If you don’t know much about gaming, it can be easy to dismiss video games as violent wastes of time or to think of board games as something you pull out when there’s nothing else to do on Thanksgiving. My guest today, the games designer Kat Schrier, believes that there’s something much more to gaming. In her book, We the Gamers, she explores the many ways that civics and ethics educators can use games to build deeply immersive and rewarding learning experiences.

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Kat Schrier: Using Games to Teach Ethics

Christiane Wisehart, host and producer: I’m Christiane Wisehart. And this is Examining Ethics, brought to you by The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University.

[music: Blue Dot Sessions, Loopy]

Christiane: With us today is games designer and professor Kat Schrier. She’s here to discuss the many ways that ethics education can benefit from a dose of play. 

Kat Schrier: Games can also just help us to grow. It helps us to understand ourselves, it helps us to express ourselves, our true selves. I want everybody to feel like they belong in this world, I want everyone to feel like they matter, I want everybody to be part of deciding the kind of world that we live in. And I believe that games can help us to do that.

Christiane: Stay tuned for our discussion on today’s episode of Examining Ethics.

[music fades out]

Christiane: If you don’t know much about gaming, it can be easy to dismiss video games as violent wastes of time or to think of board games as something you pull out when there’s nothing else to do on Thanksgiving. My guest today, the games designer Kat Schrier, believes that there’s something much more to gaming. In her book, We the Gamers, she explores the many ways that civics and ethics educators can use games to build deeply immersive and rewarding learning experiences. And full disclosure before I play the interview: Kat and I are collaborating on a game design experience for the Prindle Institute’s ethics education resource collection.

[interview begins]

Christiane: You claim early in your book, We The Gamers, that gamers are already engaged in civics and in ethics. And even as somebody who plays a lot of board games and video games, that sort of surprised me. In what ways do games encourage this type of engagement? 

Kat Schrier: So a lot of times, we think of games as being the antithesis of engaging in ethics or engaging in civics. And that could be true. Certainly, there’s some antisocial behavior happening in games. People are calling each other names or harassing each other. In addition to the cruelty, there’s also the compassion and there’s also the learning and there’s also the care.

Even in a game like Fortnite, it’s a violent game, you’re trying to be the last person standing on this island and you have to compete with other people to do that. But you’re also having to manage resources, you’re having to think about how do you gather resources and use them in strategic ways so that you can be surviving?

Those are exactly the kinds of things that, for example, take any small town, when they know there’s a big storm coming, they have to think about: we have to stockpile water, they need to secure schools or sites where people can be safe during a storm. That’s exactly the kinds of teamwork and kinds of communication that people in Fortnite are doing.

And then if you also take a game like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in this game, you’re developing your own island and you’re designing it how you want it to be. You’re running after bugs, you’re trying to catch fish, you’re building a museum and you’re actually shaping a world, you’re shaping a town. This is exactly what civics is. It’s exactly what ethics is too. You’re trying to understand how you are in the world, what your values are and how you want to express it.

Christiane: A lot of what you’re writing about in the book is not only about the connections between ethics and gaming but how educators can use games in a classroom to teach ethics. You write about all kinds of exciting possibilities but first, I want to get the bad stuff out of the way and talk about what are some of the limits of using games to teach ethics?

Kat Schrier: There’s everything from logistical challenges, to equity challenges, to all kinds of accessibility challenges and then there’s of course, financial challenges. Logistically, you need to have some kind of internet access. Sometimes, to play some of these games, you need enough computers and enough ability to even access them on a browser on this computer to be able to even play some of these games. Even if you’re playing a board game, you need a table; sometimes big enough for everybody to play on.

In terms of accessibility and equity, there’s first of all, representation in games. There’s not always different races represented, different gender identities, different sexual identities. Even if there are, for example, some customization available, it doesn’t mean that they have all the hair textures and all the skin tones that are necessary for everybody to feel included when they are designing their avatars in a game.

And then, there’s accessibility challenges. Does your game have the language that people speak, the ability to… for visually impaired people, can they have alternative ways of interacting with the game. Does it have closed captioning, does it have all different kinds of the controllers that you use.

And then there’s financial. Some of the games are free and available online but do you even have money to pay for the internet to be able to access these games? Do you have to use mobile devices? You have to pay for enough mobile devices. Or VR headsets, these are really expensive equipment I don’t necessarily even have access to. And then, do you have enough computers? Do you have money to buy enough computers for everybody in your classroom or enough tablets.

That said, I don’t want anybody to be scared now because there’s a lot of ways around this. That’s where the creativity comes in. A game does not need to cost money. It does not even need to be played on a computer. It could be designed for the constraints and limitations and challenges of your classroom or of your educational space. For example, I will play a game with my students that, they take pieces of paper, they rip them up and using those pieces of paper and drawing Xs and Os on them, we can play a really compelling game about ethics.

So there’s a lot of constraints. But whenever there’s constraints, you design for those constraints. You find games or you design games that can work within the challenges that you might have in your classroom.

Christiane: A lot of people perceive gamers to be disconnected from the real world. But you argue that games can actually facilitate the connection to real world problems, especially in the classroom. How might that happen?

Kat Schrier: The stigma around games, that limitation of how we might frame games as being, “Oh, they’re just leisure,” or “Oh, they’re just for fun.” That is a real stigma. That’s a real issue that teachers face but also parents but also the public faces because they’re not seeing games for all the ways that they can support learning and they can support growth and they can support connection.

For example, I was just talking to some of my colleagues at the World Health Organization and we are designing a game to support doctors and clinical staff in how they might approach a mass casualty issue. You have lots and lots of patients coming into your hospital and you need to design a system, even within a hospital, of how to actually handle all of these patients coming in with all different kinds of injuries.

We’re making a mixed reality game that is based on reality. It’s based on what would a nurse do, what would a doctor do, what would clinical lead do, what would the incident commander do in this situation. They all have to work together to help the patients and to support all of those different factors coming together. We’re having real people, real people from the hospital, play this game so that they can learn how to actually work together if this really did happen in real life, if there was a mass-casualty event.

These games are teaching, directly, real-world skills, helping people to solve the most important problems which is saving lives. Maybe you’re not playing a game like that in the classroom, maybe you’re not directly playing that, but whatever game