Playful Rome: Student Game Creation as Critical Learning Practice

While there are numerous explicit principles for game design (e.g. Schell's 100 lenses) and approaches to project management for game studios (agile-scrum), there has been less attention to how creating an educational game with student developers can function as a critical learning path into the game's subject matter. More than absorbing isolated facts, this process should invite sustained comparison between how the subject is approached through game design and the methodologies of subject's discipline (e.g. history, biology, astrophysics). As a specific example, this paper provides a postmortem of the learning experience of student developers for the Roman civilization game Saeculum, created at the Tesseract Center of the University of Arkansas for a university level course. Three key principles emerged: (1) Muitum in parvo. As a starting point, it is important to engage interns deeply in a small piece of the game world. This may be an individual art asset, small level, or subset of the game mechanics, but it is crucial that students come to understand it as a microcosm of larger themes in Roman culture. (2) Systems matter. While interns begin by touching smaller pieces of the game, they are brought into play-testing and critique of game systems early on. We expect them to think critically about how well (or not) these systems represent Roman culture, and how they compare with narratives developed through more traditional historical methods. (3) Historical empathy and group cohesion. Closely modeling a Roman artifact can produce a powerful sense of oneness with the past, but this must be tempered with respect for cultural difference. This can translate into the ability to balance diverse perspectives in the development team. As the process does not belong to any one developer, the story Saeculum tells about Rome is necessarily multiplex and provisional.