Thursday’s time loop class blew my mind. It was a normal Thursday of Week 7 and I expected to listen to a normal Ashtrick lecture. To be very honest, I was planning to multi-task during lecture and work on my math problem set which was due that night. However, our class about time-loop games turned out to be a time-loop game itself. It was totally unexpected, and class was so fun that I ended up forgetting about my math problem set.
Wow, what if all classes were like this? I can’t help but imagine how fun school would be and how much I would love going to school if all my classes were like the one on Thursday. Was Thursday’s class an instance of gamification in education? To my limited understanding, when most people talk about “gamification,” they refer to incorporating incentives like points, score system, levels, and winning that are common in games, in order to make people more engaged. Ian Bogost thinks gamification sucks because it’s businesses capitalize on these incentives in games as marketing and sales strategies. However, for Thursdays class-game, there were no point-systems, the students were not competiting against each other. We did not pay more attention by the incentive to win. To be honest, we weren’t really motivated to win at all. Following the logic of the time-loops in Groundhog Day and 12 Minutes, I guess we were supposed to try to break out of the time loop. But personally I did not feel the urge to stop the time loop, partly because I know this is not real, and partly because class was so enjoyable already that I was ready to sit back and watch this “entertaining show”. So then, was Thursday’s class even a game? Well going back to the definitions of games in week 1, Thursday’s class had a lot of the key parts of games: system, players, artificial, conflict, rules, and outcome. And referring to Roger Caillois’ definitions, although there wasn’t much play from competition (agon) or chance (alea), Thursday’s class had role-playing (mimesis) and some degree of vertigo (ilinx) in the sense of altered perception of time. In fact, in my opinion, it was exactly the lack of competitiveness, lack of incentives to win, that made Thursday’s class a good way to gamify education. While not making class super competitive, Ashtrick still managed to get our attention and engagement. And on top of that, the meta-structure of a time-loop class-game about time-loop games made us think outside the box and think critically about time-loop games. So I think “gamifying” education by designing more role-playing and meta game-classes while staying away from competitions and scores does not suck, there should be more classes like these.
While the structure of Thursday’s class was super entertaining, which made us more focused and engaged, the actual contents, such as the history of the genre and the time-loop genre outside of the US, were still taught to us the same way, as in Ashtrick talking through the slides and then having some discussion about it. I think this part could be more gamified as well. I remember during one of the lectures Ashtrick talked about the effective COVID game where you are playing as the virus and your goal is to spread and grow. I think it’d be fun if we have an additional class where the students (and TAs?) design a time-loop game for Ashtrick (and TAs?) to play. The students have to apply time-loop knowledge and concepts to make the game, and Ashtrick’s goal is to try to break out of the loop by the time class ends. This also solves the problem of the need for time-loop games to be single-player mentioned in @Breathtaking Apricot’s blogpost (perhaps only one of Ashtrick is playing?).
Still, Thursday’s class was fantastic. With the tragic news of Shaoxiong Zheng and other safety issues, this past week was truly depressing. Thursday’s class happened at the right time, it brought some positivity to my life and allowed me to escape for a moment and appreciate the beauty of the creative human mind. Thank you to the professors for putting so much effort into teaching this course.
References
Gamification is Bullshit | Ian Bogost
CVGS Week 1 Lecture PPT
I agree with you that class kind of fell short of being wholly gamified because it didn’t particularly motivate us to seek out the win condition. I wrote about wanting to be stuck in that loop for longer, in much the same way as I wanted to be stuck in Punxsutawney with Bill Murray for longer than I was. I agree that the 2.0 version (that we were hinted would happen at the end of class) should lean more into the mechanics of time loops as part of lecture and not just as a framing device, but also think that there isn’t that much more ground to be gained with the 80-minute hard cap that lectures unfortunately have.
(Also, Ashtrick, if you’re reading this, just realized that I’m not sure if you want information about lecture to be on the public internet — I certainly wouldn’t. Apologies for my prior transgressions… and for this one .)