DO YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME?

Over the weekend, I had some time to digest a very fruitful and in-depth session with my design team. We focused on learning experiences through play. There is no denying that gameplay has significant educational value. Consider the 2002 Millennium Challenge. The US Dept. of Defense spent over $250 million to explore the scenario of a US invasion of Iran. A retired USMC Lt. Gen, playing for the “red team” (i.e., opposing forces), and shocked US commanders when his opening moves defeated the US Navy during a simulated attack. His tactics were so devastating that the game facilitators had no choice but to reset the scenario, and impose artificial restrictions. His tactics revealed a strategic weakness, and exposed the unknown. Was it worth $250 million? Considering the expensive lessons we learn (or, fail to learn) during actual warfare, I would argue that such simulations are a bargain.

With so much potential (for both learning and fun), we explored game mechanics as a way to make the abstract concepts of digital rights more accessible. We rant into a few obstacles with this approach, but none more frustrating than the fact that there are already several games that attempt to do exactly that. We agreed that we do not need one more in that mix.

Toward the end of that session, I became acutely frustrated by the divide between tactics and strategy. Encryption is important, and I want people to know about it, but I also don’t see it as a solution to systemic issues of user privacy, data collection, and surveillance capitalism. To be clear, I still think that it is a valuable tactic and an essential technology, but it falls short of addressing most of my strategic concerns. Worse yet, addressing these technologies as their discrete parts leaves little room for addressing the issue of digital citizenship, digital rights, and the electronic frontier we all care so much about.

How then, can we present this level of complexity to our intended learners? And *who* are our learners, exactly? We reached consensus that “digital natives” make the most sense — but really it should be everyone who benefits from (or can be harmed by) the internet.

Pictured: a young netizen. There is no way that this kid gave consent for this picture to be distributed, but let’s put a pin in that for now... Intel Free Press — https://www.flickr.com/photos/intelfreepress/8433147083/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Where is the strategy? Where is the awareness? We began to focus these concerns through a framework created by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, and their “six facets of understanding.” Before we can decide how to address *how* learners will understand this complexity, we first needed to develop concrete goals for learning.

The six facets for learners

• Explain: learners can produce written/verbal information relevant to the topic

• Interpret: learners can construct a narrative, linking cause and effect for a given phenomenon

• Apply: by contextualizing what they know, learners can adapt their model of understanding to solve novel problems

• Perspective: learners are able to think through a problem from the perspectives of different actors

• Empathize: can think experientially about other’s interactions with a context, and value how they experience it

• Self-knowledge: be aware of how that knowledge affects their thinking and decision making. Know the limits of their understanding, and what remains unknown to them

In the game monopoly, children (ages 3 to 10) learn zero-sum capitalism, market failure, scarcity, opportunity cost, property rights, legal penalties, and much, much more. The players get to take on the role of a property tycoon, and quickly learn that there are different layers to the game. This was by design: the original intent of the game was to teach players about income inequality. It is a game born out of the Great Depression. One of the often overlooked aspects of Monopoly is that “house rules” are determined by the players. A game of monopoly need not be cut-throat. The rules can be tweaked to be more equitable for all. This is true beyond the board game context—this is core to the very concept of democracy.

Not knowing how to synthesize something so elegant (to address digital rights), I told the group that what I really wanted was a constitutional convention. I wanted people to take on the 21st century equivalent of Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Washington. I wanted smartphones and powdered wigs, tough negotiations and duels. I wanted people to think about their dissatisfaction of being mere subjects to the kingdoms of Facebook and Google, to having no higher status than “colonist” on a digital frontier.

Could roleplaying be enough? Could personas to represent different stakeholders facilitate a learning experience? How can we get people to take these roles seriously? I had more questions leaving our session than I came in with.

Upon reflection and a white board session with Nandini, we returned to the idea of game mechanics in a learning experience. I think we both retreat to the territory of fun when things get difficult. Indeed, for such a heavy subject, I do want people to have fun, and make the learning happen under a blanket of stealth; people tend to be more open to new ideas when they step outside of their own context to engage in play, and we wanted to leverage that. As I alluded to earlier, this is also true in the context of war games.

Returning to Wiggins and McTighe, we began synthesizing game mechanics around the six facets.

I’ll do my best to make sense of these scribbles—I promise!

Mechanics under consideration (an incomplete inventory)

• Digital and physical mechanics

• Hidden agendas

• Secret personas

• Objectives with dynamic feedback

• Inevitable conflict, plausible compromise

We now envision a game, where players use their mobile device as an interface, while interacting in physical space. The players are participating in the first constitutional convention of the internet. They are randomly assigned roles that will dictate their objectives (e.g., a movie and television streaming service, a government surveillance agency, or a social media platform). These personas will act as stakeholders, trying to advance their agenda. Players will take turns, negotiating for an objective to be codified into a digital constitution. Players will then anonymously vote (using their mobile device). As certain provisions are agreed upon, the player’s objectives will change in real-time. For example, an video streaming service is naturally harmed by asymmetrical restrictions on bandwidth… unless they also control that restriction themselves, giving them an unfair competitive advantage over competing platforms. If they “lose” the fight to obtain net-neutrality, their agenda shifts to obtain power over the inequality. Likewise, a government agency and a social media platform might both benefit from anti-privacy measures.

This is as much of a convention as it is a war game.

How does this perform under the six facets?

• Explain: players will learn key terms related to cyber security, digital rights, privacy, and the institutional structures governing the World Wide Web

• Interpret: to perform well at this game, players will need to engage their critical thinking skills and explore the relationships of a highly dynamic and complex system. They will develop mental models to account for economic, social, and political aspects of 21st century technology

• Apply: as their mental model improves, players will begin to think strategically about their objectives, and the objectives of other players. They will improve their ability to persuade and advocate for complex policy positions

• Perspective: players will become aware of the competing stakeholders, their agendas, and the consequences of their proposals over time

• Empathize: players will learn to value differing and conflicting goals, and will understand the gains and loses for themselves and others

• Self-knowledge: players will become aware of the complexity, and will identify gaps in their knowledge through multiple playthroughs

Why Privacy, Security & Surveillance: Netizenship in the 21st century

This week we began to establish framing (reframing) and constraints for our learning experience. We presented our initial research, and received substantial feedback from the class. I will address a couple of points here.

Ema:

“Interesting shift to digital rights from civic tech. The graph/exercise you went through seems like a good way of mapping commonalities within a large stakeholder group. Digital and media literacy in a real place like the internet — it’s everywhere — is very important to civics. Exposed to everyone else around the world. Need to start adapting people’s thinking to the unintended consequences of the internet development. Unsure about audience — feels like there are a lot… Who is EFF? Would be nice to make sure that the jargon is out of the presentation. It’s great to see an example of an analysis of a learning experience that you think could work.”

Who is EFF? The Electronic Frontier Foundation is “the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.” They provide advisory and advocacy for important matters related to people and technology. This question from Ema has helped to identify another area of focus for our project. Many of the terms related to this topic are quite esoteric. We need to adapt the language and build analogies to avoid alienating our intended audience.

Tomo:

“This is an important topic to explore and I appreciate your thorough investigation of it. The idea of role-playing is interesting and I agree that it could potentially be a meaningful experience. Great that you explored existing resources and identified problems. Gamification — it is not typical that gamification enhances learning (when assessed rigorously) but it is rather a tool for enjoyment and engagement. Thinking about preferred state and what assessment you would need to measure learning might help?”

I think it is valid to be skeptical of gamification as an educational tool/method. My primary interest in the potential for teaching in this format is largely based on my military experience, and the training modes for combat. War Games are not intended to provide a 1:1 experience, but to build institutional knowledge and to help identify weaknesses/opportunities for improvement. It also helps leaders and lower ranks experience multiple perspectives in a conflict scenario. For example, consider submarine hunting. By having US Navy ships assigned with the task of hunting one of their own submarines, they can evaluate the stealth capabilities and limitations of subs. It can also make surface ships more aware of the challenge to identify certain threats.

Likewise, these “opposing forces” exercises allow learners to role-play interactions without stakes. It is an opportunity to help stake-holders better understand threats and challenges, without fear.

Tackling the challenges for our learners

Bridging knowledge gaps.

Working with a team of three other designers, we began to see points of divergence for our goals. Amanda’s focus on online activism and leveraging new technologies was compelling, but she was driven to do this work independently. Nandini and Michelle were also interested in the digital realm, but were not sure about the framing for citizenship.

One of the key challenges for addressing citizenship in the 21st century is the fundamental misunderstanding by the public of how we interact with these new technologies. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. have removed the traditional political boundaries and geographic limitations of culture and ideas.

This is our stake-holder map, there are many like it, but this one is ours.

The advantage of this style of mapping is that we do not need to work from the current state toward feasible solutions. While the appearance may be linear, we actually developed our ideas for bridging the gaps by first looking forward, to a preferred state. Herbert A. Simon succinctly described the field of design as “changing existing circumstances into preferred ones,” which is exactly what we are plotting with this map. We then can backcast from the preferred state, and identify patterns and opportunities for intervention.

This tool is simple as it is effective. For weeks we had been looking at how technology was affecting citizens’ perception of reality (bots, trolls, hackers, fake news, hoaxes, disinformation campaigns, post-truth, etc.) but we had not adequately considered how bidirectional that perception was. In late 2013, a hacktivist documentary titled, TPB AFK (The Pirate Bay, Away From Keyboard) was released. This film chronicled the political and social aspects of digital sharing, and the rise of Sweden’s “Pirate Party.” Having won seats in parliament in 2009, The Pirate Party of Sweden was a recognized political group. Since then, other nations (e.g., Germany and Iceland) have also elected members from this movement.

The philosophy of the Pirate Party is best understood from their belief that “the internet is real.” They do not make the distinction between interactions “IRL” (In Real Life) and “online.” Instead, they use the term “AFK” (Away From Keyboard) to describe that state. In American politics, we can see the disruption all around us from this misunderstanding. People have been tricked into believing that their online activities are somehow contained, safely behind a prophylactic digital barrier. It’s “on the internet” and therefore not real. Except that it is. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if people believed that their personal vehicles and the roads on which they travelled were somehow a totally self-contained reality, separate from everything else.

Our goal therefor is not to leverage technology to help citizens become more engaged IRL, or AFK, but to help them understand that they are still citizens, even (and especially) when occupying digital spaces.

Who are my learners?

What can we teach about civic engagement?

Last week our teams mapped out the stakeholders for our chosen topic (citizenship and grassroots).

Our stakeholder map was stolen from the studio. This was the last picture taken before it went missing. If have any information, call: 1-800-STOLEN-MAP No questions asked if you return it. Really, at this point we all just want closure.

By looking at the tension between groups, we can easily get overwhelmed. What was most helpful was to recognize where common interests exist between stakeholders. These should provide opportunities for engagement, or perhaps even leverage points between groups in conflict (or perceived conflict). Additionally, we identified a disturbing aspect: asymmetry. While there were mutual and shared interests between our three groups, there were also some goals that actually provided benefits at the expenses of others.

The easiest way to understand this dynamic is to think about big tobacco. Smokers want and desire cigarettes. They are willing to pay for them, even when discouraged through taxation. They smoke throughout the day, despite knowing that it has a negative impact on health. Who benefits the most in this relationship? In the short term, the smoker benefits. In the long term, the tobacco companies benefit. These relationships are exploitative, but also difficult to break.

Reactionary politics benefit a minority of the powerful at the expense of everyone else, but it also provides validation to a cynical and disengaged citizenry. For those who insist that politics is self-serving, and incapable of providing value to the public, it is very easy to be proven correct, even if the outcomes that produce that validation are not beneficial.