June 1, practitioners and researchers from research institutes, universities and cultural industries gathered for a ‘Gaming, Conflict and Asia’ workshop held on Duke Kunshan University campus. The workshop featured discussions on innovations in gaming and pedagogy, and gamification’s role in helping students develop empathy and understand political and cultural conflicts.
‘What’s great about this workshop is that we are bringing together people from different disciplines – from the medical field, business schools, to artists, game designers, historians, and other academics. And we are all concerned about how to improve the way of communicating with our students and our communities in a more engaging way,’ said Nayoung Aimee Kwon, associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and organizer of this workshop. ‘It’s very exciting to think about how gamification is being addressed or experimented with in all those disciplines.’
Rachel Chen, gamification facilitator from Let’s Shine Culture & Creative provided a detailed introduction to how board games can help kindergarten and elementary school-age kids develop financial awareness, entrepreneurship and mathematical thinking. She noted that even among children as young as 9 years old or below, family backgrounds can play a role in shaping their play. ‘Different backgrounds can lead to very different patterns of behavior in game.’
The rise of gamification in education is certainly not restricted to K-12 settings. At the other end of the gaming spectrum, professors from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Renmin University of China presented on how adults can benefit from more sophisticated ‘games’. Professor Erhua Zhou and Haijun Wang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology shared their experiences of engaging college students in learning activities with game-based pedagogical approaches, while Dr. Chunning Guo from Renmin University of China talked about generative art and re-evolution of games.
Researchers from the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) delivered a presentation on the role-playing games they designed to help students develop empathy, understand cultural or political conflicts as well as build self-awareness. ‘Games can help students realize that people from a different cultural background can be forced to do something against their will under social pressure,’ said Jeremy Falger, serious games consultant at TNO. Later, students from Prof. Kwon’s class ‘Interethnic Intimacies’, who participated in the ‘comfort women’ role-playing game, reflected on what they learned about the Korea-Japan comfort women historical conflict through the perspectives of ‘Korean comfort women’ and ‘Japanese bureaucrats’.
