"Replaying History: Learning World History Through Playing Civilization III"

[Ozymandias]

I'm on Academia.edu and found a slew of papers from around 2004 on this sort of topic. Should anyone be interested (Oh, @Blue Monkey!) there are more available.

 

[Snowygerry]

By 2:40 the class had settled, but four or five students, all of whom were women, were still not playing the game at all. One student slept in front of her computer. Four others talked, walked around the room, or sat and did nothing. The other 12 students worked through the tutorial. The teachers said that this was actually a large number of students to have on task at one time.

Sounds about right, tnx for posting, interesting.

Eventually Kent became engrossed in other students’ games. At one point, Sandy threatened him with detention for being out of his seat, but Kent replied, “Kent will go home when Kent wants to go home.” Four girls talked or checked email.

By day 3, several students became engaged in the game, each for unique reasons. Dwayne, Chris, Andrea, and Jason stayed to play after class and I had to struggle to get them out of the classroom.

It reads like a novel

 

[timerover51]

I have already done this once, but with only 4 students. I used TETurkhan's The Test of Time scenario. The young lady playing the Zulus complained that I have not gotten rid of all of the dinosaurs. Other than that, it did go off well. I was playing with them as the Scandinavians, which are quit difficult to play unless you change things a bit.

 

[Quintillus]

My goodness, it's about the length of a novel, too!

It is kind of interesting, though. 18 students, all of whom had flunked ninth grade at least once, and only a few of whom had played real-time strategy games, none turn-based. Very different from my 9th or 10th grade classes academically, I was surprised just how disengaged the students were in general until realizing the class background.

But by about two weeks in, most of them were pretty engaged, and 8 of the 18 wanted to sign up for an additional camp in the same format. For some students, it clearly was an effective way of increasing engagement and interest in geography and history.

Some additional excerpts:

Kathy ordered all of her laborers to cease working and become entertainers (and had no idea that she had done so). Kathy was confused because entertainers are represented by colorful icons, and so the visual feedback suggested that turning a laborer into an entertainer was a good idea: Meanwhile, her civilization starved and went bankrupt as they entertained one another rather than producing food, gathering natural resources, or engaging in commerce.

Definitely a game design trap!

Kent made his warriors extremely powerful, created ironclads that could fly, and loaded his territory with gems, furs, iron, and horses.

Someone should make a flying ironclad unit, with animations!

For example, Norman invented a language of colonial imperialism to justify conquering smaller countries, which was later taken up by Chris, and then a few days later, Tony. Norman met the Polynesians, a small, weak civilization who were exploring South America. Norman realized that they had neither technology nor money and decided to conquer their settlements. He explained, “It is for their own good, really. Look how much more I have. They will be happier living as Iroquois.” Chris and Tony laughed at this rationalization for imperialist behavior.

That's Civilization, turning us into imperialists!

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I'm rooting for Dwayne to successfully conquer China. He reminds me of one of my college friends, really smart but really bad at focusing on the school work, and failing classes as a result of that lack of engagement. But Civilization proved engaging for him.

I was also wondering about the impact of the technology issues (which came up repeatedly), and that gaming was not as common back then as it is today. If you tried the same thing today in a similar setting, would it go more smoothly? Hopefully the technology would at least be more stable. Would students' likely-higher experience level with games make things smoother? And would it take fewer days to get up to speed? The game's learning curve is mentioned as a challenge, and would still exist, but the initial skepticism of many of the students was also a challenge and technology issues deflated enthusiasm at times along the way. And those 30-second turn times on slow computers were arguably both good and bad - it created built-in time for the engaged students to walk around and see how other students' games were going.

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Lastly, I'm wondering if any of these students ever discovered CivFanatics, Apolyton, or any of the other fan sites. At least one (Andrea) mentioned wanting to continue playing the game at home, maybe more later. It would be wild to be able to read about your first experiences playing one of the Civ games in an academic paper 20 years later!

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Edit: Some tips from the students on how to play Civ III:

Tony: Make as many roads as possible. Helps with traveling.
Chris: Always put 2-3 defense in every city.
Dwayne: It’s good to build up your money for when you get espionage so you can steal technologies rather than trade.

We probably mostly wouldn't follow Chris's advice, but Tony's is solid. And I might have to follow Dwayne's advice if I start falling farther behind in tech in my current game...

 

[Snowygerry]

[...]
Lastly, I'm wondering if any of these students ever discovered CivFanatics, Apolyton, or any of the other fan sites. At least one (Andrea) mentioned wanting to continue playing the game at home, maybe more later. It would be wild to be able to read about your first experiences playing one of the Civ games in an academic paper 20 years later!

That would be very strange - especially given the amount of personal details in the academic paper, I can only hope they changed the names.

I wonder if T. and B. got together, do D. and K. eventually become close friends ?

And what became of J.'s baby...

They were filmed too - could be a cult hit movie, something like The Breakfast Club