No fairness paradox. Yes subjectivity shift.
Alberti ’21 [John; January 28; Professor of English @ Northern Kentucky University; The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom, “Playing Games with Our Lives: What Critical Pedagogy Can Teach Us About the Ethics of Games in the Writing Classroom,” pp. 77-93]
Rather than the more conventional (at the time) classroom experience of textbook reading, film watching, worksheets, and lectures, we were organized into teams that moved through a variety of experiential games: farming, the Constitutioal convention, playing the stock market, the debates over slavery and abolition. In each unit, we were tasked with solving various problems (Robison’s [2008], “achievement-bound systems”): keeping a farm afloat in spite of the vagaries of weather and the commodities markets, managing a stock portfolio, forging a new nation, avoiding or starting a civil war. Our teachers acted as our Dungeon Masters, introducing each round with a new set of calamities and opportunities (a sudden drought, a market collapse, a political crisis over the expansion of slave labor).
These achievement-bound systems involved a mix of assimilation and critical questioning: we had to play the stock market game (there was no opting out of the market, and the market equally defined the farming game) and we had to (or were supposed to) stick to our appointed roles: representative to the convention, abolitionist orator. Yet over and over instances of challenging the premises kept arising, especially in the Constitutional convention game, and not always (or even mostly) for what might be considered intellectually and rhetorically polite reasons. Boredom, a desire for attention, our vexed adolescent relationship to teacherly/parental approval—all figured in the subversive mix I count as “challenging the premises.”
Instead of undermining the experiment, however, our toggling between trying to solve a problem within the defined procedures of the game and challenging the premises of these procedures and definitions of these problems (our not always taking these games “seriously”) only made them all the more “realistic”—and effective—in highlighting how ego, insecurity, and social status affect and shape these “real world” games (including the game of the high school classroom). Three takeaways for me from this pre-Oregon Trail educational gaming experience: important career lessons (never, ever go into farming); the profound impact of the dramatized writing and speaking practices we engaged in that essentially constituted the games, especially an appreciation for the power of pathos and ethos; and finally, how this one class remains easily my most memorable (official) pedagogical experience of high school, one I am still thinking through 45 years later, certainly one definition of what Robison (2008) means by “rich literacy and learning practices.”