Gamification vs. Game-Based Learning: What's up?

Speaker 1 Hello. Welcome to our latest episode of our podcast. My name is Chris McNutt and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project. Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Paul Edgarto Perez, Kane Letzia, and Corinne Greenblatt. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on social media and YouTube. On today's podcast, we're joined by two founders of Lutic Language Pedagogy or LLP. LLP is an open access academic journal and community focused on publishing actionable ideas on Lutic or playful ideas and language learning through tabletop RPGs, live action role playing, card games, and video games. For example, two recently published papers include, Teaching Spanish with The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, and Places, People, Practices, and Play, Animal New Horizons here and there. Joining us are Doctor. James York, the editor in chief of LLP, and a senior assistant professor at Meshi University, where he teaches and conducts research on the application of games and play and literacy. And doctor Jonathan Dehan, who is associate editor and associate professor in the faculty of international relations at the University of Shizuka. I didn't also should have added on that you're both in Japan, is interesting in and of itself. Jonathan focuses on teaching literacy with games as well. And Jonathan are currently writing a book on ludic pedagogy and they led a session at our recent conference to restore humanity on ludic teaching that you should definitely check out. We'll put that in the show notes. Thanks again, James and Jonathan for joining us. And James, we're just gonna start off with you and just kinda go through some of our our key terms as many academics do and really just describe the difference between these concepts, play, ludic, game based learning, gamification. What is this world that we're living in when it comes to ludic learning pedagogy?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Great. Thank you for the introduction, Chris. Yeah. I am a doctor, but, I am a researcher, but I'm also a practitioner. I think that that's where a lot of my research focus comes from. And, yeah, I am a teacher, and, being able to interface between, what's happening in classrooms and what's being talked about in the world of academia, I think, is a unique position and one that I'm trying to to use to its fullest, I guess, to to reach teachers and to to help researchers at the same time. Regarding these terms, I guess we can start with the term gamification, which is perhaps the most well known term among teachers. Also, most confused term, I guess. It seems to be a a word that has used as an umbrella for anything to do with games or game like approaches to teaching. You may think, well, gamification, is that like playing monopoly in class? Gamification, is that like saying x giving students XP instead of giving them a grade? Is it Minecraft? Is Minecraft gamification? Right? So I think there's a lot of confusion around the terms, both gamification and game based learning. Definitely not. So I I think that it's important to define these terms, that gamification should be different from game based learning. It it needs to be separated in order to to talk about these things properly. So gamification essentially is this idea of using the elements of games in non game context. That's the kind of clinical definition that you'll find in in textbooks. Generally, how this has been interpreted and applied to these non game contexts, and let's stick with education then, is that, like I mentioned, the the the reframing of of the classroom as a game. Teachers really glom onto this because it's nothing new, really. The the the classroom is already kind of gamified in the fact that there is quantifiable outcomes. You know, the the grade that you get, that's kind of a score that you get in games. You have these activities which could be considered, I guess, levels in the game. There are winners and losers in the class. So teachers go, okay. I just need to rename things in my class, and then it's kind of gamey, and kids love games, so they're probably gonna love this. That's basically how gamification is implemented in classrooms. It's okay. Instead of doing a reading activity for homework, I'm gonna give you a reading quest that just by changing the terminology makes it more glamorous and more well, supposedly appealing to the students that are gonna do this activity.

Speaker 1 And also, like, tagging on things that feel gamey that add to the the extrinsic motivator element. I know ten, maybe twenty years ago now, there was the badging phenomenon, putting badges attached to everything like the Boy Scouts or something where you you get your badge for completing three homework assignments on time, and that would give you a 100 XP to level up and put a hat on your avatar or something in the in the tech system or ClassDojo, which is used in I they advertise, I think, 95% of classrooms or schools. 95 of schools use ClassDojo.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's it's definitely taken the world by storm. Yeah. So this this idea of, like you said, rewards based, gamification, extrinsic motivation, tapping behavioristic, qualities of gamification, it really the problem with it then for me is that it doesn't doesn't change the underlying structure that's already there. Right? If we want to change schools and make them better, quote, unquote, better, then just by changing terminology and by focusing even more on extrinsic motivation and behaviorism, it doesn't really do anything. So that that's kind of the problem that I have with this term gamification and its implications for for education. So in opposition to that, then we have this idea of, well, what's game based learning? And game based learning is simply just any learning that is facilitated through the use of a game. So where gamification is using game elements or at least playing game elements to the to the the the construct that's already there, game based learning then is saying, well, we're actually gonna use a game, a real game, to achieve something. So, okay, you could use civilization to learn about the the world, the the the map of the world or something. You could use, Minecraft to do a kind of group, what's the word, like, collaborative activity to to build trust with each other, to learn about deforestation, to learn about farming.

Speaker 1 You know, it's it's this idea of using a game to learn something. Right. And this is something that I think that anyone who's grown up in the last thirty years probably played Sim City or Oregon Trail when they were in school. And everyone pretty much remembers the major life lessons, I guess, or historical lessons of Oregon Trail. People know dysentery probably solely because of Oregon Trail. And it it wasn't something that we were forced into through some kind of lesson plan. It just existed in classrooms and kids played it because it was fun. You bring up Oregon Trail as an example of game based learning is actually super

Speaker 2 important. Okay? So if you imagine a student playing Oregon Trail and then this sorry. This this links to my critique of game based learning, actually, is that if you think about students playing Oregon Trail in the classroom, you're probably gonna think that the learning just comes from playing the game. It's it's kind of a package onto itself. The learning should just naturally happen. Oh, you're gonna play Oregon Trail today to learn about x y zed. Right? Now that that's the problem with with game based learning is that it has no pedagogical ideology. It has no kind of teaching attached to it. Game based learning, in fact, could be implemented in a a behavioristic manner in that you're you're gonna play this game to get 10 points. Right? There's no teaching around it. There's no reflection. There's no onboarding. So I think game based learning, one of the issues with it is that, okay. So I'm gonna bring a game into a classroom, but how do I actually, you know, pedagogically scaffold that towards learning? So if we if we just sum it up then, we've got gamification, which is saying we're gonna take these elements of games and apply them to the classroom as a kind of fake simulation layer on top of what already exists, not change underlying structure. There's a problem there. Game based learning, okay, we're gonna use games towards learning something, but how the teacher actually does that really matters. So I think that that's that's a kind of blind spot in game based learning is that we're gonna bring this tool in, and we're gonna expect learning to happen. And so that maybe lev leeways into what me and Jonathan and the the the team at LLP, ludic language pedagogy here, is are trying to do in that saying that, well, the pedagogy focus, how do we actually use these things? If students are really into Among Us or Stardew Valley or Apex Legends, League of Legends, how do we actually, you know, pedagogically scaffold an activity around that game or playful activity towards, you know, learning that is in line with HRP's, kind of proposition. It's transformative. It's humane, and it, you know, is the best that we can do for students.

Speaker 3 That's probably the best I can do right now. Please add to it, Jonathan and Chris. Yeah. I think one of the things that James quickly said about Oregon Trail is that there I think you said that there aren't pedagogical models baked into it. And I think we can we can split that apart just a little bit. Right? Because, like, if if we look at Oregon Trail, it is designed by people for people. And so the designers thought about the best way to onboard or introduce or tutorialize or to present the information in that game. Right? And this is where where Chris yeah. No. This is where Chris and HRP is also thinking about, like, how do we communicate effective design principles to teachers? Because in Oregon Trail, the designers did did present things in a way, and they designed the graphical interface, they designed the levels, they designed the progression to be effective. Right? If they had not designed the game in an effective way, nobody would play it. It wouldn't be fun. Right? And so there is a sort of systemic interactive model. There's there's there's hints, there's tips, there's events, there's text, there's information that does teach people about the experience of the Oregon Trail. Okay? That's that right. There is that. That that games are designed effectively. If they weren't designed effectively, no one would play them because they'd be too hard. Right? I just finished a five hour video essay review of Tokimeki Memorial, this hardcore dating simulation that which broke down this entire model. Right? It's it's in it's very difficult. It's it's impenetrable. Right? Okay. So but and then but then to go back to James talking about about Minecraft, Minecraft is designed also to onboard people. There is a tutorial in Minecraft, but there are things in Minecraft that are a little bit obtuse or obscured or ideas that are underlining what Minecraft is. For example, I just watched a video essay on how in Minecraft, you can abuse the villagers in Minecraft and transport them to another place to build a sort of work camp to to farm certain elements. And it's basically, you're you're you're engaging in colonialism, right? Where you can do things in games and not be aware that you're doing things in games or that they have meanings, right? And so, I mean, so for example, like Animal Crossing as well, you brought that up in the introduction, like, it is a model of capitalism. It is a model of of a mortgage system. It's a model of consumerism that perhaps the player can see that the designer did put in the game, but if the learner is not aware of what colonialism is or what capitalism is, it's very difficult for someone to play a game and then reflect on it and go, oh, right. Like, I I shouldn't be engaged in colonialism in this amazing voxel game. Right? No. No. Really. Right? And that's and I think that that's and that's where LLP starts with is, like, there are there are systems in games and there are ideas in games and experiences in games that learners might not be that probably won't be able to unpack by themselves. Right? Like, how does how does sexism appear in certain online games? Right? Or or or how do we unpack that and actually apply that to the real life? I think that's where James' comment about games not having learning certain learning principles in is very apt. Right? Where games a lot of educational games are not designed to include a sort of debriefing stage and an application stage and an analysis stage. They're just focused on the experience. And games are fantastic experiences. And media are fantastic experiences. I'm I'm I'm sort of addicted to watching The Big Short right now. Right? This this about the the the the housing crisis crash in 2008. Right? And it's just like it's amazing. Right? But but I would like to talk to a financial banker and and and get their understanding of it and and unpack that stuff for me. Right? Like, I can't unpack it by myself because I don't have that knowledge or that ability to apply those lessons in my real life. Right? So I think games are well designed experiences, but teachers are also interactive and can design additional well designed experiences around them to to to apply them in an even greater if they can amplify

Speaker 2 the the the the well designed experiences to be more well designed experiences. Right? That was, yeah, that was the point I was trying to make, actually. So thank you for for clarifying the fact that games themselves may have some pedagogical, you know, design baked into them. But, yeah, the point was that your what was it? The colonialism example for for example. A teacher a teacher could manufacture that experience for students and then unpack it. Right? They could. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Right. Not everybody is going to going to, like, colonialize the villagers to mine emeralds. Right? Like, I didn't do that. I've I've played hundreds of hours of Minecraft. I've never

Speaker 1 okay. My kids do abuse the villagers. I'll I'll take that back. What what I think is interesting about what you're saying is that I think it speaks to a greater conversation that we could at least tap into slightly surrounding ed tech broadly, even beyond games. For example, we recently have been talking a lot about Conmigo, which is the new AI companion for Khan Academy, which in theory is a tool that kids can go on Khan Academy, they can have a conversation with a chat GPT chatbot type thing, and it will tutor them and help them come to answers. And and honestly, AI is an incredible tool to break down code, to break down math problems. It's really neat. But that doesn't mean that you just put all of 30 kids in your room on a computer to do AI chatbot stuff without any teaching intervention or purpose behind the content. In the exact same way that we wouldn't tell 30 kids, play Oregon Trail, and then the bell rings, and that's that's the end of the period. Like, there's there's an additional layer there. And something I I wanna make sure we got to is that this doesn't just apply to video games, and and you guys talk about this a lot. It's it's board games. It's tabletop games. It's role playing activities. And it also dives into the conversations around the systems that the games are in, but also conversations about how you play the game itself, like strategy. A a good example I have is I I used to teach the Cold War and McCarthyism. So when people were investigating, communism, they thought everybody was a communist, spread like wildfire. We used to play what's called the red dot game. A very simple game. You cut up a sheet of paper, like, tear it into a bunch of pieces. Let's say they're in groups of eight. The teacher will take a red dot, put it on one, write red because of color blindness, and then put black on all of the other ones. So you have seven black dots, one red dot, discreetly give it to every single kid. They look at the dot. They put it in their pocket. And the goal of the game is everyone has to vote out the red dot. And pretty much about sixty seconds into this game, chaos ensues because everyone will just start screaming at each other because they just assume everyone else is the red dot, and very rarely does anyone actually win. And what tends to happen is everyone isolates from each other else. They think everyone else is the red dot. So you have this group of people that kind of all span out. At the end of the the activity, there's, like, 30 people around the room, and they're all hypersuspicious. That in and of itself, the strategy of that and how you feel and how you play it, emulates the literal thing that happened during McCarthy. So that's that's exactly what people did. They sold out their neighbors. They were they were worried about someone being over their shoulder at all times, etcetera. Go ahead, Jonathan. Yeah. No. Exactly. Like, that's phenomenal because you're you're describing

Speaker 3 and I'm sure, like, you're describing a system which is really elegant, well designed, there's there's hidden information, there's there's instructional principles baked into that. But then, of course, you're gonna debrief it, and you're gonna talk about what it means and the accusations and how this feeds into, like, you know, psychosis and things like that. Not psychosis, but you know what I mean? Like, you know, right? And so I think what James was just talking about and bringing it back to the definitions, like, yes, this is the kind of stuff that we want in the classroom. Like, we we do wanna have these elegant like, the red dot game is is is frugal. Right? It's it's just a piece of paper. Right? It's it's a it's a face to face simulation. There's there's there's all these hard skills and soft skills and knowledge and strategies, and you can write essays about it. You can do all this kind of stuff. Like, I think that's a really wonderful example of of ludic language pedagogy. Right? And there's tons of language in there as well or ludic pedagogy. What I what I think is really interesting and and and what we would love to try to convey in this podcast is that what do you call what you just did? Do you call this game based learning? Do you call it game based teaching? Do you call it gamification? Because I think that's just like it's just a very side box of saying, I think it's very hard for lay people, for for even researchers to label what that is, and I think that leads to the problems about gamification. Someone will say, red dot game debrief red dot game debriefing, writing essays to prepare for the regents exam or whatever, or class dojo and rewarding people with the sound effects for for being on task. Let's just put those in the same barrel. Right? Right? And that's and that's it. That's and that's and that's the thing, like and that's just that that's just the nature of the academic silo, of jargon, of of people's literacy, of going Minecraft, Oregon Trail, class dojo, rewards and punishments, grades, levels, achievements, badges, red dot game and debriefing, they're all the same thing. Right? And because kids love because because because kids like games. Right? And so that's that's I think that's the anti ed tech, anti like, it's it's the thing we're fighting against. Not fighting well, fighting or or trying to deal with because it it is a literacy. Like, it's a you know, it's an understanding.

Speaker 1 It's it's restructuring. Right? It's systemic rather than a tag on. Because the the concept of gamification, as it's typically said through school, is you're a teacher, these are students, let's do things better using games. But what we're really getting at here is actually redefining what good teaching is. Because games like the Red Dot game, but also having your kids play video games in class is fairly radical if you are doing that for longer than fifteen minutes. If you're debriefing and talking about it, if you're doing this consistently and it's not a one off, that is going to make your classroom loud. It's going to make it hands on. It's gonna make it experiential. And that is quite literally re yeah. It's teaching as a subversive activity.

Speaker 3 You know, literally redefining what it means to have a classroom. And I think that's a complicated conversation. And that's and that's just people's, like like, human attention spans, thinking about the future, being able to deal with the systems of education. That's a much more nuanced, difficult conversation to have than I can reframe my class as quests and badges and and achievements and and XP. Right? And so that that's interesting. That's, yeah, that's the third rail. Right? The thing that I'd like to add here is then that we we kind of talked dismissively about gamification,

Speaker 2 because it doesn't really change the underlying structure of the classroom. K? Of course, you know, grades, scores, quantified feedback can be effective in knowing how well you're doing. Yeah. Of course, rewards and punishment. Feedback is good, of course. We we do like feedback, but, yeah, gamification doesn't really change in line structure. Okay. The issue that we have with game based learning then is, well, one is, is there any pedagogy there, that the teacher is doing? But that that's that's the first thing. The second thing that I think that we touched on is, maybe the teachers listening to this when they think of game based learning, it's like I said, the Minecraft, the video games, and the digital games. And it's well, how the hell am I gonna bring Minecraft into the classroom? How the hell am I gonna get 30 devices so that students can, experience the Oregon Trail, for example, even? And I think that's one of the the issues with this this terminology game based learning is that it has been kind of hyper focused on the digital. Whereas what Chris just introduced is this red dot game that would, for us, definitely I mean, it is it is a a game of sorts. So it it would come under the umbrella of game based learning. But the way that game based learning has kind of been sold is that the red dot game doesn't really fit into the the narrative. So that's why we're using this term ludic, which comes from, you know, the the the word play, be meaning that we're looking at things from the the massively multiple online RPG games like World of Warcraft, the the Among Us games, the the Minecraft games. Okay. Of course, they fit under a ludic umbrella, but we'd also like to include all of this stuff that teachers are actually doing, like the the red dot game. How can we pedagogically support that, you know, scaffold that towards learning as well under a banner of of of game based learning using the term looting? So, yeah, that that's the the difference in terminology that I'd like to just focus on is the game based learning because it has been, you know, fairly techno utopian and focused on digital. It has let teachers down in a way. And so by opening the gates to, all kinds of play and and games under the under the term ludic, I think, is a little bit more

Speaker 1 humane and the way that we'd like to see things going. James, just addressing the first part of that, and then I wanna get to what it means to be ludic in physical spaces as well, that that external motivator piece. Something that I've been watching very closely because I myself, I'm a pretty avid board gamer, video gamer. I'm I'm truly a nerd. And this has been ongoing, but I feel like really recently, there's been a massive pushback to external motivators in games. So there's been hypervigilance towards, is the game wasting my time? Is the game trying to move me forward using almost behaviorist methods of like shiny things on screen, etcetera? Or is the game fun in it of itself? Like, we've seen recent releases of games that are all style, no substance. And then games like Baldur's Gate three, which just came out. It's, like, one of the best selling games of all time, won all these different awards, contains no micro transactions, is fun to play. You can play it any way that you want. And I'm curious if there's a way for us to interpret this movement that you all are doing through the lens of, like, exploitative mobile games or exploitative, like, triple a games that don't value people, etcetera. I love exploitative

Speaker 3 crappy games. I think that they are wonderful and I think that the more of them, the better because we can bring them into the classroom and we can use them to show students how manipulative systems and people are. And if we don't have those, then there's not a shortcut to really showing people

Speaker 1 how awful other human beings are. It makes a really good case too for when you can use extrinsic motivation. Because it's not like there's no role. I think that some people get stuck in the binary. Right? They get stuck in this idea of

Speaker 2 extrinsic motivator bad, intrinsic motivator good. But it's it's more nuanced than that. It's it's a it's a good framing concept, like the idea of freemium versus triple a games versus indie games and how do they relate to what's happening in classrooms. Like, the freemium games due to their nature is that they're free to download, and so they wanna keep you on the app the game as much as possible so that they can generate money. And they do that through manipulation of, you know, timed rewards, gems. You know, basically, they keep you on the app as much as possible. Okay. This is kind of pessimistic, but you can see that if if maybe high school or junior high school, whatever, teaching, if the content is such can I say bullshit?

Speaker 3 I went to a new supermarket the other day and I and I checked out and they're like, do you have a point? Do you do you have a point card? I'm like, no. I don't have a point card. Would you like a point card? I don't want a point card. Right? Because it's the same thing. That's the freemium bullshit. Right? It's the I will give you this thing to hook you back into keeping continue playing. Right? And coming back Yeah. So that's why gamification is used in schools because the content's crap. It's like, I'm gonna have to use all these all these rewards to keep you on the on on the treadmill. Right? Right. Like, I came to this store for the cage free eggs. That's why I came to this particular You're an idiot. What are you talking about? No. Because that's why I I I decided to go to this store for a specific purpose,

Speaker 1 and then they're trying to sell me this freemium gamification bullshit. I have no idea what you're talking about. But but building off of that, though, I wanna be clear too, if we're gonna continue maybe not necessarily the egg route, but the mobile gaming route. Premium games tend to burn out. Like, there's a few that are hyper popular. But the ones that are hyper popular, if you notice, tend to be the least exploitative. Teamfight tactics, like the League of Legends, game is incredibly well done. Does it have in app purchases? Yeah. There's a ton of them. But they're not actually impacting the game and big asterisk here because there are caveats. Most people aren't addicted to this in the sense that I'm spending thousands of dollars a month to keep playing it versus something like Diablo Immortal which kind of infamously launched and had a giant number of people burn out of it within the first few months because the game itself is done through purchasing. It took everything out of the air and then moved on. And And if we think about that from a teaching angle, that's the same as saying, hey, my class is it's fun just because it's fun and every now and then we have some extrinsic motivators because we have to to keep you all going. I mean, there's a little bit of that in there. But at the exact same time, every single lesson is not, hey, you're gonna earn your a 100 points today because after a while that's it's strenuous. It harms you. It's stress. People do

Speaker 3 burn out on gamification. Right? Like the point that James made in his excellent digital culture and education paper is that in if you start to implement these systems of rewards, you need to keep them going. Right? And you need to keep, like, ramping up the dopamine hit to keep people in that system. Right? And and that's the that's the argument against capitalism too. Like, capitalism, consumerism, yeah, we're just gonna consume all the resources or resources on the planet,

Speaker 2 and then people are gonna burn out. Yeah. I think you can also think about it in terms of passion versus profit. Right? The game design. Is it designed for profit, or is it is it a passion project like an indie game that that doesn't try and keep you attached? It's if you like it, you like it. If you don't, you don't. Right? I play a freemium game called Tricky Machines. Okay? It's this crazy high

Speaker 3 this is janky driving simulation game. It's it's free to download and you get rewinds because you're gonna make a lot of mistakes driving these like really difficult to drive trucks and forklifts and and and and trailers around this three d blocky world. I'm happy to spend $5 or $10 because I like the game and I'm happy to support the designers, but that I so Chris, has the designer tricked me into into giving them $5 every couple months? I mean, there's a whole science behind this, like making the bundle a certain amount of money. What bundles do I display at different amounts of times? What digital currencies do I use?

Speaker 1 This is like a whole thing, but there's a major difference between a developer obsessing over, hey. I'm going to reap as much money as possible from the consumer, and the purpose of the game is the extrinsic reward, aka the purpose of the game is to make as much money as possible,

Speaker 3 versus the purpose of the game is to be fun, and I can sustain myself by making a fun game. Yeah. It's the passion versus project profit thing again. Right? So is it focused on giving the giving the experience, or is it about milking the the user? Yeah. Well, but it's not it's not a or b. And I think this we can get into this later. Like, it's not a or b. Like, there's the designer still has to buy cage free eggs tomorrow. Right? Like, they they still have to eat. Right? So they do need they can't just make an amazing free game and put it out into the world because they love everybody. Right, they they do have to eat.

Speaker 4 Meet Dominic, a typical kid navigating the monotony of school. Every day, he trudges through a seemingly endless cycle of uninspiring lectures, textbooks thick as bricks, and the ever present drone of the teacher's voice. As the clock ticks, his creativity wilts within the confines of rigid curriculum and standardized tests. The fluorescent lights flicker against the beige wall, casting a sterile glow over the rows of tired faces. All daydreaming of adventure and excitement outside those confining walls, even the most intriguing subjects lose their allure as they're squeezed into the unrelenting schedule, drained of the spark that could ignite a passion. Dominic yearns for a spark of real world relevance or a chance to explore his unique interests, but the system seems determined to snuff out any hint of excitement that deviates from the script. The bell rings, echoing the same familiar routine. The purpose of the Human Restoration Project is restoring humanity to education. We believe in fostering a human centered systems approach that revitalizes and rehumanizes the educational experience for students and adults alike. Through our research backed, informed guidance and collaborative effort with students, teachers and administrators, we are actively shaping the narrative of public schools. We aim to build trust and foster a strong community of backers who share our vision. We believe in the power of openness, and with your contribution, you're helping us maintain this organization and continue to restore humanity to education. Here's a quick summary of our financial situation. Our income sources are donations, grant funding, and professional development. We don't generate a profit on our other endeavors like our conferences, resources, and videos. We're funded through 2024, but are currently reliant on potential grant funding to stay afloat. Our only major expense is payroll. The only two full time employees at HRP, Nick and Chris, each make $55,000 a year. And last year, 92% of our funding was used toward expenses. That's payroll, website fees, transcription services, and more. In other words, every dollar counts. Human Restoration Project is a five zero one c three public charity and your donation will receive tax deduction benefits in The United States. Our EIN is 84Dash3753948. As a bonus, all donor gifts are produced by Ray Gun. Ethically sourced, sustainably made here in the Midwest, and the largest union clothing chain in The United States. And as I can vouch, the shirts are also very very comfortable.

Speaker 1 So would one of you like to address potentially, what does that actually look like, feel like, sound like? What does it mean to be ludic

Speaker 2 generally? Okay. There's there's a couple of different framing devices. First of all, we can think of our classrooms as playgrounds. This is something that we've been playing with quite a lot recently is that if we consider classrooms as games where there are winners and losers with quantified, output in terms of the grade that students get, think I that we can do better than that by considering student, classrooms as playgrounds instead. And so the the the kind of aesthetic difference here is that, well, if you consider the game snakes and ladders, for example, you know, you just go through the paces. There's no real choice, I guess. You just roll and see what happens, and your outcome No one's, like, replaying chutes and ladders multiple days in a row. I just I don't I don't think so. Nah. Nah. And we can kinda consider that if if that's the kind of game like classroom, then what would a play classroom look like? Well, what do kids do in a in an adventure playground or a jungle gym or whatever you call them in The States? You know, you've got the the slide, you've got this maybe a little castle area, you've got maybe a a walkway that they can go across. So with a playground, it is a structure. It is a defined structure that someone has made, but they've made it to be played within lots of different ways. So the kid could use the castle as a to say that, oh, I'm the king of the castle and you guys are all peasants or whatever. Or you could have someone that just only goes down the slide 15 times, you know, see how fast he can go or maybe he slides down backwards and stuff. So the point is that I think that if we as teachers can create a a structure for students to play within, we're we're doing something that's a lot more in in line with what HRP would would would consider important in in in schools is that it's more, adjunctive. There's more participation. So the first kind of idea of being a ludic teacher is both to think of your classroom as a playground, and then how can you create space for students to play? And and this word space, we're actually using as an acronym for kind of five key tenants of, progressive, transformative, good education. So the s would be safety. So how can we create safety for our students to play? How can we create, for example, a classroom that, values learning by failure and and, you know, redoing things. So it's it's a safe place where students can can talk about themselves and not feel like a kind of a fear of being reprimanded. Okay? So that's the first core tenant of a, quote, unquote, ludic playful environment is to have a safety participation. So if you look through educational material on progressive education, on playful education, on, yeah, again, good education, it should be connected to the real world. So the the participation element of of the classroom, how do we have students get involved in society? K. So that's the second core tenant, so SP. Next would be a. So it's agency. How can we have students, you know, be active learners doing things that are important to them, you know, have some autonomy, have some choice? So we've got SPA. Next is c. So this is another key core tenant of of educational literature being critical. So how can we create critical students that are not just regurgitating things verbatim from what the teacher said, but actually diving into material? Who who wrote this? Why did they write it? You know? So a lot more it's about literacy. The final point, so we've got s p a c e, is about experiences. So valuing students' experiences in and outside the classroom, thinking about their their identity, making meaningful experiences for students. So I think that if a if a teacher can consider their their classroom as a place that provides space for students to play with these five core tenants, then we're on the right track to being a kind of ludic teaching experience, essentially.

Speaker 1 Is there even a difference between ludic as a concept when it comes to learning and the concept of learning? As in, isn't all good play learning and all good play learning? I think I said the same thing twice, didn't I? Yeah. In in both ways. Right? So, like, when you describe this concept of space, what I hear is, well, it's progressive education. I I don't really need to add on anything to that to necessarily make it progressive ed. That is progressive ed. I I think when some folks think about the emotional connection to play, they think of the word fun. And that's not necessarily true. Although games can be fun, games can also be very serious and rigorous and difficult and challenging and tackle, like, real problems. I've played everything from, you know, I'll play some like dumb game on my phone the past ten minutes because I'm bored and it's like a quick dopamine hit to I'll play like Albion online or some like hardcore MMO and make a spreadsheet for hours and be doing like math calculations, and I'll end after like three hours thinking to myself, why am I doing this? This isn't fun. I'm like working. I'm working harder than I do on my day job playing this game, but yet I still continue to do it.

Speaker 2 The idea of this space, having these five core tenants, the space to play, being totally aligned with progressive education, yes, it is. It's also completely aligned with playful, education literature as well. It's also aligned with radical critical pedagogy literature. It's also aligned with general good educational literature, which I just mentioned. So the idea that all of these things kind of coalesce, that is why I'm able to call it a ludic approach because it does align with so many things. It it's not only progressive literature, but it also aligns with play and play literature. So, yeah, I think that having these just just boiling all these core tenants down, was a real kind of revolutionary thing for for mine and Jonathan's thinking on this topic of what is ludic teaching. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There is no there's nothing new. It's just only truth. Right? What's exciting about that to me is that it gives you an example. Right? Because the one of the major issues that you run into as a progressive educator is that the thing that you have to model on is either your own classroom experience, which tends to not be progressive, or perhaps, like, looking at, like, Sudbury schools, which which but it's it's not accessible. Right? I can't easily walk into a quote unquote progressive education classroom and feel it and see it, understand what's going on. But again, pretty much everyone born in the last few decades plays video games actively or has played a game and they can understand that. Like that's a super accessible thing for most folks, to go play a board game or video game. We we talk about this, but like this is getting into like semiotic domains of understanding, teaching, and learning through the domain of games and play and learning, and just making that realization that, oh, hey, these are really similar, if not the same thing.

Speaker 3 So the question that you asked a few minutes ago about like about fun, it's it's philosophical. It's it's it's remarkably hard to to define what what fun is and and what play is. So in the book and and the work that we're doing right now is to try to talk about ludic by downplaying the what of games, like downplaying the technology in a way, and and focusing more on on on the who and the how and the why. And so what what we've what we've come back to, and this is this is this wonderful refrain of like there's nothing new, only truth that we're exploring in the book, is that in 2004, like like Mark LeBlanc and other people, they they they looked at different kinds of fun. And the things that you talked about were like, well, you could you could play Pokemon or Animal Crossing or or Stardew Valley as just a pastime just to relax. It's it's fun to just, like, collect things and relax with your friends. Or you can play something that's incredibly hard, like people are playing Dark Souls or or or or are really, like, for the challenge. And underneath the the the umbrella of fun, there are both of these things. Right? There are different types of fun that people like to have, just like there are different ways that people like to learn. Right? Like, we can go out and we can do inquiry learning, or we can we can draw flashcards. We can we can do all these different things. I I think if if teachers start to think more about why their students might like to play games and why they might like to engage with the world and who their students are and how they're going to use the games, I think the question of the what just sort of answers itself. Right? Like, we we we necessarily have to look at different interactive experiences to get at those goals. It's sort of backwards design. Right? It's very hard. And I I think it's I think it's sort of a trap to say, I love Elden Ring. That's a great that's a great game. We're gonna play Eve Online. We're we're gonna do all this kind of stuff. And then we're gonna sort of figure out what we can learn from that game is is the sort of trap that people I think have have fallen into. Right? Like, Among Us is great. How are we gonna use it? There it's it's it's a recursive loop again. Right? Like, that's that's also something that we're talking about, like, the the the horoboros, the snake eating its tail. I think from the other end of the spectrum is

Speaker 2 I've got to teach Spanish tense. What's a good game to teach Spanish tenses? Right? That's another pitfall that people fall into, I think. Though,

Speaker 3 it's it's not completely bad, though. Like, if if the goals are good, James. Right? Like, that's the that's the thing we talk about as well. Like, if the goals are interesting, then you can start doing really interesting things like, let's let's say, High-tech High or some or or Quest to Learn. Right? They've got these progressive goals. By going from the the the why then back to the how and talking about who the students are, the what just makes sense then. Right? Because you're going be doing all these other pedagogical things around it. Right? But if you said, I I have to teach I I have to teach English one. I have to teach Spanish one. I need the students to learn 400 verbs by the end of the semester. You're gonna go to Kahoot. You're gonna go to ClassDojo because that's the most efficient way to get people to drill the content that's been mandated by your administrator. Right? If you don't have the freedom to play, you're going to you you the the backwards design puts you in a bad place.

Speaker 1 It forces you to embrace a more radical pedagogy though because that's a perfect example of something that is not retained. It's short term results and a behaviorist mindset because it does well on testing, but does nothing to engage the learner over time in the exact same way that I I mean, I took eight years of Spanish, but also I've attempted to use Duolingo, which is ostensibly a flashcard app. Right? That doesn't really teach you how to to do that. But if you were to play a game that was in another language that was immersive, your chances of remembering that content beyond just flashcards is much higher.

Speaker 3 James James has just done that with Tactics Ogre. So James is is a very proficient Japanese speaker, and he is now writing a paper where he played a quite hardcore tactics game in Japanese. He streamed everything. It's on his Twitch channel. And you can see him trying to unpack things. I'm still curious, like, what did you actually learn, James, from this progressive, humane, exploratory way of approaching learning Japanese rather than than grinding another, you know, a 100,000 words through Duolingo. This is the problem too, Chris, that I'm sure you brought up against is that they have it's really easy to show data from a more behaviorist agricultural model of farming students rather than creating a permaculture garden where people where everybody can be their wonderful flower and explore the things they wanna learn. Because demonstrating what demonstrating I'm I'm poking you. Right? Demonstrating what what students have learned through inquiry is much more challenging. Right? It's much more challenge I I have a I have actually a little pushback against that. See, I'm poking you. I because I want you to I want you to push back on this. It's because it's

Speaker 1 systems of education find themselves in many other monetary, capitalistic, economic systems that cause us to look at learning through one specific lens, which is traditional test score academics. Now interestingly enough, we can make the argument that progressive education actually does increase test scores. We have that data. But as as you probably both know, there was the eight year study, like way back in the day. This is what, seventy years ago. Was the nineteen thirties, I believe. And they looked at progressive schools and looked at things like college success rates, job academic, job job success rates, academics, even like life, like health risks and stuff like that. And they found across the board that progressive schools did better than their public school peers. Now the data is a little skewed because you have to account for the fact that progressive schools tend to be richer kids. They tend to have more access to things, etcetera, which speaks to the idea of education can't solve economic problems.

Speaker 3 Right. It's just the straight it's it's education replicating class structures rather than, right, there is not social mobility. Right? If if people are stuck at a certain level, there's not social mobility either. Right? Right. But you can extrapolate the data and still find that kids who went to

Speaker 1 more affluent typical public schools were more engaged, had more monetary success and were happier and healthier healthier people as a result of going to progressive schools. It's just like this has been studied time and time again. The research is all out there. It's just not nearly as clean.

Speaker 3 It's not clean. It's not clean because right? Like, because then you then you get the conflicting factors of, like, well, the the parents are highly educated and they're also feeding the kids better food, like farm free egg or cage free eggs again. Right? There there are more books in their bedrooms, they're they're participating in different extracurricular activities. It it's it's it's hard to look at that data and the social cultural

Speaker 1 factors around it, right? I was even getting into like, the pedagogy isn't necessarily as clean. So speaking of like like the game element, it's a lot easier to just say Duolingo x into y versus play immersive game in the class and everyone's doing something different. So it's like a b c d e f g h I j into

Speaker 3 x. Like, it it's it's way more complicated. And I just wrote a paper in in ludic language pedagogy about, like, the methods, the materials, the mediation where I had 60 students. We all played the the same game, and students were sort of were exploring, like, well, I'm gonna teach with this game, or I'm gonna look at the language of this game or the cultural models. And it's just like, as a teacher, I have to do different things, and I've got 60 students doing different things, and so I have to structure it as a sort of portfolio based class, and I have to have students demonstrate their own learning and reflect on things. I didn't give them a vocabulary test. I don't know how many words they learned, but I can I can show 20 groups beautiful transformative journeys through this class?

Speaker 2 Let's pull this slightly back then. Right? So the idea of well, what did you learn from tactics Ogre James? Okay. I played a game. Did I learn anything? If I had just studied vocabulary via flashcards, I would have, quote, unquote, learnt more content in the time that it took me to play tactics ogre. But the the level that I retained that information would probably be a lot less than the words that I learned by playing this game. So it's a kind of quantity versus quality argument here. Right? Really quick interjection. That is mirrored in how they study progressive education in regards to tests.

Speaker 1 Whenever students take tests, they tend to do the same or better on state state tests, etcetera. But folks that go through progressive pedagogy get more complex answers correct. So they are worse at the rote memorization questions, like what does this word mean? But they're way better at what is the theme of this passage or something like that. Interpretation,

Speaker 2 critical thinking, these measures. That's great. So the the problem here, we're gonna go pessimistic though now, unfortunately, is that the thing that my universities well, I've I've spoke to Chris, outside of this podcast about it. For example, the the university entrance exam in Japan or maybe the SATs something in The States, what they're looking for is that quantity over quality. So you could say that even though my my, experience of of learning that way was was good for me, and I learned things in a deeper way, I didn't get actually, as much as I could have done if I just did flashcards, which is the thing that is valued by, universities and and, you know, higher education.

Speaker 1 So that that's that's a huge problem I see. Right? You you work in the systems that you find yourself in, and you push in any way that you can on the systems that you can influence. The the trouble that we run into is that the folks internalize the message that, yes, I should work to change the systems that I have control over. But their interpretation of what systems they have control over is heavily skewed in the sense that they could be taking much bigger risks and changing much bigger systems. They just don't know it because they haven't tried. They've limited their own potential.

Speaker 2 This hits, directly, onto the idea of play and what is play. There's a few definitions of play. The one that me and Jonathan are using in our book that we're writing is from Ian Bogost, which is to, manipulate, a system towards gratifying experiences. So it's sorry, manipulating constraints within constraints. For teachers then, they need to know what their constraints are in order for them to be able to make this space to play. So the more cognizant they are of the constraints that they find themselves within, hopefully, the more that they can actually push back on those boundaries towards generating these gratifying experiences, which I think we're both talking about from a play angle and from, a progressive education angle as well. Right? It is it is really about literacy. Right? It's it's it's very much about literacy of understanding

Speaker 3 what your constraints are and how you can use a ludic approach to push back on those constraints and to continue to grab you know, to to to make or take more freedom. Right? And I and I love what Chris said about, like, you you do what you can, it's just that it's the nature finds a way or, you know, like, the water goes through the cracks sort of of approach of, like, just a really simple example. Like, I I was I there's a there's a teacher that I was working with, like, a couple years ago and there was a there was a mandated textbook in the curriculum and he had gotten through the textbook a little bit quicker and there were a couple weeks left in the class. And he came to me and said, what do I do? And literally, he he didn't know what to do with three weeks. He could have for me, it's like, oh, wow. I'll do a mini project. Right? I'll have some I'll have students go, like, do some mini inquiry inquiry research or I'll have them make a podcast or I'll have them I'll just stand up and talk about, like, what makes you happy. I don't know. Like, just do something nice for a couple weeks. And and I just said but because of his literacy, I'm just like, well, just do a couple of the chapters again. Like, just do a little bit of repetitions. Right? Like like, ask the students which chapters they had trouble with and just do those do those chapters again. He didn't know that he could do the textbook again. Right? He had thought that he had just gone through all the content, and now his job was done and he was totally lost.

Speaker 1 I think what's really cool about this specific line of thinking surrounding progressive pedagogy is it does give a very tangible way to start. Right? If you go on YouTube and you type in like me, like if you type in my name, okay, one of the first things that you'll find is me talking about the benefits of a badging system from like fourteen years ago because I didn't know what I was doing. Right? I integrated an XP system. It was my second year teaching. I did all these really dumb things and I went through a master's program where I was taught Giraud and Hooks

Speaker 3 and Freire. I learned the critical pedagogy. I did all this stuff and it still didn't resonate. And and that's and that's that's a wonderful transition into something that I I stumbled into as well. Like, I met we teach language in Japan, James and I, and and we teach a lot of conversation classes. And so you have you ask students like, oh, hi, Taro. How are you today? And they I'm fine. Thank you. And you? I'm fine. What'd do this weekend? Watched a movie? Okay. Have go go sit down. Right? Instead of that, I take now, like, a week, like, also ninety minutes a week I've I've classes ninety minutes a week. We take a period or two just to get to know each other. And I ask much more different questions like, who are you? What are your superpowers? What what what are you afraid about? What are you afraid of in this class? Like, what what would you not like to do in this class? If if you had three hours of time, what what could I help you with? It's it's what you just said, like, it's very human of are you happy and are you healthy? And who would you like to be in the future? And how can I get you there with with the limited time that we have in this class? I've only I'm only gonna meet you for twenty two hour twenty two and a half hours. I can give you ten hours of homework, another constraint. What can I do in the thirty hours I'm gonna be with you? And by starting with that human perspective of this is who we are, this is who we wanna be, students do remarkable things, like amazing projects. Like, my students are, like, redesigning the toilet systems to to be more humane towards international people in Japan, right, because the length of the language barrier. Or they are trying to revitalize areas of Japan because of its declining population and aging population. Like, the downtown areas are just becoming wastelands. And so I have students going in and, like, talking to shop owners and saying, what can I do for you? I mean, I'm a student. Right? I teach them. These are the magic words. Like, I am a student. What does she say this? It's just the magic word. Like, people will help them. If they say, I'm a student and I want to do something, they could it's it's just like

Speaker 2 lightning in a bottle and people start talking to them. I was gonna say, how do you tie that to ludic pedagogy?

Speaker 3 This idea of agency and interaction. Like, I used to the way that I used to teach classes was much more teacher fronted. Right? Alright. Here's the textbooks. Open your open your book to page 17. Alright. Here's the dialogue that you've got to read. Okay. Person a, person b, now switch. Let's pull some vocabulary out. Let me drill you a little bit. And so now it's much more about that that that is interaction. Right? That from from a from a very behaviorist language perspective, a cognitive perspective, that is effective teaching. Right? The students are interacting with each other. They're outputting. But for me now, the I'm reframing the agency and the interaction to be much more

Speaker 2 of saying, you've got the freedom to do anything you want in this class, pretty much. Yeah. Okay. So can I can I tie this into the playground metaphor then? So the idea of of of lie of teaching as a playground rather than a game. I'm gonna presume then, Jonathan, you've set up some kind of constraints for the students. You have to do a project. You will be graded on this project. You must evidence your learning on this project. That is that is the jungle gym that you have created, and then you've given students the space there to actually play with it how they want to on their terms. Well, we we went through a curriculum reform process about four or five years ago.

Speaker 3 I was part of the decision making team, and I said, like, we really need to have a prod a project based learning curriculum to this department. In Japan, not enough not enough schools have a p have a PBL class. I think we I can put together a project based learning curriculum. The dean was on board, and we hired we got a new hire to help me put together this project based learning curriculum. Okay? So this was like through the institution of there was a window for curriculum reform that you have the conversation with people. Right? Hey, we're we're going reform the curriculum. What should we do? And another person might have said, well, we need to have more conversation classes. We need to have more flashcard learning. We need to have more test prep. I said, we need to have more inquiry learning. And I I think I can put together a decent project based learning curriculum. So conversations with the department, drafted syllabi, which were negotiated with the dean, got a new hire who was totally on board, hired for this position, and we continue to play around with, what is it, like what's the seven habits of highly effective people? Like, that's the that's in the first year course, all this kind of stuff. Like and so we do. We have a syllabus, and it's rigorous. Right? Like, students have to keep learning diaries. There are multiple critiques that have to be handed in. There are there's transformative reflections at the end of the semester. They have to write an exit memo to the next year's class. They have to document their learning. They have to write reports in their second language, their first language, and their third language to get extra credit. Like, it's this and it just and it just snowballs. Right? I'm I'm I'm I'm just gonna spend about, you know, an hour today revising it for next semester to add in more of this space. Now that I've now I've started this process, I can add in more things. So instead of me checking the diaries, I'm also gonna have them peer checking each other's diaries and giving comments to other people. I'm gonna I'm buddy them up, right, so that they can they can they can buddy up with different people each week to sort of peer feedback on their learning diaries. Right? So that's that's how I was able to think about my constraint, which I I could not have taught this class ten years ago under the constraints that I had at the time. But now I'm taking more and more approaching things in a very ludic way. We don't use games. We don't use games in this classroom, but it's incredibly ludic. Right? Like and by right? I do show them examples of games, like, for example, the fun theory, like the the piano stairs. Right? Or the or the world's deepest garbage bin or or this kind of stuff. Which would not fit just as a disclaimer, that would not fit under a game based learning approach. The fun Okay. Those those could sell that as a game based. And when I when I taught a graduate level class at NYU, it was a it was a games and education class, and I showed all kinds of crazy stuff. Right? Like, I I showed the Pac Manhattan was that was that was the year before me. Right? So people they dressed up as Pac Man and ran around the streets of Manhattan. So right? Somebody dressed up as Pac Man. Someone was like, four people dressed up as ghosts. There was a command center where they were on cell phones. And and because Manhattan looks like around Washington Square Park, it looks like the Pac Man board, so they played Pac Manhattan. They built and run Pac Manhattan

Speaker 1 and they hope nobody got killed by a taxi. Was remarkable. Pulling that back, a huge part of the work that we do at HRP, and I also find it in that SPACE acronym you have, is this idea of purpose finding. Going on a life's journey, having a purpose. And it's not necessarily that you ever even meet that purpose or know what it is. It's the fact that you are on constant track of figuring out who it is that you are, who you are on that journey. It's the classic statement, it's about the journey, not about the destination. The the dream or the lofty goal of folks who think about education in a very human centered way see life as ludic. Work is ludic. School is ludic. The way that I interact when I wake up and I go to bed is ludic. And because if we get away from that word of fun and move towards these ideas of agency, choice, purpose, these are things I would wanna be doing all the time. These are not things I reserve for the classroom. These aren't things that I reserve for the office. These are things I want to be doing twenty four hours a day every single day a week. And I can't help but think about folks, you know, who are who are who are elderly, who have gone through a traumatic experience, like a near death experience, etcetera. They they talk about this this idea of, like, childhood wonder, childhood joy, embracing, you know, who you were as a kid. I'm just curious about your thoughts on how you see ludic even beyond ludic learning, just ludic as a concept universally.

Speaker 3 When I have the time to do that, like for example, my thesis summer, I see them for two years. Right? We spend time, yeah, talking about who they are and who they want to be. And we do I I do sort of I don't poke holes in their dreams, but I definitely push back a little bit when they when they're I really wanna be a YouTuber. Right? And knowing what I know about games and and about media, Quentin Smith from Shrugged and Sit Down gave a gave a talk at an elementary school about like, you know, like, oh, like, how many of you watch YouTubers? Like, yeah, all the kids raise their hand. How many like YouTubers? Oh, they all raise their hand. How many of you want to be YouTubers? All raise their hand. And he's like, alright. Let me break it down for you. You make you make one video, you love it. It's great. Right? You're you're you're on top of the world and that video gets a bunch of likes. Guess what? You gotta do it again tomorrow. And then the day after that. And then the day after that. And then the day after that. And so, like, the reality of what seems like fun can pretty soon turn into something that's not meaningful or or whatever. And so when one of my students say, like, I wanna be a YouTuber or I wanna work at a hotel, we start to talk about, like, the design of gratifying experiences that James talked about earlier. And we we do spend some time googling, like, what are the most rewarding careers and why might they be rewarding? And consistently, teaching is on there, even though it's not like a highly paid job, because some teachers do. They they they they get a lot of meaning. Right? Again, the safety. Right? Participation with students and agency and critical, like like, some you know? And then, like, other jobs pop up, like, for example, radiologist or or a dental hygienist or a physical therapist or or something like that, grief counselor, because they they they it it does embody this sort of these ludic principles of relating to other people and a challenging job and interacting with people. Right? And so even though those jobs might not be fun, they're incredibly ludic. Right? Because it contains all this space in which you're human and you relate to other people. And so I do like to try to reframe students' understandings of society using this sort of ludic unpacking model.

Speaker 1 What do you think about this concept of reframing ludic learning towards the idea of ludic living? It's quite literally expanding and broadening the term beyond. Like, is ludic just a substitute for a good life? As opposed to is ludic just reserved for a classroom or learning

Speaker 3 space? So in an earlier draft of the book, we played around you know, like there's life is a game. Right? You can reframe you can reframe games as like, right, there's a system of inputs and outputs and and and then there's stratified outcomes and the actions that we take. It's it's a machine. Right? I wrote a paper in college with, you know, like, on on diets as being games, and and we we specifically steered away from that. Right? We didn't wanna say school is a game, life is a game, because I think whenever you start to do that, it does start to get very behavioristic, right, of of inputs and and quantified. It already is. It already is. Right? God. Let's not get too far into this. But if, like, if we wanna start diving into, like, ideas of, like, capitalist realism or into, who's defining like, who's defining the game? If that if we're saying life is a game, well, it's not my game. It could be a game, but if I'm not the one that designed it, who cares? I'd like to talk about, like, Animal Crossing and Pokemon with my students because not because Pokemon's a good game. I I I don't think I let I whatever. I don't like it. But I think Nintendo is playing the game. Right? We are the we are the we are the pieces that Nintendo is playing so that they make profit and continue reselling Pokemon to the next generation for the next, you know, however long capitalism lasts. I think that, yeah, if life is a game

Speaker 2 if life is a game, it does it does mean that there's gonna be winners and losers and and scores and leaderboards. Right? And and so sometimes the difference the difference between that and free play is that isn't it just nice to not worry about scores occasionally and and and just have, like, a more interesting experience? So I think that that that's that's the problem with schools as they are. They are currently designed as games. Right? They are, set up for for winners and losers. It's highly competitive, essentially. Right? So I think that having a ludic approach to to learning in life is that just taking the focus off that slightly and and thinking about, well, what's the the best kind of experience I wanna have in my classroom? For example, thinking about grades then again. I tell students in my presentations class that don't worry. Whatever you do, you're gonna pass the class. Right? Don't worry about your grade. It's I'm very open with them. It's like, I would like you to take risks and challenge yourself and do things that are, you know, more in you know, connected to societies. I I have them go out and do fieldwork and and, you know, collect some real data from real people, rather than them trying to play it safe because they're worried about the score that they might get at the end of the, of the year. So I think that a ludic approach to teaching and and and living is,

Speaker 1 definitely something that we should be striving for. Yeah. That's true more broadly as well. Like, if you're talking about raising money as a corporation, it tends to be the folks who think outside the box, who don't think about making money, end up actually creating the most creative products that might, in turn, actually create more money. In the exact same way, the people that don't focus on grades actually tend to get higher grades. They study like grading orientation versus learning orientation. People who don't focus on grades get higher grades, which is deeply ironic.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Okay. So so I think it gets it it gets back to what James said about like ludic being about the design of gratifying experiences. Right? And that's different for everybody. Right? What's gratifying to Chris is is different than what's gratifying to James is different than what's gratifying to me. Right? And but I think you can start to have those humane conversations with students and peers about whether or not you are living a gratified gratifyingly successful life and and what's missing or what you might like to change. And then and then it is a journey, right, of of talking to students. I mean, if if if a teacher would walk into a class and be able to have the trust, and in one of my classes, I do start the class by saying, like, I trust you that you're going to do the work and I want you to trust me and I want you to say it out loud, Right? Because if we don't have trust, this class is for nothing. Right? I don't I I I can't trust you to go out and and take pictures of garbage cans or something if if if I if I if don't trust you. Right? Because you could just get them off the Internet and have and then you just cheat your fieldwork. Right? So if we do start to have that trust and talk about gratifying experiences and starting to have a ludic life, then I think that is the foundation for for better education and and and and a better life. I struggle with it for sure. Like, whenever I go to the cabin, I like to reflect on, like, how's my life going? And I was like to the podcast this morning because I I rode. I have a running machine in my office and I just needed to get some stress out even though I'm sick. I knew that it would be better for my body tomorrow and the day after if I if I did some cardio this morning. Right? So and it's not always fun. I I'm I have a cold and I'm and I'm rowing in the morning. Right? In the in the in the Japanese summer, like, it's not a good time, but tomorrow will be better.

Speaker 2 Games are good, but teachers are better. So you you gotta have you gotta have the pedagogy. It's not just about the games. Focus on what you can do as a teacher rather than what the game can do for you.

Speaker 1 Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, other podcasts all for free at our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.