Mechanics of Civic Games

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

After another great weekend of gaming, this time at PAX East, I, of course, have been thinking about what would go into a good civic game.

And just what is a civic game? Others might have different definitions, but I’d be inclined define that broadly as any game that increases a player’s civic skills, knowledge, or values.

And just how does any game increase someone’s skills, knowledge, or values around any topic?

Well, I suppose there are two broad elements which sets a game’s tone and thereby has the potential to impact a player: content and mechanics.

Content is what the game is actually about: are you in space? In the desert? Trying to survive the zombie apocalypse?

Mechanics is how the game actually works: Does the game rely on luck or strategy? Do you play with dice, cards, or other items? How do you interact with other players?

There is as much variety in styles of game mechanics as there is in types of game content.

It seems to me that a common failing of many education games is that they focus on content rather than mechanics – I have this information I want you to learn, and I “gamify” it with some set of game mechanics in the hopes of making learning more fun.

That’s actually kind of a backwards approach. The content of the game is interesting as a one-sentence overview: you are Little Red Riding Hood fighting zombie werewolves with a 9mm – but the mechanics of the game are what you really want to know:

How do I play?

And the mechanics of the game are absolutely critical in setting the tone and feeling of a game. The mechanics are what truly give a game its unique personality.

It’s not uncommon to hear people say, “I love that game, it’s got this really interesting mechanic…”

The mechanics are not an add-on that bring the content to life, the mechanics are the heart of the game itself.

And good mechanics, I think, are where civic games could really excel.

There is, of course, a whole genre of cooperative games – where players work together and either collectively win or collectively loose. There are semi-cooperative games, where players work in teams or form temporary alliances. These games may be inherently civic – forcing players to interact, work together, or perhaps to find mutual ground.

But, I suspect there are many more mechanics which could impart a civic lesson.

Take, for example, Penny Press. The content is simple: each player is a newspaper assigning reporters to stories and periodically going to press.

But the mechanics are great: there are different types of stories, and the public has different interest levels in those stories. If the public’s not interested in political stories, then the wise player won’t cover political stories – they’re not worth as many points.

Furthermore, public interest in a type of story is boosted by how many reporters are covering that type of story. If everybody’s writing about crime, public interest in crime will increase.

Finally, there are the mechanics of going to press itself. Stories are physically different sizes and you have to successfully lay them out within your newspaper. And you lose points if there are holes.

As a player, you find yourself thinking, “well, I don’t really want to cover sports, but…I need that story to make my layout work.” Even in this digital age, it’s not a bad approximation for the real impact of needing to manage resources.

“Newspapers” may be civic content itself, but it’s the game mechanics which really make it work.

Switching Tracks

Posted on March 5, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

So, there’s this thought experiment that drives me crazy.

There’s a train plummeting towards certain doom. Luckily, there’s a track switch you can throw to save the seemingly ill-fated passengers. But just as you’re thinking about doing that, you realize – there is a sole person tied-up, unable to move, on the track you’d be switching the train to.

Saving the lives of dozens on the train means taking the life of the one on the tracks.

The purpose of this thought experiment, I suppose, is to make you think about that age-old question: do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Is taking one life justified if it means saving more?

Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I can never get that far in this thought experiment. When challenged with this question all I can think is:

Seriously, have you ever thrown a railroad switch?

I mean, it is hard, man.

To be fair, my experience with trains comes mostly from my childhood – when I spent a great deal of time on a historic 1880s farm – complete with horse-drawn train – thanks to my father’s enthusiasm for trains, history, and building.

I spent a lot of time with trains.

And I’ve switched a lot of track in my day.

Granted, I imagine I’d be somewhat better at it now than as a small child, but let’s be honest – switching tracks is hard work. It takes significant brute force to muscle through the intense, metal-on-rusty-metal action. The gears are always a little worn, a little jammed, a little worse for wear.

There’s no magic switch that just – boom – switches tracks.

You know, the whole drama that led to Casey Jones‘ death was essentially a track-switching problem. It’s a non-trivial issue.

And perhaps philosophy just isn’t a field to be burdened by practicalities. Perhaps the larger thought experiment is more important than the actual details of the problem.

And yet, for a field that struggles to reflect views beyond those of white men, this thought experiment strikes me as indicative of the problem –

The whole question assumes that I have a position of power.

What would I do if I saw a doomed train full of people and a safe track with one lone soul?

Hell, man, it hardly matters – if I can’t muscle the rail switch, I can’t do anything at all.

Improving the Health of Near Highway Communities

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

This morning I had the opportunity to attend the release of “Improving the Health of Near-Highway Communities,” a report by the Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health (CAFEH) project.

As those who are local may know, the CAFEH study is a series of community-based participatory research projects about localized pollution near highways and major roadways in the Boston area. The effort is a partnership between several Tufts schools – including Tisch College, where I work – and community organizations.

In fact, part of what’s particularly interesting about CAFEH is that it started when community members from STEP (Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership) approached a Tufts faculty member at the School of Medicine.

Since then, it has grown to a large, multidimensional effort which seeks to quantify the health effects of living near freeways and develop tangible solutions to mitigate those effect.

And if you’re wondering, living near highways is quite bad for your health. Research shows that those who are most exposed to roadway pollution have rates of heart disease and lung cancer that are 50% to 100% higher than people who don’t have that exposure. Lead exposure near McGrath Highway as led to a permanent 8-10 point drop in IQ for children along that corridor.

This is clearly an environmental issue, but it is more importantly an environmental justice issue.

Because who lives near highways?

Poor people.

People who can’t afford to live anywhere else.

And it is these people who are most exposed to ultrafine particles, neurotoxins and other pollutants which are not only an issue outside, but which can actually seep into your home.

But there is some good news in all this. CAFEH researchers as well as a few similar studies around the globe are developing a better understanding of the effect and impact of these ultrafine particles. And they are working hand in hand with policy makers, architects, urban planners, and community members to do something about it.

Lessons from a Snowy Sidewalk

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Is there anything more awkward than trying to navigate snow-narrowed sidewalks?

There probably is, but that definitely ranks in the top ten.

For those of you from more mild climes, the problem, you see, is this: a sidewalk of once predictable width, formerly capable of allowing two strangers to pass unperturbed, now forces a level of intimacy which is most unseemly in many parts of the world.

That is, the side walks are too narrow for two people to pass.

Forced with such a conundrum, the pedestrians options are this: wait, claim the right-of-way, or try to pass anyway.

Waiting might seem like the safe bet, but it is not without risks: for one thing, this approach is untenable if you are in any sort of a hurry. It will take you forever if you are always yielding the right-of-way. For another, you occasionally end up in the awkward wait-off: who will strike out upon the narrow sidewalk first?

And, of course, choosing to wait can be awkward in itself: age, race, and gender norms all come crashing into play as busy pedestrians try to gauge the best way to interact.

I imagine that in Victorian Boston gentlemen always yielded passage to the ladies.

Which, of course, always makes me want grant first passage to the men. (Though I have been known to play the occasional game of narrow side-walk chicken with self-absorbed bros who don’t strike me much as gentlemen.)

Being somewhat old-fashioned, I tend to yield to my seniors – though having heard stories of embarrassment from grandparents who’ve been offered seats on the T, I’m not sure that’s actually the best way to go.

In fact, I’m fairly certain I once caught a look of surprise and distress from a woman who I let pass – I might have well just yelled “old lady!” at her, for all that old-fashioned habit was worth.

If both parties try to pass, that some times works out. Other times…well, I hope you’re okay getting to know strangers.

In the end, I suppose, we all just do the best we can.

I try to yield some of the time, claim the right-of-way some of the time, and only try to pass on walkways that seem like they can handle the two lane traffic. But sometimes I misjudge.

And I try to be equal in the types of people I wait for and the types of people who wait for me.

Sometimes, I misjudge, but overall – it’s like the snowy, narrowed sidewalks are this great equalizer. It doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter where you going. Only one person can go at a time and we all need to treat each other with respect and patience if any of us are ever going to get anywhere.

Resilience

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

This morning I ran across an intriguing opinion piece by Melissa Chadburn, “How fostering resilience keeps low-income communities down.”

In it, Chadburn argues, ” …normalizing the idea that residents in low-income communities can simply bounce back in response to a lack of resources…is handicapping our ability to help those truly in need.”

She recognizes the focus on resilience as an asset-based approach, yet expresses concern that projects which promote resiliency “valorize the idea that we should remain unchanged, unmoved and unaffected by trauma.”

Resilience, she says, is an antonym for broken.

I’m not sure her definition there is accurate, but she’s right to raise concerns about praise for the unbroken – as if all it takes to recover is to pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

Perhaps resilience should be seen more like Kintsugi – the Japanese art of repairing a broken dish with gold lacquer. Perhaps the places where we are broken should not be something to hide, but rather something to cherish.

Or perhaps that, too, puts too much focus on the whole, too much focus on the way things ought to be – and doesn’t pay enough respect to the dreary way things actually are.

I’ve been told that people who make it through difficult and traumatic experiences often do so by developing certain coping mechanisms – mechanism which might serve them well in one context while being entirely socially unacceptable in the next.

Perhaps, then, we should imagine people with resilience not as whole and unscathed, but rather as world-weary warriors, deeply scarred and wounded. Broken, perhaps, but beautiful all the same.

Chadburn says resilience claims: “I am not broken. I can take more.”

Perhaps we should say: “You can not break me. I’m already broken.”

The Things You Leave Behind

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

A friend on mine passed away on Monday, after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. I’d only just learned about the diagnosis last Friday, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

I knew Linda Borodkin through my work with The Welcome Project. I recently learned that she joined the board around the same time I started volunteering, but it always seemed to me that she’d been on the board forever.

She had a remarkable passion for non-profits and for non-profit leadership. But most of all, she saw each person’s capacity for leadership. She believed in the value each person brought to the work through their ideas, skills, and resources.

After my first year of chairing YUM – The Welcome Project’s annual fundraiser – Linda gave me the biggest, most beautiful bouquet of flowers I have ever seen. They lasted for weeks.

I hadn’t thought I was into that kind of thing, but – the earnestness and genuineness with which she felt compelled to say ‘thank you’ was a remarkable experience for me.

And Linda was big into thank yous. As a fellow member of The Welcome Project’s fundraising committee, Linda personally called almost every donor to thank them for their support.

She said it was wonderfully fulfilling to hear their stories – to learn why they supported The Welcome Project, and to hear them talk about what compelled them to this work.

But most of all, I think, she liked to see the students learn and grow, just as she liked to see the organization learn and grow.

And throughout it all, she was there helping, building, learning, thanking.

So here’s to you, Linda – thank you for everything.

Confidence

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Someone told me today that the world would be a better place if more people had more self-doubt.

That sounds about right.

I have written before about how unimpressed I am by the common solution to the so-called confidence gap – that is, when it’s raised as a problem that women typically don’t have the confidence level of men, I’m skeptical that the best solution is for “women to be more like men.”

Maybe none of us should be egotistical pricks.

I mean, really, should anyone aspire to be Gilderoy Lockhart?

And I’m a bit uncomfortable putting this all in gender terms – it is true that women, on the whole, have lower levels of confidence than men, on the whole – but I also know plenty of bombastic women and overly humble men.

That’s not to suggest we should just ignore the gender dimension of this issue. It is most certainly a problem that men are generally taught to be aggressively confident while women are generally taught their ideas are worth nothing. That is a problem, indeed.

But just for a moment, let’s pretend we want to instill the same lessons in all young people regardless of their gender, regardless of the race, class, sex or gender identity. Let’s just pretend we want all people to learn the same lessons. And then we can ask:

What’s the right amount of confidence to have?

Probably my least favorite type of person is someone who is overly confident with nothing to show for it. People who are overly confident with everything to show for it aren’t too far behind.

Invariably, it seems, it’s the people who think they know everything who actually know nothing and the people who think they know nothing who actually know everything.

Well, not actually know everything – because the people who think they know nothing know it’s impossible to know everything – but the poetry is better that way.

Irregardless, nothing is worse than a blowhard.

But while stunning over-confidence can be tyrannical, a dramatic lack of confidence can be devastating.

A little self-doubt may be a good thing, but too much self-doubt can be crushing, paralyzing. To wake up every morning convinced of your own incompetence, convinced nothing you ever do will add value – well, that’s no way to live, though many do live that way.

But self-doubt doesn’t have to be debilitating.

A physicist by training, I think often of the men who developed the nuclear bomb. Just what did they think they were doing?

They were inspired by patriotism, by science. They had a fascinating problem at the cutting edge of human knowledge and they brilliantly developed a solution. A solution that ended in death, destruction, and the continual threat of more.

“Now we are all sons of bitches,” Kenneth Bainbridge famously said to J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Those men probably should have doubted themselves a little more.

A moral life requires constant introspection, constant questioning, constant examining of your true motives and beliefs.

And I think that confidence should probably follow a similar process –

If you aren’t doubting yourself, you are probably doing something wrong.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Posted on February 25, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Today, I heard history professor Jill Lepore talk about her recent book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

The story is one of sex and sexual identity, of feminism and struggles against convention.

According to Lepore, Wonder Woman began in 1941 as a tool for silencing critics of comic books. With the genre having only recently arrived on the scene, parents were concerned about the effects of comic books on their impressionable young children.

Superman came from a master race – problematic for 1941. Batman originally carried a gun – which was also unfavorable to the sensibilities of the day. In fact, in an effort to console concerned parents, Bruce Wayne was later given a back story – one in which his parents were shot – and Batman ceased to carry a gun.

Wonder Woman was supposed to quell such critics – although she ultimately drew more criticism of her own – by fighting for truth, love, and equal rights.

Before giving the new character her own comic book line, a short survey was given to comic readers – Should Wonder Woman be allowed, even though a woman, to become a member of the Justice Society?

Surveys came back favorably, and Wonder Woman was given her own line.

Creator William Moulton Marston, a psychologist with a Harvard education, described his creation in the early 40s: “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”

If that seems somewhat radical for a white man in the 40s, it probably was. Marston grew up seeing the front lines of the suffragette movement – his Freshman year at Harvard he heard radical feminist and political activist Emmeline Pankhurst speak. She didn’t speak at Harvard proper, though a male student group invited her, but rather spoke off campus as the administration would not allow women in Harvard Yard.

Marston was fascinated by radical feminists and passionate about equal rights. “The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity,” read the press release announcing Wonder Woman.

In Lepore’s description, the history of Wonder Woman quickly becomes a history of Marston – and of Marston’s family.

As the New York Times describes, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” is fundamentally a biography of Wonder Woman’s larger-than-life and vaguely creepy male creator, William Moulton Marston (1893-1947). He was a Harvard graduate, a feminist and a psychologist who invented the lie detector test. He was also a huckster, a polyamorist (one and sometimes two other women lived with him and his wife), a serial liar and a bondage super-enthusiast.

But that doesn’t really tell the story.

Marston married his college sweetheart, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and then later – while working as a professor at Tufts University – fell in love with a student, Olive Byrne.

Eventually, Olive moved in with Marston and his wife, and Olive and Elizabeth each bear two children.

After Marston’s death in 1947, Olive and Elizabeth continued to live together until Olive’s death in the 1980s.

Lepore, a dedicated historian, lamented that there isn’t more documentation clearly describing the nature of their relationship. There are no letters between the two women, no notes indicating intimacy.

At least none which survived.

The polyamorous relationship was quite scandalous, you see, and a lot of effort was put into obfuscation. Marston was eventually blocked from his academic career due to the unsavory nature of his personal life. Meanwhile Olive – the daughter of Ethel Byrne and niece of Margaret Sanger – was concerned that the truth of her personal life would destroy advocacy for birth control.

And at the center of it all is Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman was conceived as part Olive, part Elizabeth, part Margaret Sanger. She was a compilation of all these powerful and strong woman Marston had in his life. But she was part Martson – a man who I imagine wished he could have seen more Wonder Woman in himself.

Leport said that the story of Marston is about the cost of living an unconventional life.

If that’s the case, it is this intimate vulnerability which reveals Wonder Woman’s true power. Wonder Woman’s story isn’t about leading an unconventional life – it’s about leading the life you want to live and fighting to have that life accepted.

Challenges of Educational Games

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I just got back from a great weekend of gaming at Dreamation, and it got me thinking – just what is it that makes a game fun?

I find this question particularly relevant because, while educational games are on the rise, games designed with the primary intention of transmitting information are notoriously terrible. “Gamification” may be all the rage, but what’s the point of an educational game if the resulting game is neither educational nor enjoyable?

Of course, my biggest qualm with “gamification” is the implied disparagement – wouldn’t it be great if we could use games for something valuable? – the concept seems to say.

But, in fact, games have inherent value. Many games are educational. They can teach skills, values, knowledge. They can ask important questions and help us collectively explore possible answers.

I mean, sure, there are plenty of poorly designed, not particularly valuable games out there – but those games are the exception, not the norm.

But even finding inherent value in games, it can still be fun to ask, how can I build a game that explores a given issue? How can people learn about a given topic from a game?

The two are not mutually exclusive.

I think the challenge of educational games is that they tend to be too focused on the education and too weary of the game. A textbook turned into a game is still inherently a textbook. The gamification may make it less dry…but it’s not really a game.

But a game tackling a topic – now that can be fun.

In one game this weekend, I learned about the lives of hobos in the early 20th century. It wasn’t the primary purpose of the game to teach me, but it was a natural piece of the game’s existence.

In most of the games I played, we explored questions of power and privilege, of gender norms and social justice, of humanity and inhumanity.

These weren’t educational topics dressed up as games, but rather wholly quintessential games placed in a time and context which gave them life, form, and meaning.

There are many types of games and many types of fun, but when it comes to so-called educational games, I guess –

A fun game is one that asks you questions, not one which gives you answers.

Civic Studies

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Author Archives: Sarah Shugars

Mechanics of Civic Games

Switching Tracks

Improving the Health of Near Highway Communities

The Things You Leave Behind

Challenges of Educational Games