Gamifying Political Theory: Avatars and Autonomy

"State of Nature" board game by students in POLSCI 101.

Over the last couple of years, I have begun introducing more and more elements from the world of games in my courses. I've converted grades to points, scores, and levels. I've introduced different kinds of points: you get "experience points" for just doing something and "skill points" for doing something well. I've played with "unlocks," "power-ups" and "badges." I've stressed that good games invite the player to think of her own strategies, leveraging her particular talents and interests.

None of these are my ideas. They go under the concept gamification, which simply means the introduction of game elements to non-game activities. Educators are gamifying school, businesses are gamifying work, marketers are gamifying consumption (frequent flyer miles, anyone?).

Like any trend, gamification has also been attacked. Some of those attacks have been by thoughtful thinkers from the world of games; Ian Bogost, one of the most important writers on games thinks gamification is bullshit (his words, not mine). Distilled, the critique goes: Games are fun, work and school aren't.

There is a lot to the criticism, and to ignore it is to miss a crucial difference between games and non-games. But if you take it seriously, you may also be able to use gamification well. I know I haven't always, and smart and thoughtful students have also pointed this out. Here, I want to point to two ways game concepts connect to political theory in particular.

My first example comes from Ben Peterson, a political theory graduate student with whom I have gotten to teach, write, and think about games quite a bit. Take avatars, virtual representations of identities and ways for humans to act in virtual worlds. Look at that sentence again: "representations," "identities," "to act" are all concepts political theorists are quite interested in thinking about. And avatars allow us to do exactly what political theorists most like to do: to problematize and complicate our understandings of those concept.

The Sovereign: the baddest 85th-level death knight in town.

Here's a World of Warcraft not produced by Blizzard Entertainment: it's a world in which all players are in a state of constant uncertainty because they all want more or less the same thing and can't trust anybody. The only way for them to end the frustrating and constant uncertainty is to unite and give all their powers a kind of super-player, which then claims to act in everyone's name.

You might or might not know it, but that's Thomas Hobbes's description of "the state of nature" and the creation of a sovereign. To think of Hobbes's sovereign as a kind of avatar on steroids is to ask interesting questions about Hobbes's claim, for example, that nothing the sovereign does can be unjust or, even more simply, what it means to have someone "act in your name."

You don't even really need to gamify anything to use avatars to talk about these questions. You might just ask those questions about all the avatars in our lives, not just the game avatars for the geeks, but, heck, about your own reasons for choosing a particular profile pic on Facebook. Like it or not, "you" on Facebook is an avatar.

My second example gets at the connection between political theory and games from the other direction. The concept of autonomy has been important in my own research work and, lately, practically in my teaching. I am interested in allowing students to develop their autonomy, that is, their ability to act on their own reasons, and so to develop a sense of responsibility for their actions. And it's hard to foster autonomy in a setting where people are constantly told what to do -- write this essay! take this exam! -- instead of getting to exercise choices. One of UM's (and America's) greatest philosophers, John Dewey, said,

personality cannot be procured for any one, however degraded and feeble, by any one else, however wise and strong.

I don't mean that my students are degraded and feeble and I wise and strong, of course. The point is simply that you can't make someone autonomous.

Gaming logics allow me to foster autonomy in students, at least in a small way. Lots of assignments in my courses optional. Students get to choose which ones they want. On some assignments, they have to decide what kind of project to do. A website? A video? A podcast? A board game? And maybe in the most radical imposition of autonomy, I invite the students to decide how much they want to value a particular type of project over something else, in terms of their final grade. Inside Higher Ed did an article on my attempt last year; this fall's Intro to Political Theory repeats the practice.

Immanuel Kant, the greatest theorist of autonomy, was fully aware that lots of people don't like to act autonomously because it's scary. That's our experience, too, at least with some students. So why might this help bridge the games-are-fun-but-school-is-not gap? Why does introducing something potentially scary make it more fun? Well, now classic finding about job satisfaction by Jeylan Mortimer suggests that one of the best correlates for your finding your job satisfying is autonomy: you get to decide how you do your job. Sure, jobs -- and school -- are still for some extrinsic purpose such as putting food on the table or getting a good job, but autonomy nudges them just a bit in the direction of fun. 'Coz what makes games, or anything, fun is that the activity is its own reward. You choose to play. And getting to choose, even scary things, might ultimately be more fun than never thinking for yourself.

(Credits: The "State of Nature" game depicted in the photo at the top was created by Dan Dantus, Kayla Foust, Zach Petroni et al. The frontispiece image from Hobbes's Leviathan is in public domain. The quotation from Dewey comes from "Democracy and Education.")