One of the most characteristic things about today’s crop of digital games is the gamer grind. The grind, grindyness, or grinding aspect of some games is an aspect that most gamers have experienced at one time or another.  But what does that mean? How do players experience it? How can designers and educators of games-based learning address the grind in our designs?

What is the grind?

The grind is the actions that players spent doing repetitive tasks in a game. This is usually done to unlock a particular game item or to gain experience points necessary to continue playing. Usually this activity is something boring, repetitive, and doesn’t add anything new to the player experience. Rather the grind is an activity that is done in order to get something. Quid pro quo.

Most modern gamers will know the grind in MMO titles like World of Warcraft where continually killing the same creatures over and over again rewards the player with currency, experience, or sometimes items.

In fact the South Park episode Make Love, Not Warcraft specifically lampoons the grind in modern MMO.  In the episode the characters play World of Warcraft 21 hours a day killing a bunch of low level boars to gain enough experience points to level up their characters.

What does the grind mean for players?

Sometimes the grind is just something that players enjoy doing. But if players DO enjoy the grind, then does it mean that activity is not really a grind? An intrinsically motivating action in a game is a cornerstone for good design. But does that mean that the player has to particularly like that action? If they don’t like performing that action in the game, then does it become a grind for those players but not for others?

These are questions that designers address in game design. Asking these questions, in addition to the level of player commitment, as well as the amount of time they invest in the game are important considerations to make.

An action shouldn’t really be a grind if a mechanic is engaging and it helps the player achieve objectives in the game. But when players are doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again is when we stray into the grind territory of games.

Why do players grind?

Sometimes players choose to grind for a host of various reasons. Some of them are evidenced by the player actions.  Some of them are purposely made by the designer.  However, there are some instances when the player does not really have a “good choice” and the grind is something that they pursue in the absence of that good choice.

The grind becomes a comparison between being bored with the game and being bored with the inability to progress in the game.

From another perspective, the grind for gamers is them exercising their basic abilities and agencies. The grind could be one optimized way of attaining something in the game that the designer intended. While the designer would have wanted the player to attempt to defeat 3 hard bosses in order to reach the next level, the player could may also be able to find a way to defeat 100 easy bosses in order to achieve the same thing.

Eric, Kyle, Kenny, and Stan did the same. For 21 hours a day they kept slaying those boars in World of Warcraft.

In this way, the players have optimized the actions they’ve taken.

Addressing gamer grind from a design perspective

Because players engage in the grind (often as a last resort) to achieve some sort of in-game win or achievement, it is often hailed as a characteristic of bad game design.

But this doesn’t need to be the case. Especially when we approach game design form a games-based learning prescriptive.  Sometimes the activities of our students need to address a grind in some form.

I think back to my elementary school days when I was part of a reading club. Whenever you read through 10 books you earned a free personal pan pizza. Now the objective of the designers of this program was to get more students to read. But from the students’ perspective reading 10 books would have been a serious grind. But students still did it – myself included. In this situation, their ideal players continued on towards meeting the program’s outcome which was to get students to read more. Despite the grind.

Another means of including a grind in the game addresses some of the achiever aspects of player design. It may be the designer’s intent to have the player slay 3 bosses instead of 100 smaller bosses to achieve something. But they can often incentivize different methods of play by awarding special “titles” to players who achieve a specific set of circumstances in a game like killing those 100 smaller bosses.

Think about those Steam achievements that pop up during your play when you accomplish something you weren’t event shooting for.

Getting the Gamer Grind on YOUR Side

Designers can find ways to mitigate the gamer grind; ways to incorporate it; and ways to avoid it. If you are interested in avoiding the grind, then you can address it through the use of player agency.

The more ways that there are for players to progress in the game, earn points, do this thing, or accomplish something that allows them to progress, then the less likely they are do something ad nauseam in order to achieve that goal. Giving the player agency in this circumstance allows them to pursue the goal according to their own plans.

Good games also involve some engaging elements such as achievements for elements that could be considered grinds. Think about my personal pan pizza example from earlier. Reading those books as a kid was a grind for me.  But you better believe that getting that delicious pizza was worth it in the end.

The last way to address the grind is to continue to make player actions varied, challenging, and fun. Failing to do so ensures that your game will be a slog no matter what your players do.

Takeaways on Gamer Grind

Sometimes grinding out a game is something that players look forward to. Other times players do it because they don’t have another (or a better way) to achieve the goals that the designer set out for them.

Address these grinding aspects in your game design by providing your players agency to achieve the objectives that you’ve designed. Otherwise, create intrinsic and positive feedback for your players’ actions that make it so that the experience is not so grindy after all.

This article address the gamer grind in games-based learning. TO learn more about how the grind affects players in gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

If you have enjoyed this article – consider getting yourself lifetime access to his Games-Based Learning Digital Library containing all of the content from the past two Games-Based Learning Virtual Conferences; past webinars and courses he’s created; as well as his complete back catalog of articles; podcast episodes; and videos. And more content is being added all the time.

Readers of Ludogogy can get a $50 discount on this valuable resource by using this link.

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You can also read more about Utopoly at his website.

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently” David Graeber

The world is facing catastrophes of pandemics, ecosystem collapse and climate change. The dominant economic ideology endorses individualism and greed over society and community whilst consumerism, perpetual growth and inequality are promoted with damaging consequences for the majority of people and the planet. It should be clear that a new economy is needed together with societal and cultural change. Utopoly is a method to explore and reinvigorate the radical imagination where people can re-imagine a different society where values, forms of exchange and social relations can be reconsidered and reconfigured.

A ‘hack’ of Monopoly

Utopoly started out as a ‘hack’ of Monopoly but has evolved to become much more.

Monopoly in its original form The Landlords Game (1904), was an early form of games-based learning, its inventor Elizabeth Magie intended to show how landlords accumulate wealth and impoverish society. Magie was later airbrushed out of history by the games manufacturer preferring the version adapted by Charles Darrow who claimed it as his own invention. This version is what most people know, and Monopoly has since become a cultural artefact that provides a subtle propaganda reinforcing dominant cultural norms. It celebrates some of the worst aspects of our economy and normalises activities, such as competitive property accumulation and rentier behaviour – teaching value extraction rather than value creation. In hacking Monopoly, we challenge the narrative it propagates and reprise Magie’s pedagogic function. However, Utopoly is not primarily about game-based learning (although knowledge is created through the process) but rather game-based creativity and game-based utopian-practice. Each time Utopoly is played players collectively take part in the hacking via a Future Workshop to produce utopia.

Robert Jungk developed the Future Workshop (1962) in response to concerns that cultural conditioning through education, work and consumerism meant people had become receivers of the ideology of the elites, and their natural creativity was suppressed. There was also clear democratic deficiency in public policy making. He had a fundamental belief that all people had the potential for genius, a creative imagination that he believed would be necessary to solve some of the world’s problems, and that this should be directed towards social and humane goals.

Populating the Board

Utopoly starts with a Future Workshop to collectively develop and conceptualise utopian values, ideas and desires and populate the Utopoly board. Through the process many discussions, stories and hopeful narratives of the future emerge. In the Critique phase participants are invited to question and critique a situation, the features of an economy or society that troubles them and this process opens the possibility of change. Items and concerns are written as notes, and these drive the direction of the next phases. The Fantasy phase is about responding to these critiques with imaginative solutions. It is the utopian space where the magic happens, where the creative radical imagination can play out producing fantasies of a utopian nature, unconstrained by whether they can be realized or not. The final phase is Implementation where the utopian ideas are transcribed onto the Utopoly board (with the property spaces now termed domains). The game part of the method is then ready to begin.

A feature of Utopoly is that participants can invent their own rules for the game stage. The rules that participants develop are predicated on the discussions from the Future Workshop, such that the ideas and values produced can find expression and be interpreted into the rules of play. However, understanding that playable rules are not easily formed a set of guidelines are used as a starting point. They are framed as guidelines, being optional and changeable rather than fixed rules – much like cultural norms and laws of a society. Utopoly is an encouragement to move beyond the fixed ideology of the status-quo and to anticipate cultural change. This concept of utopian-practice is not to produce a fixed flawless blue-print but recognises that the future holds possibilities and different requirements, it is a horizon that is moved towards but never reached, however in the process life is improved.

Beginning at the End

The game proceeds much like Monopoly with features that have been introduced to encourage certain behaviours and alternative economic thinking. The game begins at the normal end-point of Monopoly where a majority of domains are already controlled and players enter the game in a state of monopoly control. This monopoly is held by an oppositional entity (often a corporate or financial entity – that can be an autonomous or played by one of the participants). Their role is to act as reactionary force preventing utopian ideas from being realised by keeping and extending control of domains. The utopian players then collaborate with the aim to release their utopian ideas (domains). The oppositional entity and the utopian players make up two sides who are differentiated in several ways and one of these is their use of different currencies.

Most modern economies use a debt-based mono-currency which is a basic flaw. This causes multiple problems such as artificial scarcity and therefore competition which skews societal values towards individualism and creates an economy that only values what can be priced in the market. It creates periods of boom and bust with the resulting economic depression preventing economies from functioning effectively. Whereas having multiple currencies available at levels of sufficiency allows economies to flourish. There is also a general misconception of how money is created (i.e. it is not reliant on people depositing money in banks). Private banks can effectively create money at will by simultaneously expanding both sides of their balance sheets with assets and liabilities. They therefore effectively have a magic-money tree (also available for national banks as ‘fiat’ money). This feature is present in the game, so the oppositional figure has limitless access to credit and each time this is a used debt is also created which the utopian players must deal with. The utopian players use different currencies, these are suggested as Time, Wellbeing, Knowledge and Creativity (although players can choose others). Domains are then controlled by the placing one of each currency type on them, setting up an ecosystem of value exchange and suggestion that different economies both exist and can be possible.

Different Economic Modes

The two sides also have distinctly different modes of economic behaviour. The oppositional entity represents a financialised and fossil-fuel based market economy based on extraction, exploitation, and growth. Landing on their domains requires rent to be paid but also creates Carbon (this is indicated by blocks placed in the middle of the board). The utopian players have an alternative economic process based on regeneration, recycling, and natural abundance. This is facilitated by the concept of the commons (or another economic sphere). When they land on their domains instead of rent being charged value is created for the commons. The utopian players have a reciprocal and regenerative relationship with the commons – they access value from it and return value to it.

There is a major flaw in traditional economic theory which considers human behaviour to be selfish, individualistic, and rational (homo-economicus). This is a false conception of human qualities, and we now know that people cooperate not just for self-interest but out of genuine concern for others’ wellbeing, even beyond members of their own family. The natural and socially-constructed environments in which our ancestors evolved produced a prosocial nature that promotes positive feelings of satisfaction, pride and elation when engaged in cooperative projects. Collaboration is a common feature of human experience and in Utopoly features are included to reactivate these qualities. Firstly, the utopian players work together against the oppositional entity. Then there is a ‘wicked’ problem of complex, interwoven social, political and economic interests posed by the current status-quo resulting in catastrophic climate change and unsustainable debt (via constant growth). A limit or tipping point is set (players decide) to the amount of carbon and debt that is allowed to build up on the board – if this is reached the players lose. This provides a sense of urgency and further incentive for cooperation to ensure the utopian economy (as a stable symbiotic regenerative ecosystem) is formed.

Creating Temporary Utopias

Whilst the end point of Utopoly is to create and play an entertaining game the real purpose of to bring people together to discuss and explore their utopian thoughts, engage them in utopian practice and, in doing so educate their utopian desires – creating temporary utopians. The participants engage with and express their desires, discuss issues, and form new hopeful narratives of the future. In so doing there is a transformative aspect relating to Ernst Bloch’s autopoietic utopia, whereby engaging in the process of utopian-practice creates utopia and utopians. The games philosopher Christopher Yorke interprets the last chapter of Bernard Suits’ work The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (2014) as a ‘utopian game design thesis’ where utopian game-play could be purposed to transform people into more fully realised utopian individuals. Suggesting such games would be played “not as a pastime, but as a means for individual (and ultimately cultural) transformation – the Suitsian formulation of ludic alchemy. The right kind of gameplay, for Suits, terraforms Earth into Utopia“ (2018, p. 11).

My thesis titled Utopoly – a utopian research method is waiting to be examined and so is not yet available for public readership (hopefully in a few months). The thesis is an account of how the method was developed and played over several iterations and now includes a condensed 2 page set of guidelines. I have just touched on some of the content of the thesis however, for further reading there are two articles which explain Utopoly in its earlier iterations:

http://publicseminar.org/2017/12/utopoly/

When this article was written, Neil was still completing his PhD thesis. This is now complete. It contains guidance on how to run a session of Utopoly, and can be read at 16 November 2021 Economics edition: Utopoly – Game and Utopian Research Method

You can also read more about Utopoly at his website.

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De La Cruz, Pablo; Bello Baltazar, Eduardo; García-Barrios, Luis; Baquero Vargas, María Paula; Acosta, Luis Eduardo; Estrada Lugo, Erín.

In 2015 we carried out an experimental ethnography using a board game in a participatory research in Tarapacá in the Colombian Amazon. One of the objectives of this project was to increase dietary autonomy and promote traditional knowledge associated with biodiversity of indigenous peoples.  In 2012, indigenous organizations of the township of Tarapacá and the Sinchi Amazonian Institute of Scientific Research agreed to support members of Tikuna, Uitoto, Cocama, Bora, and Inga indigenous peoples by helping to develop a local market in which they could sell their traditional products.

Our initial hypothesis was that the main reason that indigenous peoples sell few products from their chagras was that in Tarapacá there is no local marketplace. Rather, they generally sell on the street or to intermediaries at very low prices. With the board game, new variables of analysis emerged, such as intra-community redistribution, sufficiency, and seasonality of planting and harvesting, which transformed the initial hypothesis and explain the low level of sales of chagra products by indigenous peoples and the lack of a permanent marketplace (De La Cruz, 2015, 29; Eloy & Le Tourneau, 2009, 218; Eloy, 2008, 17; Fontaine 2002, 177; Peña-Venegas et. al. 2009, 84; Yagüe 2013, 31).

The idea of carrying out an experimental ethnography using a board game as part of participatory research was a response to criticism by the indigenous peoples, that research results often do not have a significant positive impact on their territories.  They commented that “scientific” methodologies typically do little to resolve the problems that they identify, and that research results remain limited to production of academic documents.  This is partly due to the fact that methodologies used in encounters between indigenous peoples and government functionaries are generally meetings in which “people just speak” and non-verbal communication is rarely explored.

We understand experimental ethnography as:

1. A combination of qualitative methods (stories) with quantitative methods (numbers) to achieve experiments that create an effective “black box” test of cause and effect and an understanding of how those effects occurred inside the black box.
2. As a research practice that involves embedded, embodied, sensorial, empathetic learning – through sensorial means such as games – that transcends a simple combination of participation and observation (Magnat 2016, 219).

For us, the key to experimental ethnographies through board games is the ability of such games to represent the decisions of the actors and catalyse cultural performances which make evident the players’ meaningful contexts.  An ethnography communicates an experience which occurred during fieldwork, presenting in legible terms the lessons learned through research.  The experimental ethnography involves trigger presentation of stimuli during fieldwork with the objective of providing a strategic trigger consisting of multiple tactical procedures, ranging from “passive” observation to directly provoking the subjects.  Methodologically, experimental ethnographies recognize that data both exists prior to the study and emerges through interactions occurring during the research process (Castañeda 2006, 82).

Experimental ethnographies embed the subjects (e.g. players, as well as game creators and testers) in performances in which they must make choices according to the paths they wish to follow and the specific set of meanings they wish to project. These choices are the scripts that either precede the performance and are (more or less) revealed by them, or that take form beforehand and are textually reconstructed post-hoc (Alexander 2009, 29).  A game allows for constructing analysis based on the meanings that the players give to their own performances as well as to those of others.  The purpose of the game is to generate subjective meaning in players which allows for convincing performances (Alexander 2009, 36), and to alter the value of what is at stake (McKee 1997, 62).  To reach this point, the structure of the game should bring together and simplify the scripts upon which the plot is constructed.  The players should reach crossroads at which they must make decisions based on values that they may express as moral binaries (e.g. I like this or don’t like it; I´ll plant or not plant).  If the performance is energetically and skillfully manifested in moral binaries through metaphors which catalyse psychological identification, the players´ understanding of daily life can be applied through drama to the particular situation being represented (Alexander 2009, 37).

The objective of the Game of Chagras[2] is to harvest, process, and sell agricultural products. This game represents some decisions of Amazonian indigenous peoples involved in planting, harvesting, processing, barter, and sale of the products of their chagras.  Actions of cultivating and food processing are carried out on the game board of each player, and those regarding sales are carried out individually on a single collective game board, where purchase-sale prices are modified as the products are offered by each player in the various sales points. The three possible sales points – store, doorstep, and fair – have different stipulations with respect to type of product and quantity which may be sold.

The Game of Chagras allowed participants to compare and contrast different types of game strategies, and comprehending the pertinence of games in both experimental and participatory research methods. Players made decisions based on meaningful contexts that arise from the personal experience of playing the game. In the game, any player could harvest his or her entire chagra by spending 2 UE; thus, the energetic cost was the same regardless of the quantity harvested.  Similarly, all players could sell some or all of their harvest by spending 2 UE.  Nonetheless, some players did not harvest their entire chagra; rather they left some plants of up to three different species (of the five permitted in the game) unharvested; similarly, some decided not to sell all their harvested produce.

We – as game moderator – initially thought that we failed to make it clear that each player could harvest everything in one turn and sell it all in another.  As the game advanced, the moderator often reiterated this possibility, but the actions of many players suggested that they felt that not all should be harvested in a single turn, nor all sold in a single turn.  If the game did not place any limit in UE on harvesting their entire crop and selling all products, what was establishing that limit? Analysis of dialogues during and after game sessions elucidated that seasonality of planting and harvesting different species, and the idea of sufficiency is closely related with chagra management.  Despite the fact that the game allows for a broad range of liberty in the timing of planting and harvesting and quantity of plants planted, players simulated the real-life seasonality and quantities of chagra species planted.  The results of the game also coincide with the fact that when a grower destines the majority for sale, crop diversity tends to diminish.

Reviewing players´ game strategies and commentaries led us to modify the initial hypothesis that due to the lack of a set market, local peasants sell few of their chagra products.  The new hypothesis took into account the ecological particularities of the chagra system and the social relations within which food is produced. Through conversations during and after the game sessions, some variables of chagra management became evident, such as work exchanges through mingas; seasonality of planting, harvesting, and weeding; and the way in which these variables influence local sale and barter of products. When the results of all game sessions had been analysed, they were presented in a meeting with some indigenous leaders.

The game sessions produce performances that lead the participants to compare their daily life situations with the simplified model presented by the game. The Game of Chagras resulted in meaningful interactions which help to understand the dynamics of sale and barter of agricultural products within Tarapacá.  The players´ subjective meanings pointed out aspects of local commerce of chagra products that some players felt were not adequately represented.  The experimental nature of the game lay not only in the possibility of repeating controlled sessions, but also in allowing players to suggest changes to the game rules.

The researchers neither assumed that the categories of analysis that emerged existed previously nor that they were new, but rather that they are cultural performances based on the game sessions. The game did not precisely reflect how the actors make decisions, nor did it create situations totally foreign to the participants.  Rather, its value was to catalyse performances that allowed for better understanding a particular phenomenon. The intention of visualizing their daily actions through a game is to induce the players to view their life precisely in a “non-daily” manner. That is, the game as metaphor for reality seeks that such denaturalization of daily life allows the players to enter a space of simulation and experience themselves as performers. Thus, the game metaphorized their experience and diluted some borders between reality and the game, such that narratives were constructed which were abstracted from their daily experience to later be recovered and presented as objectively real phenomena in daily life (Berger and Luckmann 1976, 61).

Rather than an experiment that “controls” and “isolates” variables to analyse decisions, the game is a lived experience – a plot with its texts, scripts, and performances.  It is a performance space, with a juncture, some turning points, and a dialectic that spurs interest, curiosity, and revelations in the players.  The performance is what happens, whether mute or audible, consisting of gestures, laughs, commentaries, and distractions; it is all part of the scene. For anthropology, it is worth elaborating on experimental ethnographies in terms of the lived experience, which occurs upon recreating a real-life situation and experiencing it in conditions that do not place the players´ existence at risk.  This lived experience is essential to establishing the game as an experiential situation in which the players play the game and “play within the play”[3].

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Sustainable development is a complex problem encompassing an interrelationship between different domains such as society, environment, and economic agents in different levels (local to global) (Weijs, Bekebrede and Nikolic, 2016). To address the complexity of systems thinking and sustainable development, we designed a board game, Green Economy and developed a game-based learning approach utilizing this game (Gatti Junior, Kim, et al., 2020; Gatti Junior, Lai, et al., 2020). The game design began with a simple prototype (Figure 1) and finished after 10 weeks.

Why a game?

Games are models of systems (Kim and Bastani, 2017) and systems themselves (Fullerton, 2008) which makes game play and game design promising learning tools for complex issues. Playing a game that invites the players to participate in the system itself helps to cultivate systems thinking in diverse age groups and contexts. For example, Goodwin and Franklin (1994) designed a Beer Distribution Board Game for adult learners in management development programs to experience the product distribution system. Castronova and Knowles (2015) also explored how a board game about climate systems can be played by university students to learn about and (hypothetically) participate in climate policy making. More recently, Nordby, Øygardslia, Sverdrup, and Sverdrup (2016) observed the potential of their digital game about ecosystems for elementary students’ experiencing and learning about the system. From the constructivist and situated learning perspective (Lave and Wenger, 1991), games situate knowledge within the modeled system and, therefore, simulate a meaningful context for systems thinking.

Why a board game?

Green Economy encompasses both the gameplay and game design experiences in one experiential game-based learning activity. By incorporating a unique feature that enables players to change the rules during the game play, we invited the players to act as game designers during the game play. Both play and design engages students in systems thinking as they need “to think about how various parts of a system (e.g., different subsystems within a system) or different systems interact with each other” (Gee, 2009, p. 6). The board game as a tool embodies design possibilities based on low-cost resources and can easily be used in formal and informal learning settings without computers, internet access, or other technical devices. Additionally, a board game requires much prior experience for learners to play or design (e.g., coding) and provides an immersive learning experience.

In Green Economy, players are invited to engage in the reasoning of sustainable development. They lead a nation through two distinctive stages. They gather and manage resources (including land and Gold) in the first stage to build facilities that will allow them to evolve as a civilization into the second stage.

The game board is formed with hexagons (Figure 2), and each hexagon represents a land; the cards include resources, chances cards, and rules cards. The game encompasses other elements that represent population, Gold, factories, and army. The first nation that reaches a certain degree of wealth without negative environmental points wins the game.

In the first stage, players must have land, Gold, technology, and mineral to build factories and armies. The Factory is the element of the game that provides Gold for players. In each turn, a player receives for each factory owned 1 Gold and 1 negative environmental point. Yet, the army can move throughout the board one land per turn and only to adjacent land. The players may (but are not required to) build or use armies to protect their own lands and factories, to conquer an available land and/or to attack other players’ land. When players use their army to conquer an empty land, they receive 1 negative environmental point. When they use the army to attack another player, they receive 2 negative environmental points.

To win the game, a player must present 10 Golds, 1 stage two factory, and 0 (zero) environmental points. It means that some decisions in the first stage (the use of the army and build factories) will lead players to deal with a critical burden at the second stage. Thereby, we argue that this game play mechanism helps players (as students) reflect on their decisions and the consequences of their actions for the environment.

The feature introduced in our design that fosters the system thinking in-depth is the rule change cards (Figure 3). These cards introduced learning opportunities in our game anchored in new design possibilities that emerged during the game play. The players often have the chance to transform the result of the game completely as we could observe in one of the tables in playtesting with master students when the group started playing collaboratively to attack a player who would win the game. In this particular game, a joint attack was possible when one of the players, who had a rule change card, allowed players to move their armies more than one land per turn. One of the students shared his observation, and acknowledged,

“Once the rule change cards came into play the objective began to focus on how to extend or manage the play between the entire group. The change of rules began to happen to instigate events in creating game play that would promote a deep group interaction.”

One of the important moments from the learning process using games is the discussions conducted by instructors after the game play. During the debriefing sessions, players learned from the decisions made and their consequences in the game. Similarly in the Beer Distribution Game (Goodwin and Franklin, 1994), players acted in the roles of the factory, distributor, wholesaler, and retailer, aiming to consider cost-effectiveness. After the gameplay, players in different positions drew a graph of the pattern of customer demand. While explaining what happened in the game, most students thought other players’ behaviors had ripple effects on their game performance, but seldom noticed the impact of the larger game structure and how their own behaviors contributed to systems result. After collaboratively reviewing and analyzing how the system worked with videotapes of their gameplay, students were able to interpret with systems perspective (Goodwin and Franklin, 1994). The study by Nordby et al., (2016) similarly encouraged elementary students’ reflective practices of writing diaries on ecosystems based on their gameplay and holding debriefing sessions. In Green Economy, through the reflection on the decision making during the game play, we could see that students were involved in systems thinking recognizing elements and their relationships in the game, as well as organizing those components and the process of the game system. Through the interaction of different game design elements that supported social interaction and the formulation of emerging strategies, it was possible to see how players were engaged in systems thinking emerged in a social gaming experience.

Our research seeks to contribute to a growing wave of game design for educational purposes (serious games) that encompass not only the creation of digital games but also card and board games (Kwok, 2017). Our work contributes to a critical discussion concerning the integration of elements of game design and learning theories for developing a board game that enables educators to enhance player’s systems thinking.

Acknowledgment: The authors acknowledge the work of Liping Liu and Xingru Lai (former master’s students at the University of Calgary) who were part of the game design team.

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