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When’s the last time you played a game? Maybe it was Candy Crush on your work break, or a late-night Settlers of Catan session with friends. They’re a part of our daily lives — we are all used to challenging, rewarding, or distracting ourselves with them. But despite their ubiquity, rarely do we think about games on a deeper level. What skills do we learn from engaging in such ostensibly playful activities, and how can they be applied to real-life scenarios? Tufts students Eva Kahan and Daniel Lewis, both seniors, are asking – and answering — that question with their ExCollege Explorations course, Simulations and Strategy Games Throughout History.
First-year students discuss a game in "Simulations and Strategy Games Throughout History." Photographs by Daniel Lewis, Class of 2019.
It makes sense that two self-professed “politics nerds and board game fiends” got together to create this course: It’s all fun and games — and their deeper applications. “With our class, we are using simulations and games to teach students different skills for gaming scenarios in their everyday life,” explains Daniel, a Political Science and Philosophy major. Eva, who’s majoring in International Relations (IR) and History, concentrating in the Middle East, adds: “We are examining the evolution of games as a learning tool through their application in military education and training, and then transitioning to their use in today's fields of policy making, negotiation and diplomacy, business, intelligence, and more.” Through written and oral reflections on actual game-playing, the students get to learn both theory and practice .
Eva and Daniel both trace their interest in teaching the class from their experience with negotiation simulations in ALLIES, the Institute for Global Leadership's IR discussion group on campus and and “kind of a central point for a lot of IR nerddom (sic) at Tufts,” according to Daniel. The two friends discovered that they “had the perfect skill set to help other students access the complex world of games and simulations in their real-world application,” says Eva. To prepare, they met with game designers and professors across the country who are developing similar courses and who encourage "active learning" of complex IR material.
After all, even if the course is about playing games, it’s also about the games that people play. “We use simulation every day without even knowing it,” points out Daniel. If you’ve ever tracked out in your head what will happen if you cook pasta for dinner instead of rice, you’ve ran a kind of simulation. But there’s more at stake than just a bowl of spaghetti carbonara. Eva notes that she’s “fascinated by how seriously simulations of conflict are taken inside and outside government institutions, and how their impact has evolved over the last half-century.” That impact can be huge: “We recently had a guest speaker explain the outsized influence nuclear war-games had in shaping nuclear policy, and discussed with him the way that a flawed American war-game in 2002 created faulty expectations for the American invasion of Iraq,” says Eva.
Finally, Eva and Daniel say they want their students to walk away with a “more critical mindset towards how they approach decisions in both group and individual settings,” and hope that they feel “like they’ve actually gotten their hands à little dirty when it comes to IR and IR theory.” Not only that, but they’re doing so while making lifelong friends around the Monopoly board. As Eva puts it, “We're excited to turn this group of learners and players into a community that lasts beyond the end of this class!” They’re definitely not playing around.
About the Author
Max Lalanne is a senior majoring in Film & Media Studies. Born in Paris and raised in New Hampshire, when he's not writing for The ExPress, he's running his own daily newsletter, News in French. He plans to continue a career in media and publishing.
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