At the university where I work these days, one of the classes I teach every semester is Screen English. For the last three semesters, I’ve included the silent, text-based role-playing game Alice is Missing (from Hunter’s Entertainment) as one of our activities. Usually we play it toward the end of semester, when students are eager for something to break away from the familiarity of student-led discussion group exercises.
Despite a few challenges, it goes surprisingly well. The challenges include:
- Making Stuff Up. Some students struggle to manufacture the kinds of details that the game prompts them to make up. (For example, they will be prompted to explain what sound they hear in the background that reveals a location during a phone call, or something like that, and will struggle to make up a detail.)
- Role-Playing. This is a more intensive type of role-playing than most of my students are used to doing.
- Vocabulary. The exercise requires a little vocabulary pre-teaching, so that they can understand the card text. (“What does ‘culprit’ mean?”
- Culture. Alice is Missing is set in a small American town. Students are familiar with the setting from American TV shows, but inserting their character smoothly into the setting can be a challenge… and sometimes things get a bit soap-opera depending on their assumptions about teen drug use, the availability of guns to teenagers, and so on.
- Technical Problems. My classes are only 110 minutes long, and Alice is Missing is 90 minutes plus prep time. Add in a technical glitch—like the broken permissions on the #group-chat channel in class Discord I experienced this morning—and you’re going to have to get creative with the timeline of events. (I had to shave 15 minutes off the game, so the early revelations came a little more fast and furious than they normally would.)
Despite those challenges, I’ve had a lot of success using the game with EFL students. One reason, I think, is that since my classes are larger than just 5 students, I partner or group them so that 2-3 students are playing each character. This lets them collaborate and brainstorm together, which makes it a lot easier for them to come up with the ideas they need to make up on a relatively tight deadline.
I also handle the card distrbution myself, carrying over the timer-based and related cards to each group about five to ten minutes before their turn comes. This ensures they have adequate time to read the cards, understand them, and quietly discuss their ideas for how to fill out the missing information.
One more thing that helps is that I’ve de-randomized character generation and development. Instead of players drawing cards to reveal rtheir character, I hand out character sheets with the character’s Background, Relationships, Secret, and the character’s Attitude or Style. Each group of players gets one shared character sheet. This makes it much easier for them to slip into character, especially since it gives them a few minutes to study the sheet.
I’m happy to report that while they start out unsure of themselves, it rarely takes students long to catch on to the game, and there’s always a moment where they “get it” and really get into character. Today, most of the class reacted in shock at the revelation of a secret romantic relationship, and gasped audibly when Alice’s body was found at the train station. They freaked out about Charlie when David (the popular kid) chased him from Alice’s body, threatening to kill him, and a number of students gasped again when, after the game, I explained that Charlie had gone silent because David had killed him.
(This was the first time I left the “Alice is Dead” card as a possible outcome. In previous games, I’d left it out. I’d recommend doing that, for very sensitive classes.)
Anyway, we didn’t have time to talk about the experience today, but in past semesters I’ve had students comment that it was the most interesting activity in the class. A few have give it even higher praise, telling me it was their most interesting classroom experience in all their time at university. Some might just have been blowing smoke, but I am inclined to believe it was true for some people, just gauging by their obvious enthusiasm. It’s a strange, captivating experience to watch them get into it and spin a story together. I have a few ideas for how to refine the character sheets to make them easier for EFL students to use, and I’d like the iron out some of the problems with prep in future semesters, but overall, this exercise is a keeper.
This is a very cool strategy for getting students engaged with learning! I tried to experiment a bit with gaming in the classroom but it kinda flopped bec I don’t have your experience as I’m not a gamer, in general. It seems like you were able to make the modifications needed to adapt the Alice game to the classroom. The game I wanted to use was BafaBafa, which is supposed to simulate a clash of two different cultures, but the game itself is quite costly so I studied up on it and tried to make my own version of two synthetic cultures. I was hoping for something that would really produce cultural incompatibility on the scale of “Federation meets Klingon Empire” but the synthetic cultures I invented didn’t quite fly.
Hi Bradley,
Yeah, it helps to be experienced with gaming if you’re trying to use these kinds of exercises with students. I haven’t heard of Bafá Bafá, but looking it up now, yeah, $500 seems pretty expensive! I think maybe keeping things simple might be easier, especially in a TEFL context. The scenario of Alice is Missing is simple and familiar enough that students can grab onto it and understand it pretty directly, and by omitting a few things (like the randomized character generation and the epilogue, which involves prerecorded voice mails to Alice) it was possible to streamline stuff enough to work in a classroom setting.
I get why a “clash of cultures” scenario would be useful in teaching anthropology, though I think it would be a challenge to design that kind of game. I am sure you could probably create something but it would require some pre-teaching, and the right group of students. It’s not something I’d try with every group. That said, you might look at The Quiet Year for inspiration about how to structure a game around two groups who don’t understand one another might come into contact and either get along or clash. The Quiet Year is focused on one group, but I feel like with little modification it could be made to work with two groups. You’d need a fairly long class session for the thing to really unfold, though: a three-hour session would be better than a two-hour one.
I also think for anthropology teaching, some of Thorny Games’ creations might work, especially Sign and Xenolanguage. Xenolanguage simulates an encounter between humans and aliens, as the humans try to figure out the alien’s language. (A bit like the movie Arrival, or Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” which Arrival was based on.) In other words, it simulates humans encountering an alien language and thought system. Sign is about deaf kids inventing their own sign language (based on a real event), but it implicitly bring students into a clash with their own real-life communication systems.
Somehow, another scenario that pops into my mind is one with orcs and humans who meet and clash, and have to negotiate peace (or fall into war). Most students have seen Lord of the Rings and are familiar with orcs from there, as well as from online games. I think with a good group, if you provided them with some roleplaying tips, they might be able to pull it off. That said, an explicitly fantasy scenario would leave out some students who have no interest in that stuff, just as Xenolanguage might not interest individuals with no interest in science fiction. Real world scenarios appeal to such students more, but unfortunately those tend to be the same students who are less able to roleplay membership in a fictional culture unlike their own.
One solution to that problem is to have students roleplay as a team effort: no one student is saddled with roleplaying a character or group alone, so the ones who are into it will join in in order to be part of the group, and they can negotiate the character’s actions in a way that makes them feel a little more confident. This is one reason The Quiet Year comes to mind: it abstracts away individuals and everyone playing just plays one community. The one problem is The Quiet Year, being a story game, kind of runs off players taking on multiple roles: sometimes they’re advocates for their village, and sometimes they’re in the GM role and creating problems for the community. I think, though, with a little work you could bifurcate those two roles and assign them to different groups. (So that one group of students deliberates about community actions, and the other group builds the map and the challenges that they need to tackle. Hell, splitting it that way makes it easier to build the game so that you could have two different communities encountering one another, in a clash of cultures type way.) Hmmm. That actually sounds like it’d be a fun exercise to do with students.
(I have played The Quiet Year with conversation students in the past. It was an interesting experience, though I quickly found I had to take on more of the GM role as they were invested in their village’s survival to the point where they were leery to introduce sufficient challenges onto the map.)
Oh, and I should note, you wouldn’t need the (slightly pricey) deluxe edition of The Quiet Year. The cards and skulls are nice but you can get by with a regular deck of playing cards, any kind of beads as tokens, and a printout of the PDF edition.
In fact, the tokens are probably the first thing I’d drop, as the “resentment” system was kind of confusing for EFL students when I’ve played it with them.
Thanks for these insightful suggestions, Gord! I am definitely going to try at least one of these next semester. I appreciate you sharing these ideas!
No worries! I’d love to hear how it goes for you!