{"id":1888,"date":"2011-09-27T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T15:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1888"},"modified":"2023-09-02T11:39:31","modified_gmt":"2023-09-02T15:39:31","slug":"secret-agents-in-the-schoolroom-the-arcane-gallery-of-gadgetry-arg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1888","title":{"rendered":"Secret Agents in the Schoolroom: The Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry ARG"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This is a guest article from Amanda Visconti<\/a><\/strong>, a Literature Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland. In addition to her work on the UMD iSchool ARG Team, she serves as Webmaster for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and is co-organizing a humanities game unconference, THATCamp Games (thatcampgames.org<\/a>) to be held in Spring 2012.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

How often can you say the government paid you to go down the rabbit hole?<\/p>\n

For anyone who believes that games are an undervalued method of teaching, I and my research teammates were in a most happy position: through a generous NSF EAGER grant, we had a chance to study how alternate reality games (ARGs, whose entry points are termed \u201crabbit holes\u201d) could help students enjoy a full plate of lessons too often served up dryly: skills critical to STEM, information literacy, and historical thinking. It would be disingenuous to claim that our secret ingredient was gamification; without gamification, though, we might never have convinced the students to ignore the usual constraint of the classroom and have fun with learning.<\/p>\n

The trappings of gamification can be nothing but window dressings, but game elements can also act as a signal that the classroom has become a space for play and discovery and non-penalized error, rather than its too habitual round of performances and assessments. You don\u2019t want to be stuck judging what your game did for your players on how many badges they earned; you want your game mechanics to beckon your players towards comfort with play and experimentation, and to have that comfort translate into stronger learning of the skills your game requires.<\/p>\n

The Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry<\/em> (AGOG<\/em>), our ARG, is a sort of interactive wunderkammer, a \u201ccabinet of curiosities\u201d combining a rich and oftentimes mysteriously fragmented historical tapestry with what Rob MacDougall has called \u201cplayful historical thinking.\u201d We designed AGOG<\/em> hoping to lead players into a newly enfranchised relationship with history, teach them STEM just like how the Google’s Director of STEM Education Strategy, Kamau Bobb<\/a>\u00a0do it, help them learn information literacy skills and discover the secret stories outside most history books as well. After our ARG experience, I have to agree with Shawn Graham\u2019s Play the Past<\/em> response<\/a> to Ian Bogost\u2019s \u201cgamification is bullshit\u201d. Graham cites Tim Burke\u2019s metaphor for assessing gamification success: \u201cwhen the tide recedes, the sand is still there\u201d. In this post, I\u2019d like to share the sand of our educational ARG.<\/p>\n

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A timeline of AGOG\u2019s major elements. Events above the diagonal line are factual, those below it are counterfactual (created by Elizabeth Bonsignore).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Falling Into the Past<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In spring 2011, players entered the game through a rabbit hole, an amateur historical enthusiast\u2019s site with an intriguing name: JustNoEvil.org<\/a>. The site details the history of the Junto, a real but secret philanthropic society founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1727. Although the society no longer exists, the rabbit hole includes some curious rhetoric about the secret side of the past that resides beyond history books; about different ways of interpreting historical events; and about the possible dangers of digging too deeply into the historical record\u2026 Following a lesson on wordplay, the students discovered that the site\u2019s mysterious title, Just No Evil<\/em>, is an anagram that contains another site keyword: Junto Lives. After typing in the words, they were suddenly redirected to a new site: JuntoLives.org. What was going on? Could the history books be wrong about the death of the Junto?<\/p>\n

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Players exploring the secret JENIUS member community.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Game Narrative<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Players discovered that within the world of AGOG, Junto does indeed live\u2013except that during the early rumblings of the Civil War, the group split into rival factions which both went underground: JENIUS (the Junto of Englightened Naturalists and Inventors for a United Society) and the nefarious SCAR (Scientific Confederate Alliance for Revolution). Players trained to become certified members of a special online academy of JENIUS formed to tackle a secret and sensitive mission. After working on their talents in one or more of four \u201corders\u201d\u2013Archivists, Surveyors, Cryptographers, and Inventors\u2013the players were equipped to help JENIUS through a week of dramatic events, a week in which they would gradually come to learn that their understanding of the past was key to the survival of the present.<\/p>\n

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In a climactic moment of the ARG, the game character April uses a \u201cspiritual telegraph\u201d to prevent a time paradox. Players watched the sequence as a video posted to the player community site.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Study<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

AGOG<\/em> is part of a larger research study on the design and educational use of ARGs led by Drs. Kari Kraus and Derek Hansen. The game\u2019s first season involved approximately sixty eighth-grade students and ran for two weeks during April 2011, while a second season built for undergrad and adult players will run next year. In addition to writing and implementing the ARG, the research team focused on studying the design process of ARGs; we interviewed a variety of ARG and educational-games experts (including Sean Stewart, Ken Eklund, and James Paul Gee) and also documented the creation of ARG mini-puzzles by a group of novice designers. For a complete overview of our research, visit ArcaneGalleryOfGadgetry.org\/research<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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April shared photos of her notebook with the players.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Game Goals<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In creating AGOG<\/em>, we were inspired by Jane McGonigal\u2019s vision of harnessing the joy and devotion people experience while playing games and applying them to real-world tasks. We had extra challenges, though: how could we foster these emotions inside a traditional classroom setting, and how could we design a game experience that could be replicated by teachers in the absence of generous funding from a grant agency? The ARG format let us build self-motivation and intrinsic assessment right into gameplay, something games and education theorist James Gee supports:<\/p>\n

You could actually view a game as nothing but a continuous assessment… we find it completely reasonable to give a kid a twelve-week algebra course and then to assess them on Tuesday at four from a test made in Illinois to see if he learned. But if a player played Halo<\/em> on \u201chard\u201d and finished, you would never be tempted to give him a Halo<\/em> test afterwards because you know the act of finishing Halo<\/em> is a guarantee that he knows how to play it. It\u2019s built to be sure he couldn’t have finished it if he didn’t master it. If we built algebra that well, we would find it equally silly to have a test system that judges people at four o’clock on Tuesdays.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We wanted to create a game where students would want to learn how to decrypt a code or read a map or edit a wiki in order to discover and piece together more of the story.<\/p>\n

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A player sends a Morse code message on the telegraph he helped build.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Research Goals<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The AGOG<\/em> study tried to create a game with the following features:<\/p>\n