Boardgaming in Education: A Ladder to the Future

It's no secret that anything you are forced to do within a classroom setting becomes a slog. As an educator, I may want my students to appreciate the depth and brilliance of a Citizen Kane or Seven Samurai. There is much to dissect in the execution and drama of such a film and of course there are always a few students who would stare wide-eyed at the power of such a movie. But for every one enthusiast, there is a string of yawns and drooping eyelids behind them, in almost perfect loop until one by one they inevitably drop. Literature does not seem to fare much better. No matter how relatable or charged the short story or theatre piece, perhaps even fewer today in the classroom can hold themselves to not be distracted. The only exception I've ever seen is that of a comedy. A comedy does tend to work much better than other genres, but it’s not always going to be an option depending on the subject matter. And even then, if you were to break down and analyse this in a classroom, the patient smiles would slowly melt into thoughts of homework and studying.

This has been the situation for as long as I can remember even when I was on the other end of the room, fighting to stay awake like in Seoro Oh’s brilliant depiction in ‘Afternoon Class’. But in the last three years, I’ve noticed an interesting change in design within the classroom.

Ask a design student how they would define themselves, they would come up with a myriad of answers that they would have varying degrees of confidence in. That is normal. Ask them to describe what a board game of their lives would look like, and you would find something completely different.

Snakes and Ladders is one of the oldest board games that we have been playing for centuries. As simple as it looks, it’s by far one of the best examples of “mechanics-as-metaphor” that we can think of. The actual history is pretty deep and honestly worth its own breakdown.

But the core concept is this: the Ladders represent virtues, things that would take you closer to the path of attaining Moksha, thus escaping Samsara, the cycle of life and death. The Snakes on the other hand, are Vices, things that would bring you down, karma that leads you away from salvation. Though you have no choice in the matter since you can’t influence the dice roll, you must accept your fate. That is the idea. It’s a metaphor for life itself and our path through it.

It's rather obvious that as a game, there is not much in the way of fun to be had in rolling a die or spinning a wheel or tossing cowrie shells to find yourself being dragged down or rocketed up the board. But there’s a lot more of that if you crack it open instead, allowing for more personal stories to feature as the “Virtues and Vices” of the game. This is something my students got introduced to for the first time, leading to some astonishing variants.

Once I closed up for the evening, I wondered. Is it because of how personal it became, that I found no drooping eyelids this time? Or are we seeing something else entirely, a more game-ready generation, interested in actively tinkering and breaking apart a system by hand than to sit back and watch it being done for them?

I’m hoping it's a bit of both.

Perhaps on the next ladder I climb, I’ll find more examples of how students teach me about the world and I hope it’s through board game design.