Why Games Fail in the Classroom

Many of us will be familiar with that feeling of looking around a table, two-thirds of the way through a game you were excited to bring to your group, and seeing the various looks of confusion, boredom, frustration and rage. Even worse than a game falling flat with a group of friends if a game failing for an entire class of students.

In this post I’m going to go through some of the reasons that a typical hobby game will bomb in the classroom – and suggest some ways you can work around this. Before we get into it, I should be up front. I think games in the classroom are awesome. I think games can be a pedagogical tool that delivers rich and powerful learning experiences for students of all ages.

However, the can also fail terribly. And in essence, it’s often because the classroom is a very different environment from a typical games night. It can be tempting to simply pick up a game and run it in your class because it feels engaging, has a relevant theme, delivers a powerful message or explores an interesting system. Unfortunately doing so can be fraught with pitfalls for the unwary.

So whether you want to bring existing games into the classroom or develop bespoke games for the classroom, here’s a quick look at some of those pitfalls you need to keep in mind. I’ll also share some of the ways you can avoid them.

Pitfall #1. Teaching time

First and foremost, before you play a game you need to teach it. ‘The teach’ is never fun, it’s often the most dreaded part of a games night – for both the teacher and the teachee! We all know that different individuals and groups have different tolerances for teaching time – some people want to be playing within five minutes, others are willing to sit through twenty minutes of rules before they get started.

The tolerance for a classroom teach is almost zero. Obviously this depends on the age and nature of your class, and the context of the game, but getting to play as quickly as possible is often of the essence. Given that students are not usually ‘choosing’ to play, combined with the oft maligned attention span of ‘kids today’, trying to get the teach down to as brief as possible is often crucial for a game succeeding in the classroom. And to be blunt, this is a reason why I simply would never try and run certain games I think would otherwise be great in the classroom – because the teach is just too involved.

 One approach that can assist with this is the ‘modelled, guided, independent’ teaching approach, With some games it is possible for you to run a turn of the game as a ‘demonstration’ where you model how it works, verbalising the process. For the next turn the students do it themselves, but with close step-by-step guidance from you. And then by the third turn they can take their turns more independently. This is useful when a game is pretty straightforward, and turns are reasonably homogenous.

For more involved games, you may want to employ a ‘rolling teach’. In essence this is ‘just in time’ rules teaching. You start by teaching only those rules that students need to get started. Then as the game progresses and they reach parts of the game that involve additional concepts, you teach the relevant rules. In this way, you can break a long teach up over lots of smaller parts, and those smaller parts only occur when they are directly relevant, so students are more likely to pay attention. This is great with complex games where you can anticipate the need for additional rules.

Pitfall #2. Competency curve

We could think about games on a spectrum in terms of their ‘competency curve’. At one end of the spectrum is a game like Snakes and Ladders. The first time you play it, you are going to be pretty much as good at that game as you will ever be. At the other end of the spectrum is something like Chess – the first time you play you will be utterly incompetent, and it will only be after many games that you build the skill required to play well. Most commercial game designers try and make their games as accessible as possible for new players, but some like Cole Werhle (Root, Pax Pamir) explicitly talk about getting better at a game being a key part of the experience. 

Each game you might introduce to the classroom will have a competence curve that sits somewhere along that spectrum. While not always a deal breaker, games with a high competence curve (more like chess) are often difficult to introduce to the classroom. The first reason is simply that being really bad at something is not usually very fun. Unless this game is something they see themselves committing to, generating enthusiasm in those early stages can be very difficult.

The second reason is that games with a high competency curve reward players who have developed the required skills. Playing chess against someone with more experience is also not fun, If there are students in the class who get more experience through more play, or who have more aptitude, this can quickly be a deterrent for other students to engage,

Having said all of that, there is obviously a huge opportunity in skill development if you can find games that are aligned with the skills you want to teach, and encourage repetitive play that builds that competency. Getting good at a game is also an excellent exercise in resilience and humility. 

It is worth mentioning that there is a category of games that are explicitly ‘one play’ games. Often puzzle games like Pandora’s Legacy or MicroMacro: Crime CIty or story games like Alice is Missing can only be played once.

Pitfall #3. Player Count

One of the most obvious challenges with introducing commercial boardgames to the classroom is player count. Most games are designed for between two and six players – and many only really play well with three to five. This means the clas can’t play them as a whole group, and you may need a lot of copies for a single classroom.

While getting multiple copies and playing in table groups or similar is the most obvious solution, you might also consider taking a team approach. Depending on the nature of the game, having a table group of students playing a single position can be a way of encouraging discussion, supporting students with less aptitude, and buiding social skills. There is a long tradition of ‘staff wargames’ being played in this way, and it is a play style that can be suitable for complex political games like Diplomacy and Twilight Struggle, for example.

Another interesting option is solo games, which can be a great classroom activity for individuals or small groups. While the cost of sourcing enough copies of a game to have one per stident can be prohibitive, there are lots of print and play options through marketplaces like the itch.io physical games category.

Pitfall #4. Inefficient Information Delivery

This less a pitfall in engaging students, rather a potential challenge for you as a teacher. Depending on your context, you may find you struggle to cover a cluttered syllabus of content within a prescribed time. The reality of engaging and thematic games is that whatever they are, they are not the most time-efficient way for delivering information. Justifying the time required to play a game of any depth in the classroom can be really difficult – and if what you need to do is tick off syllabus dotpoints it probably just isn’t the right choice.

Rather than trying to ‘fix’ this, I would suggest it is a matter of appreciating and maximising the benefit that game play can provide, beyond that information delivery. This is more likely to fit into your classroom when you can appreciate the broader learning that games facilitate. They are often interdisciplinary, and can help developing broader skills like creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration more effectively than traditional teaching methods.

Another way that the benefits of games with respect to required curriculum can be maximised is with complementary activities.  This could mean expanding on the play experience by making a map of your explorations, keeping a personal journal of in-game experience, or writing a strategy guide, for example, 

Pitfall #5. Forced play and game styles

It’s easy to forget that in most contexts, board games are an opt-in activity. We have at least some control of the style of games we play. Not all of us enjoy the same types of games. When introducing a game to a class, it’s likely that there will be some students who really like that style of game, and some who don’t. The upside is that in many instances students will see any game as an improvement of the other educational opportunities on offer, but we should still consider what we can do to increase the chance of engagement across the class.

The first obvious watchout is not playing anything too heavy or extreme. Keeping things as ‘entry level’ for whatever category you are playing can be helpful in making sure you don’t lose too many students.

Second, if you recognise that different people like different game styles you might try to have different styles of games in your classroom over time. Some collaborative, some competitive. Some crunchy euro-style and some high energy, high interaction. By mixing it up, students will know that even if the current game is not their jam they will get opportunities to try other things too.

Pitfall #6. Competitive Games and Diverse Ability Levels

Many games – particularly competitive ones – require particular capabilities in order to do well. These may be specific ways of thinking logically, negotiating, estimating probabilities and so on, depending on the nature of the game. In some instances, the purpose of the game in your classroom will be to build those skills (such as using Numbers League in a maths classroom). In other cases these skills will be less directly relevant (such as strong literacy in Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective).

The reality of these games is that less able students will do less well in these games – and consistently losing is no fun. Keeping this in mind, there are a number of ways you can manage the consideration of diverse ability levels. Collaborative games are one interesting option, where students playing a game like Pandemic are not competing, and different levels of skill become less of an issue. Playing in teams is another way of balancing out the strengths of individual students to create engaging competition. A more involved solution (but one that students will be very aware of from digital games) would be tracking performance and matching up students of similar ability levels – this is a particularly useful approach when the skill is a real focus for your class so you will already be setting it as an objective and tracking it.

Lastly, you can always select games that have a high chance component. As much as people claim to be Monopoly ‘experts’ it continues to be a popular classroom game (despite reservations people have about its quality as a game) because of the influence the luck of the dice plays.

As a huge advocate of bringing games into the classroom I don’t think any of these pitfalls are show stoppers. But I do know that having a game really work with students is going to be the biggest factor in making it easy to bring another game in – both in terms of enthusiasm from the class and confidence of the teacher. That’s why its always worth thinking about what the challenges might be, looking at how you might tweak the game to make it work better, or even looking for another game that will work better – for you, and for your students.

 Have I missed any bit pitfalls? Do you have horror stories about bringing particular games into the classroom? Or perhaps there are surefire winners you’d like to share? Let me know over on BlueSky.