, “students in Reacting to the Past showed elevated self-esteem and empathy, a more external locus of control, and greater endorsement of the belief that human characteristics are malleable.”[4] RTTP appeals to what the authors of Reacting to the Past in Australasia call “illicit imaginary play worlds.”[5]

 The unique structure of RTTP provides a wholly different educational experience from a class, especially University classes, which were what it was designed for. RTTP students can not sit back and take notes, they are required to actively engage with the source material, at the risk of looking dumb or incompetent if they don’t.[6] This required engagement has provided considerable benefits to students in the long term, with one study evidencing that “Students enrolled in first year RTTP classes were 10 percent more likely to return for their second year when compared to students enrolled in control classes,” and RTTP classes having better attendance than the control groups.[7] Unlike a traditional class, where the closest thing to “victory” a student can get is a good grade, RTTP also provides students with very real, very concrete win conditions. Victory in a war, triumph of a certain political party, et cetera. These victories are much more concrete than an A on a transcript, and studies of RTTP have evidenced that students are much more driven to achieve them. “Games are competitive, and the desire to win has produced some of the best scholarly habits and outcomes of my teaching career. To win the game, students read more than any of my conventional classes. They engage in a very detailed fashion with primary sources and work hard to think historically.”[8]

Some critics of RTTP, however, have claimed that the influence students have on the outcomes of the games may be a negative. What if students are taught “incorrect” history? What if their victors are not the actual victors? What is the point, if the students aren’t learning the truth?

No historical scholar could ever argue that it is possible to accurately represent the truth of events. Many educators, however, try to provide their students with something close to it - facts, free of judgment or opinion. But this focus on bare facts leaves out much of the humanity of history. There is nothing to relate to, when presented with a timeline, or a simple list of events. But RTTP presents the alternative: an “untrue” history, but one that is immersive and engaging and relatable. “The end of the game is full of uncertainties... making history feel contingent on one speech, one vote, and one die roll.”[9]

 This tension is precisely what makes RTTP so unique. In the RTTP Game Designer’s Handbook, author Nicolas Proctor provides an alternative to simply learning “false” history, with explorations of the actual historical events sandwiching the actual gameplay. In this way, students can learn the accepted history, but are still able to engage with the much grittier, firsthand experience of playing RTTP. “Like other works of history,” wrote Proctor, “a game develops a particular representation of the past.”[10] The representation in RTTP games is inaccurate in many ways, but it provides the firsthand human experience of history that so much education lacks.

Exeter already employs a modified RTTP game in the Roman History For Latin Students course, which explores the history of Rome after Caesar’s death. Power vacuums of this sort make for fertile ground for an RTTP game, as a wonderful means of fostering competition. And “Classical” history, nebulous as that name is, also works well in an RPG format. Classical RPGs allow players to relate to a world deeply different from their own, and to taste the actual experience of, say, being a member of the Senate who was constantly vetoed by an irritating Tribune.

TO THE STRONGEST, our own RTTP-inspired RPG, is set in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, directly following the death of Alexander the Great. Players compete to win Alexander’s throne and control his empire, through a Mafia-inspired elimination game. The primary success of RTTP is its encouragement of outside effort and research, and the way it motivates students to participate. So, TO THE STRONGEST should include consistent encouragement for students to produce good work, especially good writing. This might be speeches, research essays, in-character letters, diplomatic treaties, or others, but the students should be expected to produce this writing frequently. Victory needs to be possible, and rewarding. This means the external and player-based stakes must be high, but not high enough that the game could have no victor. The game should include encouragement towards competition, but also collaboration. It should reward players for banding together by granting them more power than the loners, but not so much power that a small group could control the entire outcome on their own. Most importantly, however, the game should encourage students to want to learn the material. It should reward those who read the rules and the source texts, and those who put time and effort into the immersion of the experience, whether through food, costume, or accurately role-playing their character. Above all, though, TO THE STRONGEST should be fun, because it’s a game.

Notes

[1] Barkatsas, 12

[2] Webb, 3

[3] Rogers, 152        

[4] Stroessner

[5] Buchanan, 211

[6] Proctor, 14

[7] Buchanan, 211  

[8] Buchanan, 212

[9] Yuli Wu via Buchanan, 213

[10] Proctor, 18

Bibliography

Barkatsas, Tasos, and Adam Bertram.  Global Learning  in the 21st Century. Boston: BRILL,  2016. Accessed October 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Buchanan, Thomas C., Nicole Tarulevicz, and Edward Palmer. “Reacting to the Past in  Australasia: From Early Adoption to COVID-19.”  Australasian  Journal of American  Studies  39, no. 1 (2020): 208–24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26973008.

Cameron, Hamish. "Imagining Classics: Towards A Pedagogy of Gaming Reception."  Classical  Journal  118, no. 1 (2022): 90-112. https://doi.org/10.1353/tcj.2022.0024.

Proctor, Nicolas W.  Reacting to the Past Game Designer’s  Handbook. Simpson College, 2011.

Rogers, Brett M., and Benjamin Eldon Stevens, eds. Once and Future Antiquities in Science  Fiction and Fantasy. London: Bloomsbury Publishing  Plc, 2018. Accessed October 22,  2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Stroessner, Steven J., Laurie Susser Beckerman, & Alexis Whittaker. “All the world’s a stage?  Consequences of a role-playing pedagogy on psychological factors and writing and  rhetorical skill in college undergraduates.” Journal  of Educational Psychology  101 (2009): 605–620. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015055

Webb, Allen, ed.  Teaching Literature in Virtual Worlds:  Immersive Learning in English  Studies. Florence: Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. Accessed  October 22, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.