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Intentional Teaching
Intentional Teaching is a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. Hosted by educator and author Derek Bruff, the podcast features interviews with educators throughout higher ed.
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Intentional Teaching
Daybreak: Learning at Play with Kerry Whittaker and Matteo Menapace
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
This episode is all about games as learning experiences, with not one but two interviews about the 2023 cooperative board game Daybreak, a game about climate action. Daybreak puts players in the roles of world powers building the technologies and societies needed for a warming planet. The goal of the game is to cut carbon emissions before it gets too hot or too many communities are put into crisis.
You’ll hear from Kerry Whittaker, assistant professor of coastal and marine environmental science at Maine Maritime Academy, who has the students in her global environmental change course play Daybreak as a final learning experience in the course. You’ll also hear from Matteo Menapace, co-designer of Daybreak, about the design of the game as a learning experience.
Whether you teach about climate change and might use Daybreak in your courses or you’re looking for a deeper understanding of how learning experiences can be designed, I think you’ll find both of these conversations interesting.
Episode Resources
Kerry Whittaker’s faculty page
Two Leading Lines interviews about RePlay Health: Kimberly Rogers and Max Seidman
One Leading Lines interview about games as counterfactuals: Patrick Rael
“Final Exams or Epic Finales” by Anthony Crider
"Collaborative Strategic Board Games as a Site for Distributed Computational Thinking" by Matthew Berland and Victor Lee
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
... Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas and teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. One of the teaching principles I discuss in my book, Intentional Tech, is the notion that giving students a hard problem or challenging experience can help them get ready for learning. I call this principle time for telling after a paper by Schwartz and Bransford. Part of the time for telling chapter in the book focuses on the use of games both digital and analog as learning experiences. This episode is all about games, as learning experiences with not one but two interviews about the 2023 Cooperative Board game Daybreak, A game about Climate Action. Daybreak puts players in the roles of world powers, building the technologies and societies needed for a warming planet. The goal of the game is to cut carbon emissions before it gets too hot or too many communities are put into crisis. Daybreak is designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace. If you've paid attention to modern board games, you might know Matt Leacock's work. He's the designer behind the 2008 game pandemic, a wildly popular cooperative Board game about battling a global pandemic. In 2020, during a real life global pandemic, Matt and Matteo connected to design a game about fighting climate change and the result was Daybreak. In this episode, you'll hear from Kerry Whittaker, assistant professor of coastal and marine Environmental Science at Maine Maritime Academy, who has the students in her global environmental change course play Daybreak as a final learning experience in the course. You'll also hear from Mateo Menapace co-designer of Daybreak about the design of the game as a learning experience. Whether you teach about climate change and might use Daybreak in your courses or you're looking for a deeper understanding of how learning experiences can be designed, I think you'll find both of these conversations interesting, and I'm excited to share these interviews right now as this episode drops because Daybreak is a finalist for the prestigious Kennerspiel des Jahres Game of the Year Award in Germany to be announced on July 21st. So first up, here's my interview with Kerry Whittaker of the Maine Maritime Academy. Kerry, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I'm very excited to talk with you today about this board game, Daybreak, and how you've been using it in your teaching. And thanks for being here.
Kerry Whittaker:Thanks for having me, Derek. This is an exciting opportunity.
Derek Bruff:Oh, great. So I'm going to ask my usual opening question. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?
Kerry Whittaker:That's a great question. I think I've always been a really enthusiastic student and I've had incredible educators throughout my my time as a student. But I think the experiences that have really helped to build my identity as a as an educator were really focused on my my work in experiential education. So before kind of as as I was learning how to how to teach. And in my early earlier career, I was a professor of oceanography on sailing tall ships, So taking undergraduates out into the South Pacific and the Sargasso Sea international waters on on sailing Oceanographic tall ships doing research for about six weeks to two months at a time, and building curricula around that in a really dynamic environment. So, yeah, kind of being part of a really intentional learning community, sailing and working with students and also kind of building the the experiences of learning around that environment. So that's really shaped who I am as a educator, really, even in my work today where I'm not, you know, my platform is not a 134 foot sailing tall ship. I still really try to weave in what I've learned about experiential education and kind of sharing learning experiences with with students. And yeah, reflecting on that experience as well.
Derek Bruff:Wow. Okay. So just for context, when you say you were you were teaching ocean oceanography on these tall ships, what, like you're you're you're you're more of a biologist than anything from what I read. Is that is that accurate to say?
Kerry Whittaker:I'm an ocean. I'm a biological oceanographer.
Derek Bruff:Okay. All right.
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah.
Derek Bruff:So what does that mean?
Kerry Whittaker:That means I study. I study life forms and biology in the ocean. But really looking at those life forms in a holistic interdisciplinary context. So looking at how life is shaped by the chemistry and the geology and the physics of the ocean, I think that's one thing that distinguishes oceanographers from marine biologists, is having kind of this systems approach to looking at things like gene flow and marine populations, oceans and how evolution happens and productivity. So, okay, I'm I'm a biological oceanographer. I would say.
Derek Bruff:Okay, I have only worked at Landlocked institutions. So this is not a discipline I'm familiar with. And now you're at Maine Maritime Academy, which I take it is also not like an institution you would find in the middle of Tennessee, Right? What what makes your institution interesting to teach at?
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah, I mean, the Maritime academies are an incredible resource in the U.S. It's these academies, train merchant mariners in a variety of fields of how to drive and navigate vessels and engineering. And a part of our our student body will leave with with Coast Guard licenses.
Derek Bruff:Okay.
Kerry Whittaker:Basically unlimited tonnage. I am in the ocean studies,
Derek Bruff:meaning. They will be qualified to drive a boat of any size.
Kerry Whittaker:Correct.
Derek Bruff:Okay. All right.
Kerry Whittaker:You know of some of my my students in in the Ocean Studies department. I'm in the Corning School of Ocean Studies and we focus on on oceanography, marine biology, a brand new program of coastal and marine environmental science as our program. So our students are science driven, science based. They'll leave with with a bachelor's of science. Some of those students will also get Coast Guard licenses. So, yeah, it's a really unique place to work because there's this like really practical teaching and learning that's happening and and also kind of more, more traditional science science education that's happening. At the same time.
Derek Bruff:I'm just remembering on my former podcast, I interviewed some theology professors who taught on a farm and they had this whole kind of theology of farming
Kerry Whittaker:That's amazing,
Derek Bruff:and you're about as as far away from my calculus classes as that as that crew was. This is fascinating. Okay. So the course you used the game in is called.
Kerry Whittaker:Global Environment.
Derek Bruff:Environmental Change. Okay. So what tell us about that course. What are what are the goals of that course and kind of how does it fit into this new major?
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah, great. Yes. So global environmental change was is part of the newest program at in the Corning School of Ocean Studies at MMA, the Coastal and Marine Environmental Science Major, and through Global environmental change, we which I co-designed with my colleague Stephen Baer at its first iteration in 2021 and our focus is to introduce students to the science of climate change so that they walk away with a really strong handle on yeah, of all of the science related to warming, biodiversity loss, all of the changes that we're experiencing in our natural systems really using the primary scientific literature to build that foundation and the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well, kind of the the body that comes together to make these predictions of how our our earth will react to the forces that we've put on it. And then another goal of the course is to to look at the human side of of climate change. So governance structures, policy and the way that we make decisions about our future sustainability. So it's it's it's a big topic to handle.
Derek Bruff:All right.
Kerry Whittaker:It's class it's a lot. But we do try to kind of cover the the both the social and the and the natural systems as well.
Derek Bruff:And I'll say just for maybe the benefit of some of our listeners, that sounds like a course you might find at other institutions, right? It may and may have a slightly different focus, but it does sound like a type of course I hear faculty are are teaching often that and it's usually kind of challenging, right? It's complex material. It's very interdisciplinary material and it sounds like you've team taught it as well.
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah, we team it, taught it the first year and then I have been going solo with it for the for the past couple of years.
Derek Bruff:Okay. Yeah. Well, now let's talk about this board game Daybreak. How did you hear about Daybreak and what led you to use it in this course?
Kerry Whittaker:I heard about the development of Daybreak. I think it was it was as we were developing the course, like in 2021. And I think it was a New York Times article. And and I you know, it was as we were thinking about the course and ways to weave in elements of future narratives and building hope into into a course that is as heavy as as global environmental change. And yeah, it was just I was really curious about the the process of that game development. And I think in the article they mentioned that Matt and Mateo were looking for play testers, and Steven and I thought that it would be a perfect opportunity to kind of have our of our class and have our students be involved in the development of of the game as we were also developing a new course at our institution focused on global environmental change. So kind of having having that opportunity again for experiential learning and involving students and yeah, to both both see kind of what goes into that type of game development, but also using what we've learned from the class to apply it to critiquing the game and thinking about the way that science is being integrated into a complex game and other elements of climate change, governance and policy. And so, yeah, it's that's why I reached out to Matt and Mateo and they signed us up as play testers.
Derek Bruff:That's great. So, so yeah, what did that what did that first experience with the game in the course look like? What what role did it play and kind of how did you, how were you a play tester as a class?
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah. So actually first they sent us a copy of the game kind of in, you know, in early form, and I wanted to try it out first before having students be involved. So I actually invited a group of colleagues and friends and and we did kind of our first round of testing. And it was challenging in that early, early stages of the game. It's it's so refined now. Like I have the I have the final version now, but, you know, like we struggled through it kind of that first first playing of the game, but we thought it would be a it would still be a really great opportunity for for students to kind of be involved. So our first students engaged playing of the game happened at the end of of that first semester that we taught the course and we used it as a culminating moment. So as a way for students to kind of think about everything that they learned in the course and apply it to evaluating this game. And I guess another kind of interesting thing that is involved in our our course is we alongside reviewing the scientific literature, we have I have students choose a book of fiction to read because, you know, part of kind of cultivating hope, thinking about a future narrative for climate change. I think fiction can be a really safe and engaging place to imagine what a future can be. So that first semester, the students chose to read Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.
Derek Bruff:Okay, which is so this was a class read.
Kerry Whittaker:This was a class.
Derek Bruff:They did they didn't pick their individual novels, but they
Kerry Whittaker:Nope. Yeah, yeah. They, they choose and they vote. They vote on a topic in that first year. Ken Kim, Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future actually aligns really, really well with with Daybreak The Game. And I know that Matt and Mateo, I think they used an incredible array of resources to build the game. But I believe that Ministry for the Future is also kind of a guiding, a guiding narrative that helped develop that. So we saw a lot of a lot of connections when we played. We played Daybreak.
Derek Bruff:Yeah. So So you said that you had the students play the game at the end of the semester. Why did you pick that time to have them playtest it as opposed to some other time in the course?
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah, that's a great question. The end of the semester was a great time to have them them play this game because we have had basically gone through different important elements of climate change separately, like looking at tipping points, looking at natural systems, response to radiative forcing, looking at kind of the governance systems, what kind of policies are in place already about climate change, You know, the Paris climate agreement or tuning into the conference, UN conference of the party meetings that conveniently happen at the same time we're teaching the course. So kind of looking at these different elements of climate change separately. But climate change is is described as a wicked problem that involves all of these elements simultaneously and how they interact, right? So natural systems, economics, policy, social resilience, infrastructure resilience, these are these are all kind of baked in to the challenge of addressing climate change. And it's like we we have to work on them all at once. And the game has allowed us to really kind of explore how these different pieces interact and work together. And I think it's a it's a it's a really effective tool of seeing how these, like, these wicked problems can be can be addressed. I won't say solved because like how will we know if we solve climate change. Yeah. As a way to kind of to kind of play with all of the different solutions that we we had talked about in class and the students had explored. And then provide that kind of free space to look at what combinations of solutions or the kind of the process of how these social and natural elements kind of can come together to address address climate change.
Derek Bruff:So let's drill down that kind of almost the lesson plan level. Like what what did that week of the class look like in terms of the the kind of sequence of things you had students do.
Kerry Whittaker:For the for the gameplay.
Derek Bruff:For the game play?
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah. So we you know, we first reviewed the directions of how to play.
Derek Bruff:Oh right. Yeah.
Kerry Whittaker:Because it's, it's actually pretty complicated so that we were prepared.
Derek Bruff:Just for. Context. You're not like an avid board game player. You don't have a shelf with a hundred different board games on it, right?
Kerry Whittaker:I don't, I don't. But actually that first year we played and actually in subsequent years, I've always had one or two students in the class that are like so into it, so into board games. And they and they bring their expertise in to the table, which is really helpful. So yeah, so the first like, yeah, the lesson plan for that week is, is first like all reading the instructions so that we can come in for our I think we reserved like a it was during finals week, so we had a three hour time slot.
Derek Bruff:Oh okay.
Kerry Whittaker:Actually play play the game. And then
Derek Bruff:so. Did they have a final exam or project as well?
Kerry Whittaker:This was it.
Derek Bruff:This was that. This was the final experience. I love it.
Kerry Whittaker:Okay. So they did. They did have a final project.
Derek Bruff:Okay.
Kerry Whittaker:For the class.
Derek Bruff:Gotcha.
Kerry Whittaker:Their final project was to do a case study on an environmental change solution and run run a series of interviews. And so they did have a final project. But in terms of like a full group, yeah, final experience that we chose to and I have continued to choose this game as as that culminating moment.
Derek Bruff:I love that. So there is an astronomer I know at Elon University, Tony Crider, and he wrote an essay several years ago about he called it Epic Finales. He he was in this moment where I think he was giving the final exam and one of the astronomy courses. And he thought my last interaction with this group of students that I've had such a great semester with is this very formal, high pressure, stressful thing. And he's like, I don't want that to be my last interaction with them. And so he started exploring kind of more experiential things that you could do for a final exam is not even the right word, right, But taking advantage of that three hour time. So I love that. Okay. All right. So you had read the directions. You had a three hour block to play the game.
Kerry Whittaker:Yep. And actually, so like, back to that, the final, final experience element in the syllabus, we we have listed that the final exam is for students to solve climate change.
Derek Bruff:Okay.
Kerry Whittaker:And then we play this game.
Derek Bruff:Okay. So so which does have a winning state, right? There's a way to win the game. And you know that it's possible.
Kerry Whittaker:It's really hard. That's why I you know, I love this game. It's it's very difficult to win and I think it highlights that it's it is possible, but it's going to take a lot of work. So, yeah, then we play we play the game for about 3 hours or so. And in that first first iteration, we had the students individually either create kind of like a video review or written review of of the game and relate it to things that they've learned throughout the semester. And yeah, so that was, that was kind of another, another element of that initial play testing
Derek Bruff:right? Because the first time you didn't have a finished game And so like I imagine there was an opportunity to give feedback to the game designers and also maybe a way for students to kind of critique the game, right, based on what they've learned all semester. So is that was that part of part of that process?
Kerry Whittaker:That was part of that process the first year and we submitted submitted those those review reviews and reflections to Matt and Mateo. Yeah, Yeah. And in subsequent years we've had, we've had debrief, so we play the game and then we have a collaborative debrief on how, how it went and what we learned and yeah.
Derek Bruff:So how did the students react to this? What have? You mentioned a couple of them geek out and I can relate to those students, but in general, how do they, how do they react to the game and the kind of the debrief experience?
Kerry Whittaker:Um, I, they, they seemed to love it. I think the collaborative nature of the game allows them to work with one another in a in a way that like, relies on their their different strengths and interests. They have fun, fun with it. It's, it's not a game that, you know, it's a collaborative game. And so we have students work in teams to represent the different world powers. I guess I don't know how they phrase those world powers or.
Derek Bruff:Right in the game like one player can be the U.S. and one player can be China and one player can be Europe. And then there's the majority world.
Kerry Whittaker:Exactly.
Derek Bruff:So you played one game as a class. It's not that you had like five or six tables set up with copies of the game.
Kerry Whittaker:Correct? Yeah. And even even within like, yeah, the U.S. or China or majority world, I have multiple students that are like representing that and.
Derek Bruff:They have to kind of get together and decide what actions are we going to take this round in the game.
Kerry Whittaker:Exactly. Okay. So it's yeah, I think it's a great a great opportunity for them to interact. And and so we're kind of struggling through sometimes some of the decisions that need to be made and I think they have fun with it. You know, it's a we have snacks and things like that. Yeah, But yeah, I think they've, I think they've enjoyed it. I've had students who, you know, the the game is now publicly available. So as a former student that I've been in touch with recently who was really excited to buy his own copy of the game. So yeah, it's it's fun and challenging.
Derek Bruff:So you mentioned earlier that oceanography involves a lot of systems thinking. Mm. And I feel like that's something that board games can teach, right? When I interviewed Matteo, he said that every board game teaches you something. If it's, if it's just how to play the game, it's teaching you that right. It may teach you other things as well. But but every board game is a set of systems that interact some simple, some complex, and then you have to kind of learn how they interact. But this one is modeled on actual systems in the real world. And so do you think do you see a kind of, I don't know, maybe some light bulb moments with students where they the the systems thinking becomes clear to them as a result of playing this game?
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah, I think I think so. You know, there's certain value judgments that are placed in the game on like what what the sustainable future looks like. You know, it's not just about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it's about it's about having resilient communities as well as an essential element of sustainability. So yeah, I think for students seeing that that's that that's reflected in this model model for the future through gameplay is, is really helpful and important. This is maybe kind of a like a side note, but in that kind of systems thinking, I look to the IPCC as a guiding source of information on on climate change and envisioning the future. And I, I use that in my classes extensively. The IPCC has shifted to this process of looking at shared socioeconomic pathways for predicting how society might react in the future to mitigate and adapt to climate change. So instead of just looking at greenhouse gas emissions and projecting what kind of the future outlook will be for that, they have paired that with this concept called shared socioeconomic pathways, and there are essentially different narratives for the future of how of how society will either like the political, the political setting or a social social setting that can yeah, can be part of our our future. And that involves elements of of resilience, social resilience. So I think that, you know, the board game is really helpful because it provides that not just like the technical elements of greenhouse reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also the other economic and social pieces that need to come together. And I think for students interacting with the board game, it's yeah, kind of a light bulb moment, bulb moment that the game developers game developers have have thought of kind of all these different pieces and how they interact.
Derek Bruff:So a couple of years ago for my old podcast, I interviewed Patrick Rael, who is a history professor at Bowdoin College, also in Maine, and he uses board games to teach history. And he said he used a term I've only really heard from history folks. He says board games are counterfactuals. They are kind of necessarily they don't have prescribed actions like a jigsaw puzzle, right? You know what the outcome of a jigsaw puzzle is supposed to be? And it may take work to get there, but there's there's not like choices to make along the way. Right. Yeah. And so he says that board games help help students explore kind of what if scenarios what if history had gone this other way instead of the way that it did? Does that notion of counterfactual resonate with you in in the use of Daybreak?
Kerry Whittaker:It does. And I think it relates to our need for a future narrative of of climate change. And and even in in predicting being able to predict what the future looks like is reliant on these on these narratives of of how society will will act to reduce greenhouse gases and and build equitable and sustainable solutions. So having, you know, as I said, the IPCC is already has has built in those future narratives in predicting future climate change impacts and this board game allows students to not just kind of read about what the future might be in these predictions, but actually design them and interact with them and build them themselves. The counterfactual idea relates very nicely to history, right? Because you're imagining what could have happened. But we when we're imagining the future, it's it's all counterfactual, right?
Derek Bruff:Right. Yeah. We don't we don't know the outcome yet.
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah. Yeah. Something like a board game allows students to literally play with all of the pieces and how they might might come together and build their own, their own narratives.
Derek Bruff:Something then that made me think there's a, there's a few there's one board game I'm thinking of in particular, but there are a few that have this feature where you have a hidden traitor, where you're all working together except one or two people maybe have secret objectives that are not run counter to the to the group. And I just I don't know if this would work as as kind of a regular way to play Daybreak, but as a kind of teaching experience, it would be interesting if you had tapped a couple of students.
Kerry Whittaker:To sabotage.
Derek Bruff:The sabotage, right? You know, mainly just to kind of see, because I think one of the perhaps one of the drawbacks of Daybreak as a game system is that it assumes everyone is working towards reducing the impacts of climate change. Right. Like like there's a kind of value assumption at the beginning of the game that is perhaps not entirely realistic of the real world. And so I can imagine a different set of conversations that would emerge if you had some saboteurs, especially the way that you structured it, right, where you've got a group of students who are playing, as you know, China or the U.S. And so if one of those students so they wouldn't necessarily be able to kind of take tank the game. Right. But the conversation that they have within their team would be really interesting to explore kind of what anyway, So.
Kerry Whittaker:Yeah, that's that's a really brilliant idea. It would I think it would be impossible to win that game. with somebody trying to sabotage it because it, it is it is really built on this collaboration. So I think I think the game is is very hopeful in that way. You know, we don't have a player that is like, I don't know, petroleum companies
Derek Bruff:right Right.
Kerry Whittaker:Oil companies that are kind of part of the decision making process. But yeah, I love I really love that idea.
Derek Bruff:Well, and I think because I talked to Mateo about agency as well. Right. And I don't think he would ever want to put a player in the position of kind of a bad guy in this game. Right. That's not the kind of agency that he's trying to kind of foster. You want students he wants players to think about in particular, like how they might vote, right? Because they are not world powers. But, you know, at least in many countries, we have a democratic system that allows people to influence what the leaders do. So let me ask another kind of counterfactual about the game. Can you imagine using this as a first week experience with students and what would that look like?
Kerry Whittaker:Hmm, I love that idea. I think if I were to do that, I would I would want to play it in the first week. And then also at the end of the semester. Yeah, I think that would be great. I think yeah, it could be. It could be a really good way to just kind of introduce the holistic system first and also kind of call upon what students already know about how climate change is impacting.
Derek Bruff:Right? It'd be one way to kind of surface that, and especially if you're kind of eavesdropping among the students as they're trying to make decisions, you you probably learn a lot about kind of what your students are bringing to the course.
Kerry Whittaker:Definitely. Yeah. I love I love that idea.
Derek Bruff:Kerry what advice would you give to other instructors who are thinking about either using this game or other games in their courses for these types of purposes?
Kerry Whittaker:Advice I would give is definitely build in time to reflect and debrief on the experience. I think that's that's kind of a a critical element of experiential education, right? Is is leaving time to reflect, also leaving, leaving enough time to like really, really play play the game and it takes a while.
Derek Bruff:Yeah. Yeah.
Kerry Whittaker:To have a full a full experience where you can kind of see all of the elements coming together. So like really carving out and dedicating the time to do it, to do it well. But also other advice is like just also go for it. I think the these elements of play and you know, allowing students and giving students the space to experiment and this this game is especially really good at doing that. So and in the collaborative piece too is, is a great learning learning experience for students to work together.
Derek Bruff:Yeah, I often see that when I look at games and simulations in educational settings that the collaborative collaborative games tend to work a little bit better.
Kerry Whittaker:Yes.
Derek Bruff:In many cases. Well, Kerry, this has been really great. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences with this game and teaching this really fascinating course. I appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Kerry Whittaker:Thanks for the conversation, Derek. This has been fun.
Derek Bruff:That was Kerry Whittaker, assistant professor of Coastal and Marine Environmental Science at Maine Maritime Academy. As I mentioned in that interview, I actually interviewed Daybreak's Co-Designer Matteo Menapace before talking with Kerry. It was Matteo who connected me with Kerry when I asked him about faculty who were teaching with the game. Now I'll share that earlier interview with Matteo Menapace who describes himself as, quote, a very serious game designer. Please note that what follows is an edited version of my interview with Mateo, the full 50 minute interview can be found on the intentional teaching Patreon for paid subscribers. So if the intersection of game design and learning design interests you, please check it out. Matteo, thanks so much for being on the International Teaching podcast. I'm excited to talk with you today about design of games and design of learning. I think we're going to have a fun conversation here today. So thanks for being here.
Matteo Menapace:Yeah, thank you for inviting me. Very excited to be here.
Derek Bruff:So I'm going to start with a spin on my usual introductory question. Can you tell us about a time you realized you wanted to design games?
Matteo Menapace:Sure. So as I imagine many people in the audience, I've been I've been playing games a lot when I was a child growing up, both board games and video games, but I haven't considered it at that time that I would end up making games. So I, I studied communication design and I worked in the industry for for a few years, and then I moved into academia where I was teaching creative computing, among other things, to undergraduate students in London. And I came across the concept of unplugged computing, which is about learning to program computers without using computers. So in other words, to focus on how to think computationally in your own language before you try to speak the language that computers use. So that made a lot of sense to me because I could see a lot of my students often getting bogged down with programming languages, but not really understanding how to structure their programs. And so as I was doing this research into unplugged computing and how to possibly use it in my practice, I came across a comparative study in which half of the students participants played a lot of cooperative board games before they were tested on their programming skills, while the other half didn't play board games. And as you can guess, the board game players consistently scored better than those who didn't play, and the study was actually using a board game that at the time I didn't know, but that I ended up playing a lot and really enjoying called Pandemic. So the the idea was that by playing cooperative board games in particular, these students were practicing all the various skills, computational thinking skills, algorithmic thinking and making so understanding rules and then playing out those rules, but also strategizing and making those strategies. And verbalizing the strategies with the other players or talking to each other about what they were trying to do in order to overcome the algorithmic problems that the game was throwing at them. I think there are there are two steps there. The first one is something that you could say about pretty much any board game, which is that in order to play a board game, you have to internalize the rules, which are essentially a program. I like to think of designing board games as, you know, coding, but for people, which is actually much more fun than coding for computers, the people are much more fun to work with. But then the second steps, as you say, is in cooperative board games. You tend to talk to the other players because you don't have to hide your strategy, you don't have to compete with them, but instead you're working together and so on top of doing all that mental processing, you're also verbalizing your thoughts, which essentially means you're you're like creating code or you're theorizing how you might resolve that problem in, in real time. And that seems to be what helped those students that were part of that study. I realized that this was pretty powerful and so that reignited my interest in in playing board games. So actually bought Pandemic and started playing with people to to study what would happen to see for myself. And then also I decided that I wanted to learn how to how to design my own games. And initially I wanted to design games to help people learn to code because that was my immediate professional goal. And then that quickly got sidetracked and, and I started designing games to to understand complex systems.
Derek Bruff:So your new game is called Day Break and it is a cooperative game. So what what is Daybreak and how did this game come to be?
Matteo Menapace:Day break is a cooperative board game about stopping climate change. So you work as a group of players representing world powers and you're doing so you work as a group of players representing world powers and you have essentially two goals. One is, you know, to win, you have to reduce global emissions down to net zero and beyond, which is called the global drawdown. And that's how you win. So when you reduce emissions down to that level where we are as humanity producing less emissions, that what the planet can absorb. At the same time, you also have to protect people, ecosystems and infrastructure from a series of crises and knock on effects that keep on happening as a result of the emissions that we have already put out in the atmosphere and and the ones that you keep on emitting up to the point where you're not emitting any more. Daybreak came about because in March 2020, Pandemic started to become more than a game in my world. So what was my and still is my favorite game, Pandemic, also turned into a a reality, the reality of COVID 2020. So I wrote a blog post about what we could learn from the game, applied to what was then a new and scary reality. And then I reached out to Matt Leacock, who's the author of Pandemic. We didn't know each other at the time, but we quickly discovered that we're both interested in the climate crisis, and we also found the prospect of a game about the climate crisis both fascinating and overwhelmingly complex, we both had tried to sketch out some climate crisis game and found it too much. So we decided to join forces. And that was April 2020. And we we've been working remotely for the last three years. Yeah. At designing this game.
Derek Bruff:I don't want to go too much into pandemic the game but and I don't know how realistic pandemic the game is like. I don't know what research Matt Leacock did to try to kind of replicate systems in the game. But I do know Daybreak is very realistic and you've described it as realistic but not educational. So in what ways is Daybreak the game? In what ways is it educational and in what ways? And what do you mean by saying that it's not educational?
Matteo Menapace:So the beef we have with educational games is that they have a tendency of being preachy and telling players what is the right thing to do. And that often means the decision space for players is very limited, very narrow, and you're guided down that almost forced down the right path. And so educational games with the best intentions often tend to put players off because they strip away some of their agency. So by trying to tell them what is the right thing to do and by kind of testing them against that, they're leaving very little space for players to to try out and to have their own learning experience. So this is something that we wanted to avoid when we decided to design Daybreak. And instead of designing this kind of, narrow, preachy game, we wanted the game to give players meaningful choices to make. So players being able to tinker with the system, to experiment with solution, and to learn by playing. What are the dynamics of the of the system involved. So in a sense, you could say that any game is every game is educational because it teaches you something. It teaches you what success and failure means, and also it tests you against those criteria. And then some games that are explicitly educational in that they want you to learn something beyond how to play, how to win, how to not lose. And so if every game is educational, then the question is how do how does the learning happen and and how is the learning balanced by enjoyment and agency so that's that's one of the questions that we had in our mind when when design daybreak. We wanted the game to be based on real world data and realistic solutions to the climate crisis, as we understood and from research them. At the same time, we wanted the game to not just present what we personally think are viable solutions to the climate crisis, but any solution that is that is plausible, whether we agree with it or not. And so that players could have their own learning experience by trying by trying them out, by seeing what happens when you when you play different combinations of solutions. We give you a deck of about 150 cards. And those hundred 50 cards can be played in many different combinations, and they span from what people would identify more easily as climate policies. So things that are to do with emissions and with energy transitions, for instance. So building out clean forms of energy, decommissioning dirty forms of energy, but also policies and technologies that are not necessarily identified by most people as climate policies, but they can still play an important role in, for instance, protecting communities, protecting ecosystems from the consequences of the climate crisis. So it's a really broad spectrum of of policies and technologies. And one of the things that people learn by playing this game is that it's there's so many angles to to approach this. So it is not really narrow narrowly focused on on emissions and energy, but it's also there's a lot of social policies and ecological policies and things that are generally beneficial for most humans, but wouldn't be identified as as climate policy. At a first glance.
Derek Bruff:There's a health care simulation, one that I've I've played a couple of times called Replay Health, and I talked to a sociology professor who used this in her class, and she said one of the things that this simulation helps students understand is that health care policy in the U.S. like to really understand it. And to make change there, you have to have a form of systems thinking that there are lots of interconnected pieces. And so it's not just about my individual choices or my individual actions, but there are, as you say, kind of knock on effects from collective actions and from the ways that the pieces of the system integrate. I want to say that board games can be really good at teaching systems thinking and this sounds. You know, climate change is certainly a problem that requires systems thinking. So is that one of your goals as well is to kind of help help players understand some of those systems a little bit better?
Matteo Menapace:Yeah, Yeah, 100%. So this is something that Matt and I agreed on pretty much from the get go from the first meeting Is this shared frustration on how climate action is often framed as a matter of individual choices. So you as a consumer can do your bit for the climate by reducing your individual carbon footprint, by say things, changing your your habits around food or on transportation or, you know, some people go as far as saying, you know, if you have one or less or no kids, that would be the biggest impact that you can do because kids are the culprit. Obviously. And so we were frustrated with that kind of thinking, which which goes back to your individualized way of thinking about health care systems or other systems that we wanted a game that helps people understand the scale and the complexity of the problem as a systemic problem. So cognitive games are particularly good at modeling any any issue as a as a systemic issue, because you're not focusing on what is that player doing, but rather what is the systems behavior that leads to certain results that we want to to change. So it made a lot of sense to model a game on the climate crisis as as a cooperative game and as a game that has this systemic frame and that makes look at systemic action and systemic solutions to the problem. Hmm.
Derek Bruff:Because I'm this is interesting. So in a competitive game, I might naturally have a more narrow focus as I play the game on my own choices and maybe the choices of one or two key competitors, right? So I have to kind of understand the system at some level, but I don't have to take responsibility for understanding the whole system. If I can find kind of a narrow route through it, that that benefits me. Whereas in a cooperative game, in order for us to all win, we actually have to kind of pay attention to all the things and how they work together. Is that is that does that sound accurate?
Matteo Menapace:Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. And also is the kind of focus that implicitly that the game creates. So as you say, when you play a competitive game, you're focused on your own action and you know your own actions as well as the other players actions, and you tend to understand those as individual choices. So if you're winning, you might say, Well, I played well because I'm a good person or I'm a smart player, and if someone else is doing something which is immoral in the in the game code, then you will blame them for their individual choices. Whereas when you start to look at it from a systemic perspective, you might see that the the actions of of people, whether they are played by actual players, by human players, or whether they are kind of encoded in the in the in the game as part of the system, they're not necessarily bad individuals, but they're just playing by the rules. They're just doing what the system is kind of asking them to do in order to lead to to a certain result. And so you start to understand things like, I don't know criminal behavior, for instance, not from an from from the perspective of bad people making bad choices, but instead people who are making choices that have a certain logic within the system, whether you agree with them or not, or whether you would in that situation, make the same choices, is kind of irrelevant because the game helps you see them with that systemic lens. And so you go beyond those easy answers or the easy kind of binaries of bad versus evil. And and you start to understand more the complexities of systems as well as human behavior within systems.
Derek Bruff:Daybreak is about fighting climate change. I have a colleague at my former institution, Joe Bandy, who teaches a lot about climate change. He's a sociology instructor there. And one of the things he's mentioned to me many times is that as he's working with a group of students over the length of a semester, the more they understand about climate change, the more despair they have. And so I'm wondering, how do you think about that? Because you could come away from an experience learning about climate change and how these systems interact and feel pretty hopeless about it, especially if maybe you were thinking, all I need to do is reduce my carbon footprint, right? That's what I can do to help. How how did you think about in the design process trying to help people not move to a point of despair, but to move to some other point as they play the game? Perhaps one once or many times.
Matteo Menapace:We've been very conscious and intentional in making day break a game that has overall a an optimistic outlook. So it shows you, as you play that climate change is a very complex and very difficult problem. But at all times you can see that it's possible whether you manage to win on your first go or your second go on your third go, that's a different question. But the game is winnable and it shows you that it is winnable. And then the argument is also that it is based on both real world data and plausible solution, which means that in the real world this is a problem that can be solved and the focus is really on solutions. So what we want with this game is to raise awareness of of solutions that exist to the climate crisis, because we're way past the point of debating whether climate change is real or not. The real question is, well, what do we do about climate change? And the thing is that there are a wealth of solutions which are both technological and political, and many of them are challenging the dominant economic system. So that is where it starts to become challenging to implement that. That's where it also starts to become difficult even to imagine some of those solutions in the real world because they are things that require a certain system change. So by playing Daybreak. We we hope that people get familiar with this portfolio of solutions and they can understand that those solutions can match the scale and urgency of the crises. When you ask the question, what can I do about the climate crisis, then the answer is very little on my own. Just just like in Daybreak. When you play Daybreak, you can see that as a single player. You can, of course, make quite, quite a lot of difference because you're playing as a world power, but still on your own that you're not as efficient as if you were working with with the other players. So there is this dynamic in Daybreak where people tend to start playing and really focusing on what they can do in their individual player board. And then after a couple of rounds they realize that we haven't done as much progress as you could have done if we had been strategizing together. If we had tried to make the most of what we are. What, we're each individually good at it and so on. So I guess the message there is that anything you can do, you're much more effective if you do it with with other people. So we're encouraging people to to look at collective action and to then join join forces with with other people. So we have a website that every single card has its own page on the website, so you can scan a QR code on the card and then see what you can see what that card represents in terms of solutions in the real world. And then we also have a few prompts for people to to learn more and to take action. And most of the time that take action is about joining groups or movements that are already working in that towards that solution and seeing that outside of the, you know, sort of your own individual sphere, there's there's a lot that you can do when you join other people's efforts.
Derek Bruff:Let me circle back to something that we talked a little bit about earlier in terms of not being, you know, overtly educational and how how players have lots of different paths that they can explore and see kind of what works and what might not work. A couple of years ago on my former podcast, I interviewed Patrick Rael, who teaches history at Bowdoin College in Maine, and he has a course that uses board games to teach history. And he said something that really kind of turned a light bulb on me that games are inherently counterfactual. And this is something that historians I've heard historians use this term before, right? Like what? What could have happened but did not. And so because often in the teaching of history, you think about, you know, we just have to memorize the sequence of events and what actually happened. But historians practicing historians do a lot of counterfactual thinking, what could have happened but did not. And how does that help us understand the systems and the the kind of the chain of consequences that unfolded that did happen? And, you know, when I solve when I when I work a puzzle with a jigsaw puzzle, right. There is one intended outcome, right And so that is not true for a game. There are multiple outcomes. And, you know, game players will often think about the idea of having multiple paths to victory. And you know, in a competitive game, you're often trying to find your path and it may be a different path than someone else. But as you say in this cooperative game, you're kind of exploring the decision space together. I'm I'm wondering if that phrase, if that word word counterfactual resonates with you as a way to think about what Daybreak does and more generally what games can do to to help people understand things.
Matteo Menapace:Yeah, Yeah, completely. And we have used counterfactual a few times in our design conversations around daybreak. So one fancy way to describe daybreak would be a counterfactual engine. So you could say that the game sets a few variables and system behaviors, for example, creates this simplified model of the emission cycle, and then it gives you those starting values of emissions from the different sectors that we mentioned before. And then you, the players, you set the engine in motion. So by playing the cards that let you explore what happens when you change those variables. And so by playing, you are able to ask questions like, What if we roll out this massive health care program? Or what if we decide that we don't we don't want to use nuclear energy even though the game allows you to? Or what if we dim the sun with Geoengineering Technologies and you can explore how those interventions interact with each other and what kind of risks and consequences they have on on people and and on the planet. So so going back to the educational question, though, there are solutions in the game that I would personally not want to see in the real world, like geoengineering. But we included them in daybreak because, one, they're plausible people are actually considering those for various reasons and because we think that is useful for players to try them out rather than us telling them this is bad, don't do it. So for instance, when you do geoengineering in the game, you are literally rolling a die. So you're taking a massive risk and the results are unpredictable. So you could you might be lucky and you might be able to reach your your temporary goal, but you also may not be lucky and what we want people to understand is, well, first of all, what we want people to think about it, to consider those choices, and we try to create a similar condition to what world leaders in might might think when they consider, should we roll out this program that we don't quite understand or can't quite predict the consequences of, but has some potential benefits as well as some unknown risks?
Derek Bruff:And that may connect a little bit to what you said earlier about different versions of fun, because I avoided those interventions at all costs when I play this game. And but I am not, you know, I, I, I play a lot of board games and, you know, I play with other people who have different comfort levels with risk. And so some players are going to want to kind of go go for the gamble. And that's that's how they enjoy a game like this. And then I'm not one of those players. I try to I like the slow build right where I know what I'm getting and I can I can build over time.
Matteo Menapace:Yeah. There's also a point where in some some games where people like you might find themselves in a situation where that's the chances of being able to win are rather slim. And then this opportunity to use geo engineering comes up and that really plays out as a kind of moral dilemma where you go, okay, if if this works, then we have we, you know, we can keep that slim chance alive and maybe even turn things around. But if it doesn't, then we'll be we'll be doomed. So and that and that is also the kind of the counterfactual situation where we might see ourselves in a few decades, where, you know, in in the in the event of global warming continuing at the current levels. And we may start to see world powers, especially in the global South, considering seriously these more drastic and risky technologies because they feel well, we've we left it too late for the the more progressive, more gradual approach.
Derek Bruff:It must be rewarding to you to see your game in the real world being played all over the world and I really thank you for your time today talking with me about all these topics. It's been fascinating. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Matteo Menapace:Thank you. Has been a great conversation.
Derek Bruff:That was Matteo Menapace co-designer of the Cooperative Board game Daybreak, and independent game designer, Thanks to both Mateo and Kerry for taking the time to talk with me about DAYBREAK. In the show notes, you'll find links to more information about the game, as well as info on Matteo and Kerry's work and a few other learning at play resources we reference during our conversations. If you've used daybreak or similar games as learning experiences for your students, I would love to hear about it. You can text me your thoughts by clicking the link in the show notes. Just be sure to include your name since that doesn't come through automatically. Or you can email me at Derek at Derek Bruff dot org and you'd like more learning to play interviews on the podcast. Let me know that too. I really enjoy these, but I don't want to overwhelm listeners if this topic isn't of as much interest to them as it is to me. Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website.
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