Game-Based Learning, Collateral Learning, and Beyond

Instructors today, whether academic, government or corporate, are leaping on to the bandwagon of gamification with hopes high and eyes closed. Joining them onboard are those who use the techniques of last century’s corporate videos with branching choices and overt exams instead of the organic, embedded assessments of games, then rename their simulations as games. Badges and other extrinsic rewards, simply the gold stars of the digital era, are added indiscriminately to learning experiences, but do not magically transform them into good games. Game-based learning also does not mean blind faith in technology such as video games or social media clumsily shoehorned into a curriculum like a stepsister’s foot vainly squeezed into Cinderella’s slipper.

We will begin our quest with a brief history of games that purport to teach; then move to the Multiplayer Classroom, an entire class designed as a real-time game played in the real world. Elements include grading by accretion (XP and leveling up); learning by failing (allowing learners to redo assignments); intrinsic rewards (such as dividing students into guilds and rewarding an entire guild for the achievement of one member); peer teaching and more. Initial anecdotal evidence of success is now supported by recent studies involving hundreds of teachers and thousands of students: good game design is a powerful tool for learning. 

Next, we will fuse game design with storytelling on a variety of game platforms from the computer to the real world, engaging the heart as well as the mind, to create “collateral learning” where true games using competition, collaboration, human emotion, mystery and surprise and more are as exciting to play as games designed solely for entertainment. Whatever the subject being taught, students, no matter their age, learn in spite of themselves, because the well-designed game inspires their curiosity and imagination even as it challenges and sharpens their knowledge and critical thinking.

Lee Sheldon is a professional game writer and designer currently working on his 40th game. He recently joined the Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD) program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. For five years previously he was an Associate Professor in the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. There he was co-director of the GSAS program for three years and created the first full writing for games program in the United States. 

Lee wrote the bestselling book The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (2011); his book Character Development and Storytelling for Games (Second Edition, 2013) is the standard text in the field. The Facebook page for his method of teaching classes as multiplayer games is now followed by more than 1200 people in more than 40 countries.

His recent applied game projects include two games at Rensselaer: The Lost Manuscript 2: The Summer Palace Cipher, a virtual reality game teaching Mandarin and Chinese culture; and These Far Hills, a video game teaching engineering and science for an NSF proposal. He wrote Crimson Dilemma, a business ethics video game for Indiana University that debuted Fall 2014; and wrote and designed Secrets: A Cyberculture Mystery Game, an online class designed as a game teaching culture and identity on the Internet for Excelsior College that goes live Fall 2015.

His most recent entertainment game is the AAA Kinect title Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved for Harmonix, released in October 2014. He is currently writing a reboot of a popular Facebook game.

Before his career in games, Lee was a television writer-producer with over 200 produced shows ranging from Charlie’s Angels to Star Trek: The Next Generation.