I got a request from the last blog to incorporate a specific lesson into the description of open-ended games. Therefore, for this blog, I will use my lesson on Sustainability to help describe some of the benefits of open-ended games.

The Best Open-Ended Games have Simple Rules that allow Multiple Strategies.

Here is a summary of the rules for the Sustainability Game:

• One at time relay race style, teams take a tennis ball from the playing area and bring it back to their home base.

• Bringing a ball from home base to the teacher will result in receiving two balls. Both balls must be placed back down into the playing area.

• Once the game begins, a team must always have at least one ball in their home base.

• The team with the most balls at the end of the playing time wins the round.

• At any point in the round, if all balls are taken from the playing area, everyone loses the game regardless of how many balls they have at home base.

The first time my middle school students played this game, I didn’t explain that this game was serving as a metaphor for sustainability and conservation. I wanted them to discover this on their own. I hoped they would fail the first few attempts, and they certainly did. Every group was unsuccessful in the first round, and several failed two or three times. To be clear, they did not fail because the rules were too hard to understand.

On the contrary, the rules are so simple that kindergarteners could understand them. However, the simple rules still create complex gameplay because competitive teams are forced to work together. Each team had to determine the balance of how much they would keep versus how much they would put back, knowing that other teams could keep what they were replenishing.

 This was how a typical first round looked for each group. Every team raced to collect as many balls as possible. Even though the students were all aware of the last rule, inevitably, someone took the last ball, which instantly ended the game for everyone. Many of the players were surprised but quickly remembered the last rule of the game. They forgot the most important rule during the frenzy of running back and forth with competitive juices flowing.

Teams needed to consider how they could play to win while preventing an early stoppage. They had to quickly decide the balance of how often they would take a ball and how often they would bring a ball to me to replenish the playing field. The general strategy is a team wants to replenish enough to keep the game going but keep enough balls to have a chance to win. However, the degree to how much they replenish versus take had to be adjusted on the fly in response to what other teams were doing. Because teams are going to make decisions based on the actions of other teams, theoretically, every game could be a little different from the last one. If students get a new playing experience every time they play, this is the definition of replay value, a hallmark of any good open-ended game.

Open-ended Games elicit lots of emotion, which influences memory and learning.

We know games and sports can be emotional. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and frustration when things aren’t going your way. Those are pretty standard for any game we play. However, what about feelings like betrayal and revenge? Or sincerity and gratitude? Open-ended games elicit more complex feelings similar to those we might have within various relationships. Board games or fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons are similar to open-ended games in that they combine a myriad of emotions and complex decision-making.

Research suggests that emotion influences learning and memory dramatically. According to Chai M. Tyng, Hafeez U. Amin, Mohamad N. M. Saad, and Aamir S. Malik, “Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem-solving. Emotion has a powerful influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior. This attentional and executive control is intimately linked to learning processes, as intrinsically limited attentional capacities are better focused on relevant information. Emotion also facilitates encoding and helps the retrieval of information efficiently. In addition to elucidating the memory-enhancing effects of emotion, neuroimaging findings extend our understanding of emotional influences on learning and memory processes; this knowledge may be useful for the design of effective educational curricula to provide a conducive learning environment for both traditional “live” learning in classrooms and “virtual” learning through online-based educational technologies. “

Open-ended games certainly seem to fit the criteria for providing “a conducive learning environment” while leveraging the inevitable emotional responses from the students participating in the games. If you are a Montessori educator reading this blog, the importance of the environment to learning outcomes should sound familiar. The Montessori classroom is full of materials to engage the student’s interests. They help the student go from the “concrete to the abstract.” The concrete materials are physical manipulatives the student uses to learn a concept initially that, with practice, they will later be able to do mentally. As the child moves the pieces with their hands, they eventually build the ability to do this work in their head. Physical manipulatives (concrete) in the PE environment can represent complex ideas and concepts (abstract). When the students play the game, the students gain a better understanding of the abstract concept with the emotions of the game to ensure their learning is solidified long term.

Open-ended Games Make Difficult Subjects Easier to Understand and Reveal Human Nature

There is a famous quote by William Arthur Ward that goes, “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. For a concept like sustainability, students have probably already heard a hundred times, “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” That messaging probably has little impact anymore, even when we explain why it’s necessary. To up the ante, we may show them newsreels of animals covered in trash or humans living in squalor as a tool to get an emotional response, which can effectively get sympathy and inspire a call to action. Inevitably, students will question, “Why doesn’t everyone just follow the three R’s?” Unfortunately, adults usually don’t have a great answer, or we say, “I don’t know.” That’s an excellent way to confuse a child. If something is obviously the right thing to do, why don’t we all do it? Desperate to find an answer, people often take an oversimplified view and need help understanding the larger picture.  

This game purposely does not provide simple answers. What it does is act as a metaphor for the complexities within society and the interactions of nations concerning the state of the world. While Greta Thunburg has valid points concerning the environment, she was often not taken seriously because she ignored or needed to understand the complexities her demands would cause on nations worldwide. The problem of sustainability initiatives is ultimately a human problem, which means if we truly want to understand the totality of the issue, we need to consider human nature. But we know that human nature is tough to understand. We want to live in a world of black and white, but human nature almost invariably resides in the grey.

The good news when facing a complicated topic like human nature is that it provides the environment to employ our critical thinking skills to the max. Anytime we engage critical thinking skills, it is perfect for our older students. They may need more buy-in to be compliant and active in PE, especially if they are inherently not sporty. Students who consider themselves intellectuals who do not want to participate in active games can be nudged into playing because the game requires more than athleticism to succeed.

World unity is not impossible, but it is improbable. The sustainability game echoes this sentiment because it is never played “perfectly.” A perfect game would be every team ensured that everyone had the same number of points at the end of the round while replenishing the environment. Nothing in the rules says they cannot all win the game together. In reality, this would be like countries acting more like states of one nation to ensure equity amongst every country. This is tricky when considering population and geography or submitting to a “benevolent new world order” to ensure peace and prosperity amongst all global citizens.

I have never seen a “perfect game” in the Sustainability game. Everyone is surprised when I reveal this was an option within the game, and some even scoff at the idea. One of the strengths of open-ended games is that they can effectively subvert expectations and open one’s mind to new possibilities. The students came to the game believing it could only be played one way against each other. Their minds are blown when it is revealed that they could have worked cooperatively. What’s even more interesting is that some individuals, even after learning how to play where everyone wins, would still not play that way. They want to win the game and can’t imagine a “tie” as a win. Unfortunately, the same mindset also applies to how nations perceive global interactions.

By playing such a fun, intense, emotional game about sustainability, they get first-hand experience of what sustainability indeed requires by playing a game. They got to see it unfold before their eyes, and seeing is believing. This metaphor is much more potent because they naturally recreated the problems and issues concerning sustainability and saw how it all unfolded. This makes understanding the global problem more manageable because they replicated the same global issues within their game. They can see the problem in all its complexities clearly for the first time. A complex subject was made easier to understand through their first-hand experience.

Open-ended games are unique in giving us much more information about the student’s character, not in a formal setting like a classroom. Recess is another valuable arena for observation. Oftentimes, these types of observations on a student’s choices and behavior are critical for the child’s full development. An anecdote shared during a parent-teacher conference about a child making a good choice, which revealed strength in character, can be the most powerful thing shared with them. When I shared observations that revealed their child’s character, the response I would get from parents was incredibly heartfelt. While it’s nice to see good grades or hear your student is doing well in their academics, imagine hearing that your child is an intrinsically good person.

 I hope you consider open-ended games a powerful tool for education, not only in classroom content but also for character education.

Bibliography:

Tyng Chai M., Amin Hafeez U., Saad Mohamad N. M., Malik Aamir S. (2017). The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory. Frontiers in Psychology. Volume 8. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454