How creative play levels up learning
Professor Hassan Lopez knows games.
In addition to being a professor of psychology and neuroscience, he’s been designing tabletop games for almost two decades, with popular titles such as Clockwork Wars and Maniacal to his name.
“I have a lot of experience building a game — from the moment of conception through the prototype, all the way to pitching to publishers and eventually negotiating contracts — and I’ve wanted to share that expertise with students at Skidmore.”
He debuted his Tabletop Game Design course this past spring, covering theoretical and practical concepts relevant to game design.
Across campus, Skidmore faculty are incorporating games and roleplay into their courses and providing a more engaging and impactful experience for students — one of many ways Creative Thought Matters imbues Skidmore's curriculum.
Students from a wide variety of majors jumped at the chance to take the new IdeaLab course — categorized by both the innovative nature of the teaching format and the use of Skidmore’s Schupf Family IdeaLab, the premier makerspace on campus.
Students’ motivations for taking the course ran the gamut. For computer science and mathematics majors, the skills they’d learn about tabletop game design would be easily transferable to digital game design.
Biology major Emily Babigian ’27, having found that her prerequisite-filled first semester
was particularly science-heavy, wanted to take a class that was “just for her,” had
a focus on “making,” and helped her get back in touch with her artistic side.
Coltrane Cho ’24, an English major, enjoys running tabletop roleplaying games with friends and was drawn to the
prospect of creative storytelling and group experiences.
As Cho engaged with his classmates in game play and thoughtful conversation, he noticed
the value of the different perspectives they each brought to the table. “I can see
how my friend who’s a neuroscience major is bringing an analytical, scientific mind
to it. I can see how the psychology majors are bringing in a more emotionally reactive,
human behavioral analysis to it. And I can see how English majors like me and others
who are more humanities-focused or arts-focused are bringing in their own investments
in the narrative storytelling of games, the expression and the artistic beauty of
games. And we get to do all of this together and bounce ideas off each other.”
In the not-too-distant past, the concepts of “games” and “play” in the classroom may
have been considered incompatible with the rigors of higher education. But the needs
and interests of students are evolving, and the pedagogical landscape is evolving
with them. Through programs such as the IdeaLab’s call for innovative proposals, the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning’s faculty learning communities and think tanks, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded
Racial Justice Teaching Challenge, educators at Skidmore are constantly encouraged to think of new ways to reach, inspire,
and motivate students.
Students in Hassan Lopez's Tabletop Game Design course play a roll-and-write game in small groups prior to designing and creating their own.
And though Lopez’s game design course centered on play, he and his students could
attest that there was no shortage of rigor.
“I think making your own game from the ground up is extraordinarily challenging,”
Lopez says. “An interesting thing about game design is it can be quite easy to come
up with ideas for games; a lot of people do it intuitively. But actually seeing that
idea through to completion — that’s a whole separate thing that forces you to learn
persistence and endurance as well as certain technical skills.”
His students were required to complete not one or two, but four playable games over
the course of the semester, in addition to other “gamified” side projects. The final
assignment of the course was suitably the hardest, Lopez says, as the students worked
in teams to collaboratively complete full tabletop games with complex sets of rules
and 3D components printed in the IdeaLab.
“The secret ingredient to this class was having that really nice combination of intellectual
discourse about game design — like really digging deeply into game design principles
— then adding on this creative hands-on building element that students could take
advantage of the IdeaLab for,” Lopez says. “And that mix I think is very satisfying
to Skidmore students especially — to all young people. That ability to think deeply
and converse about something you’re reading or have a conversation with somebody else
about something you’re passionate about, then actually translate that into building
something.”
A new set of rules
For the gamified side assignments Lopez required over the course of the semester,
he gave his students the freedom to pursue the ones that most appealed to them and
to choose when to complete them.
“That’s very gamification,” Lopez says, “to give that kind of power over to the students
and say, ‘Which of these are you most interested in doing? Which do you think will
be most beneficial to you? And at what point in the semester do you think you’ll have
the most time and energy to commit to them?’”
Why Play?
Hassan Lopez says the psychologist in him will tell you that the importance of play from early childhood is a no-brainer: Social play is foundational to child development. It’s how the mind and brain grow and develop. It’s how we develop our cognitive and social skills. For adults and college students, he says, the benefits are similar but different and include:
- “Exercising your brain”/intellectual challenge
- Expanding your social community
- Separating yourself from the anxiety and stress of daily life
- Engaging in competition in a safe space
- Being creative and imaginative. “There are very rare opportunities for adults to have that kind of imaginative play experience, but games can give you that any time you want,” Lopez says.
With each assignment completed, students earned “victory points” and “achievement badges” — gaming terminology assigned to what ultimately represented 25% of their class grade — and a public leaderboard displayed their achievements.
In taking Lopez’s course, theater major PJ Moller ’24 found that the gamification
approach resonated. “Some of us in the course are neurodivergent, and for those of
us who function differently in society, it works really well,” says Moller. “I think
the combination of the open-ended assignments, the points, and the vague competitive
aspect is motivating.”
As someone particularly on the pulse of student learning trends as the director of
Skidmore’s Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning, Beck Krefting is keenly
aware of present-day challenges in holding students’ attention and keeping them engaged.
Krefting, a professor of American studies, has been teaching a Post-Apocalyptic Film
and Literature class for a decade, creating innovative assignments that she believes
amplify the memorability and impact of lessons. Her students work in groups to roleplay
an apocalyptic scenario in Skidmore’s North Woods, play the post-apocalyptic video game The Last of Us, and engage in a virtual reality
experience by playing the zombie video game Arizona Sunshine.
“They have to put themselves in a real visceral way into the setting of a post-apocalyptic
narrative, making similar decisions to those of the protagonists in the texts we explore,”
she says. The exercises are assigned in addition to, not in lieu of, traditional readings
and papers.
Krefting says she is always asking herself how she can do more to meet the needs of
students in this particular moment. “I think I share that with a lot of other faculty
who are seeing trends of disengagement and short attention span in students but not
a lack of commitment or smarts, not a lack of desire to be where they are.”
Still, she cautions there could be a downside to gamifying too much of the college
experience, if it were the only element of a course’s format. At Skidmore, faculty
have been treading carefully and maintaining a balance of assignments, study materials,
and degrees of challenge as they incorporate play into their pedagogy.
“It’s not about just entertainment and trying to make it fun for students,” Krefting
says. “I want it to be fun, but there are learning goals and outcomes that are necessary.
If games and roleplay can be a vehicle to get there, fantastic. I wouldn’t say it
should always be the vehicle to get there, but it is certainly an effective one at
different times for different courses.”
An unmatched shared experience
During an end-of-semester Game Fair in Skidmore’s Billie Tisch Center for Integrated
Sciences, Lopez’s Tabletop Game Design students excitedly gathered around tables bearing
their work — explaining to peers and passersby the tokens, cards, and intricacies
of their playable, entirely original games.
Tabletop Game Design students present and discuss the games they created during a Game Fair held in Glotzbach Atrium in the Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences.
Lopez made his rounds through the buzzing room, proud of what his students had accomplished
and feeling reassured that the rollout of his course was a success.
“If I was worried about anything before coming into the class, it was wondering whether
they were going to buy into the premise of the course,” Lopez said. “I knew that I
was going to get students passionate about gaming, but were they going to get into
the creative process enough where I felt they were getting something substantial out
of the class? And they definitely did. They really got together as collaborators and
came up with amazing ideas.
“It has solidified my belief that play is incredibly valuable and we don’t do enough
of it. I think educational settings could take more advantage of play to increase
engagement and to make the daily routine more stimulating to activate parts of your
brain that you don’t activate when engaging in more analytical activities.”
Cho, the senior English major, reflected on the impact of the course and what he succeeded
in building, both tangibly and through the community he found.
I think learning happens best when you are enjoying yourself, when you have personal investment in something, when you feel rewarded and nurtured for the experience beyond just what it means for your future.”Coltrane Cho ’24
“This is work that is rewarding not for the grade, not even for the class, but for me,” he said. “And it takes a lot to do that in school."