Authors:

Sean Duncan, & Mathew Berland

Abstract:

Games scholarship has moved beyond principled description of experiences of gameplay
to uncovering the ways that players make meaning in gaming spaces, be they in digital forms,
tabletop forms, or physical games. Uncovering the structures of play within games implies better
addressing the ways in which rule sets, the social milieu of a particular game, and even the
motivating potential of a game narrative can all interact in the shaping of a game experience. In
the present study, we address several of these concerns by teasing out the interaction of two
valued practices found within game play: computational thinking and collaboration.

In this work, we investigate how players exhibit computational thinking and collaboration
in delimited play space — the strategic board game Pandemic (Leacock, 2007). Pandemic is an
award-winning, collaborative tabletop game in which up to four players work together to rid the
planet of four diseases concurrently spreading across the globe. Involving negotiation, the
development (and iteration) of collaborative strategies, as well as a potentially motivating “save
the world” framing, the game provides researchers with a rich space in which to study the
interaction of computational thinking and collaboration. As studies of collaborative tabletop
games (e.g., Zagal, Rick, & Hsi, 2006) have revealed their interesting complexity as play spaces,
we see Pandemic as a useful testbed in which to study how game rule sets, social configurations, and a motivating theme can combine to provide meaning to their players.

With regards to computational thinking, we hypothesize that Pandemic and other
collaborative games afford practices within the “cognitive pillar” of computational literacy
(diSessa, 2000), in which players use computational thinking in order to solve complex problems
(e.g. Papert’s, 1980, “procedural thinking”). With the recent emphasis on understanding the
dynamics of computational thinking (see National Research Council, 2009), we see collaborative
board games as a fruitful domains in which to assess the development of informal computational
thinking practices – primarily through the understanding of rules and the iterative development
of strategies, “run” by the participants in the game. Additionally, we investigate the forms of
collaboration that take place within gaming spaces, focusing on vocalized “help seeking” (e.g.,
Alevan, et al, 2003; Nelson-LeGall, 1981) or verbalized expressions by participants during the
game in which assistance for others is discussed. We hypothesize that tracking the overt
vocalizations asking for, receiving, and arguing over assistance within the game can help to
capture elements of the game’s collaborative play structure.

We conducted a series of eight studies using Pandemic to investigate these practices. In
this work, we have assessed both the naturalistic play of the game, as well as simple game
modifications designed to elicit differential degrees of computational thinking and collaboration
through play of the game (Berland & Lee, 2010; Berland & Duncan, 2012; Duncan & Berland,
2012; Duncan, Boecking, & Berland, 2012). By “tinkering” with the game’s rule set, we have
attempted to isolate and augment certain forms of play already present within the game that, we
hypothesize, can bring aspects of computational thinking and collaboration to the fore. Berland
& Lee (2010) initially established the presence of several computational thinking practices
within the “vanilla,” or basic form of the game, and we developed these new modifications of the
game to differentially elicit a computational thinking practice for each. See Table 1 below for a
description of each of the modifications, the hypothesized changes to computational thinking,
and number of game runs per condition. For all conditions, all verbal interactions between
participants were recorded, transcribed, and then coded by participant by game turn (if a
participant made an utterance that matched a computational thinking code on a given turn, it was marked as occurring on that turn).

Video Summary: Coming soon

Reference:

Duncan, S. C., & Berland, M. (2012). Uncovering play through collaboration and computation in tabletop gaming. Presented at the Meaningful Play 2012, East Lansing, MI.

Link – https://meaningfulplay.msu.edu/proceedings2012/mp2012_submission_155.pdf