Leveling up: Player choice and student ownership

As the huge nerd I am, I’ve spent many an hour fantasizing about what life would be like if I were a character in a game. I’ve taken dozens of online tests to find out my Dungeons and Dragons Stats, my World of Warcraft Class, and my League of Legends champion type.

But, as silly as it may seem, the  Dungeons and Dragons character sheet actually has a lot of applications in terms of  real life. It has open slots for all kinds of character information that could easily apply to a real person. To help me illustrate this point, I’ve made one for myself, filling out each blank with information I gathered from online tests.

Let’s talk about what this means, though. In D&D, a character will start the game with each of their six stats (located at the far left of the sheet) at zero, and is given a number of points by their dungeon master to put among the six however that player sees fit, from a minimum of three to a maximum of eighteen. That said, the stats that are actually useful for a character are determined entirely by which class they’ve selected. For instance, I’m a bard (go figure). Bards use the force of their personalities to  perform magical songs and poems that inspire their allies and give them bonuses in combat. As a result, bards benefit most from the charisma stat, the stat that determines how well a character can interact with others in social settings. That said, for a character like me, stats like strength, constitution, and wisdom aren’t nearly as useful (which is good news for me, considering how low mine are). A bard doesn’t run around smashing things with an ax! That’s the barbarian’s job.

These two systems allow for a player to choose how their character fights and completes tasks in the game.  What kind of character do you want to play? Do you want to be a brave swordsman? What about a powerful wizard? Or would you rather avoid combat altogether and try to get past bad guys by using stealth and diplomacy? One of D&D’s greatest strengths as a game is that it gives its players the freedom to choose how they want to deal with obstacles.

Likewise, D&D’s skill system allows players to put points in skills based on their character. This system is pretty true to life, as it makes not all bards alike. Sure, all bards will probably want to put some points into perform, considering it’s the main skill for their class, but others will want to diversify a little bit. Are you a bard with strangely high intelligence? Maybe you should invest in some of the knowledge skills. What about strength? Climb and jump can help you navigate any dungeon. By allowing players to pick the skills they invest in, they can allow their character to be useful in a number of different situations, giving the party some extra options in terms of how they want to deal with situations.

Finally, (and debatably most importantly)let’s talk about the boxes on the far left. They contain personality traits, ideals, bonds (people/places/things you care about), and flaws. This is the section that can really tell you who a character is. Why are they questing? Do they have an overpowering sense of wanderlust, or are they trying to track down their long lost parents? What are their goals and ideals? What keeps them up at night? This section of a character’s sheet gives you a look into who they are as a person in a living, breathing world.

This last aspect is what makes my character more than just “A human bard”. It lets the player figure out who their character is and how they’ll choose to deal with the game’s world. In my years of playing D&D, I’ve come across some really creative and interesting character designs. One of my childhood friends played a sullen necromancer who turned to dark magic in an attempt to resurrect his dead best friend. My current roommate is playing an 8 year old boy whose mind was accidentally trapped in the body of a 35 year old cultist. This is the true magic of D&D. The game allows for players to create a character that is powerful at doing a specific thing in combat (via the class and stat systems), but also capable of completing a wide array of tasks (via the skill point system), and most importantly, is a unique and special person that has goals and ideas that shape how they deal with problems and challenges.

Now, what does all of this have to do with education, you ask?

Everything.

In our education classes, we’ve talked a lot about this idea of Student Ownership. This principle is a relatively simple one: When students have the ability to do things on their own and put a personal spin on the content, they learn better. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? If all I care about is sports, then wouldn’t I actually want to learn about parabolas more if I thought it could help me improve my volleyball serve?

In game terms, there’s a principle of game design that uses a lot of these same ideas. If you love playing video games as much as I do, you’ve probably seen one of these bad boys before. The classic talent tree is a system that allows players to put points into different attributes as they progress through the game, allowing them to choose from a number of potential ways to play, just like D&D’s skill and stat systems. These systems are a common staple in games of all types, and for good reason. Players always love having options. The most successful games in history always utilize this principle of Player choice, giving the player the freedom to choose their own path and come up with personalized ways to complete challenges and make progress that reflect the type of character you’ve built/the type of player you are.

Game developer Daniel Doan published an excellent blog post on the importance of this principle in game design.

GameDev Thoughts: The Importance of Player Choice in Game Design https://t.co/AVwK7tptx1 #gamedev #indiedev #gamedesign #unity3d

— Daniel Doan (@doandaniel) October 27, 2017

 

I like to think that life is pretty similar to this in a lot of ways. A person is born, they roll some base stats, but they haven’t had a chance to put any points into them yet. As they level up, their background, personality traits, flaws, and ideals start to form, and this sort of helps them shape their stats. Maybe their parents are health nuts, so from an early age they start putting points into strength and dexterity. Maybe they had a really strict upbringing and were forced to study all the time, putting points into intelligence. As a kid grows up, their stats and skills start to get rounded out, and then they choose their class, their specialty, which will allow them to decide how they want to deal with society.

So, how do we do this? Although we want each of our students to be able to be the best versions of themselves that they can be, creating a classroom that lets them utilize their stats, skills, and class options in a way that nets them even more experience points is quite the daunting task. How can we possibly kill so many different types of birds with so few stones?

Data:

Before you start building lessons around your students, you have to know who they are first. The easiest way to collect this data is to just talk to them and treat them like they’re people (perish the thought), but there are lots of little things you can do to clean this process up. Ask your students how they feel about different types of activities, ask them how they learn best. Ask them for feedback after lessons are over. Also, writing things down is extremely useful. You can easily keep papers or excel spreadsheets full of information on your students. What do they like to do for fun? What are their goals? Who do they work well with? What are they interested in? By having all of this information present and organized, a good teacher can have an idea of how specific students will react to specific ideas and projects. After all, you can’t play to a student’s strengths without knowing what they are first.

Flexibility:

In D&D (and in life), there is no bad class option. Granted, some classes are better in certain situations than others (bards suck at fighting stuff alone, for instance), but in a well-designed adventure, your character will never spend too long feeling entirely useless, since each class is really good at doing something. Likewise, in education, we need to design lessons this way as well. We need to give our students as much player choice as possible. By this, I don’t exactly mean that we should tailor each particular lesson to a specific student or type of student, (that would just result in the remaining 80% of the class being confused and frustrated) but rather we teachers should design our lessons in such a way that each student will be able to put a personal spin on it.

In other words, we need to find one objective that can be accomplished in a number of different ways. When I was in school, I loved writing songs (I am a bard, after all). Whenever we were asked to do a presentation for a class, I would always ask the teacher if I could write a song instead. As a result, I would usually end up doing a ton of research on different topics on my own time, and I would try to come up with lots of different and exciting rhyme schemes or clever references that I could work into my latest masterpiece. Likewise, one of my good friends had always dreamed of being a movie director, and our teachers usually let him make videos and write scripts for those same projects. Our teachers learned who we were and what we were into, and they gave us the freedom and support to work those talents into our work.

Courage:

The third and final staple of maximizing your adventurers’ strengths is less tangible than the first two, but it’s arguably more important. If you want your students’ strengths to shine, you’ve gotta let them, and that means creating an environment where they’re comfortable with being themselves and with approaching tasks from different points of view. You’ve got to make sure you give your students the courage and support they need in your classroom. That means not tolerating discussion of whether they’ve built a poorly designed character, that means acknowledging each students’ particular builds as strong, and most importantly, that means paying as much attention to each individual student as possible to help them maximize their character. The classroom should be a place where anyone can level up.