The JCI Prison Scholars Program

Blog

  • Labyrinth Lord (Games and Game Design, 4/11/14)

    This is a bit belated, as it relates to last Friday’s class (but I thought I should write it up before I leave to teach this Friday’s class).

    Josh has already put together a nice write-up of basically what this class is on about. But he’d asked me to write up our particular experience from last week, in which I facilitated a game of Labyrinth Lord (LL). For those of you not hip to the OSR (that’s the “old school revival” for those of you not hip to it), LL is a “retro-clone” – a fan-made version of an older edition of Dungeons and Dragons made possible by the fact that you can only copyright the particular expression of a game and some proper names of things (so no beholders), but not the rules of the game. For anyone reading who is entirely unfamiliar with role-playing games (RPGs), I’m not going to try to explain them here, but you might want to check out the wikipedia entry, or Epidaiah Ravachol’s excellent micro-game, What is a Roleplaying Game?

    These older editions of D&D are long out of print, but there’s a significant constituency of players for them, motivated by some combination of nostalgia and the fact that the earlier games supported a simpler, more player-skill-focused (that is, it matters more whether you, the player, think to describe your character as twisting that strange carving gently or casually than what number is next to her “find traps” skill on her character sheet), and harder (in the sense of “your character is more likely to die”) experience than some of the newer editions.

    Anyway, for us, we wanted to use LL as a way to segue out of abstract and board games into more story-focused games (there’s a whole long argument about the line between games like D&D or LL and “story games” that, if you are likely to be at all interested, you surely already know about, but whatever). RPGs have some of their roots in wargames (like Diplomacy, which we’d already had them play), and the natural thought that it might be cool to, say, act out what that imaginary fleet commander trying to take Sevastopol is thinking about, rather than just treat it like an abstract token on the board. We decided to start with LL both because it shows its roots in these wargames relatively clearly, it’s pretty complex for folks used to simple board games but pretty simple compared to some of its RPG brethren and sistren, and it’s a clone of the version of D&D most folks of my/Josh’s generation discovered RPGs through back in the 1980s.

    The session was a bit chaotic. We had thirteen students show up. And, since they’ve run into some difficulties with playing unfamiliar games on their own during the “study halls” without an instructor present, we’ve decided to use class time to walk at least partially through games rather than just leave them to figure it out. And after all, very few of us who played RPGs learned our first one by sitting down with the massive rule-book. I know for me, I played D&D in the back of Tom Lopez’ van many times before I ever had the books on my own, and most other folks I know have similar stories of being introduced by older siblings, friends of the family, etc.

    The plan was for me to run the beginning of Dyson Logo’s fun little Goblin Gully adventure, doubling the number of creatures so that there’d be some threat to a party of thirteen characters, and with Josh acting as “caller” to try to corral everyone into having a coherent party decision. It didn’t quite work out.

    After the boring preliminaries (what do all these numbers on the sheet mean?), we went with tradition and started them in a tavern. This led into the traditional questions of “why would we go investigate this maybe monster-infested slave pit on the outskirts of town instead of continuing to drink in the tavern?” and “why is this so dumb?” So, I threw them the “there’s maybe a magic axe”rumor, and that was enough to convince most folks that they should head to the gully.

    We got about as far as the tree with the goblin guards. Under the guidance of a guy who’d played D&D before, they decided to have the thieves try to sneak up – but level 1 thieves are really pretty crummy at sneaking, so they were soon facing a bunch of arrows from goblins in the tree. One thief was immediately cut down, and the other started to run away.

    Interestingly, this caused a bit of a split in the group. Some of the guys wanted to regroup and start shooting things at whatever was in the tree shooting at them. A few decided to run away and look for another way in. One guy declared that he was going to throw his spear at the thief who was running, declaring that he was a coward, and shouldn’t have run away.

    This last was the most interesting to me – as it led to a bit of a conversation about the social contract. On the one hand, “I kill that guy” is probably pretty familiar to a lot of people who played these games when they were tweens or teenagers. It’s a pretty natural response, when you’re told that in this game you can do anything you want (that is within the reasonable fictional powers of your character), to try to push the boundaries a bit – my early D&D games were full of stupidity like “I steal from Lydia’s character,” “I kill the bartender,” and “I moon the dragon.” But the man playing the halfling who threw his spear was a bit more sophisticated than that in his motivations – he wasn’t just trolling, and he tried to make the case to the rest of the group that killing one of their mercenary band who showed cowardice in that way was the appropriate thing to do.

    I’m underselling the chaos of this session more than a bit here to pull out the interesting bit (to me) at the end, and I wouldn’t run a thirteen-player game of LL again anytime soon. It also drove home that while, historically, games like this were many current players’ introductions to the genre, they’re not maybe the easiest access point. Play did stop a few times over things like, “so, it says Paralysis/Petrification 16, and I’m a Magic-User, does that mean I can paralyze people?” But I’m hoping to, next time, use the friendly-fire demise of Mr. Hoppe’s cowardly (or perhaps merely reasonable!) thief to start conversations about social contract issues, genre expectations,  and kinds of fun – after all, if everyone knew we were playing a game about a hard-bitten mercenary band that brooks no cowardice, that could be a cool game.

     

  • Advanced Literature (8/15/14)

    Mikita Brottman writes:

     Today we read the murder scene in “Macbeth,” and I was surprised how focused the men were. Each of them was following the text closely; some of them were even running their fingers along the lines and mouthing the words to themselves silently as the readers spoke their parts. The room was unusually quiet and tense as the scene unfolded, the silence outside the room disturbed only by the occasional raised voices and laughter coming from the classroom next door. During the murder itself, the men were alarmed by Macbeth’s jittery behavior, and annoyed with him for forgetting to leave the bloody daggers in Duncan’s chamber with the grooms. As we read, I realized that, although I’d read Macbeth many times in many places with lots of different kinds of students, I’d never read it with people who might very well have experienced such a crime first hand. From this point of view, Macbeth really was making a hash of things.

  • Prison Philosophy Teaching at the Daily Nous

    The Daily Nous put up a nice discussion of teaching philosophy in prisons the other day. Drew Leder, Joshua Miller, and I were interviewed for it, in addition to some folks from other programs. All the bits except the questions to me are worth a read!

  • Game Theory and Design

    Go Board
    “Go” by Flickr user Bauke Karel

    This semester we decided to do something a bit differently. First, we decided to experiment with team teaching; it’s difficult to team teach in a university because labor requirements are usually expressed in terms of teaching load, and so there’s no good way to give credit for teaching half a class. Plus, my co-instructor, Daniel Levine, doesn’t even teach at the same institution. So we decided to team teach two classes, with him taking the lead in our course on Violence, and me taking the lead in our course in our second departure from standard coursework: a class on Games.

    The idea for the Games course, (officially Game Theory and Design) was to meld traditional games and decision theory work with actual games, and to build up to the point where the students designed their own games or created a module for games that allow that. So we started with the standard decision theories, discussed payoff matrices and various simple games, following the standard line that goes from one-off games like the prisoner’s dilemma and chicken game (we used nuclear disarmament examples) to iterated games. We also threw in a smattering of probability theory, because we wanted them to be thinking about mixed games of chance and skill fairly quickly.

    The games we played at the start were interesting but difficult: we mapped the strategies for tic-tac-toe and then introduced the game Go. The big challenges were that not everyone was getting a chance to play the games outside of class; various limitations on students access to the school (holidays, snow days, etc.) kept getting in the way. We even introduced them to Diplomacy, a fascinating semi-cooperative game that becomes quite cut-throat in the final rounds.

    In developing this course, I have a couple of ulterior motives: I wanted to make sure we worked through Eleanor Ostrom’s institutional analysis and design account of rules, norms, and strategies. I find this work (and Christina Bicchieri’s “grammar of society”) quite useful for giving nuanced game theoretic accounts of thing we don’t think of as games, including things like nuclear arms races and disarmament where we seem not to be wholly motivated by competitive impulses. Forbidden Island gave the students a taste of how one might design a game that is both challenging and wholly cooperative; and this, in turn, suggests that the rules themselves might have a lot to do with the competitive element in our lives and society.

    Another of the big departures from a standard game theory course as it might be taught in an economics department was our desire to play lots of games, and a transition we are beginning to make into non-standard games that focus on storytelling and role-playing. The stereotypical example of such games is Dungeons and Dragons (and we last week we introduced a free clone of the original D&D called Labyrinth Lord.) But our goal is to transcend the standard fare pretty quickly and move into games that are less about dice and probabilities and more about storytelling. A great example of this is the game Fiasco; a story-telling game that gives each player an opportunity to create and act out a role in a Cohen brothers film, “ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control.” This is a game almost wholly divorced from victory and defeat. Defeat is guaranteed, really: the goal is to tell a great story along the way. Designing “playsets” or scenarios for Fiasco is one of my dream goals for the students: these merely set the stage for others to imagine their own tragicomic stories.

    One big impediment is that while the prison allows prisoners to own Xboxes and playing cards, they do not allow dice. The fear is that the dice might be used for gambling, I believe. So we have to constantly develop techniques for introducing the unexpected and random into our games. This has already led to some interesting experiments and techniques. (Why don’t people gamble on Rock-Paper-Scissors, anyway?)

    Anyway, thanks for the support! I’ll have more to say about the course next month as we see how new games strike the fancies of our students!

  • Reflections on Forbidden Island from one of our Games and Game Theory Students

    I’m still working on putting together my thoughts on Friday’s class and our chaotic game of Labyrinth Lord, but in the meanwhile, here are some thoughts from one of our students, L.B. (posted with his permission; I am transcribing this from his paper, so any typos are probably mine):

    It was very interesting from a sociological point of view when a group of us played Forbidden Island. Once the rules were explained, the confusion began. One man assumed a leadership role. He was directing the play of everyone else. In the beginning, the individual players permitted this guidance. However, the two men who explained the rules and refereed the play repeatedly intervened with their leadership, when questions arose or an air of confusion permeated the table.

    Finally, when the majority of players grasped the rules individuals assumed responsibility for their turn and the game proceeded rather smoothly. It was intriguing to see how well the men played when someone needed protection. The conversation took on an air of empathy for someone who could be taken off the board and everyone spoke on how best to save said player.

    Such cooperation was eventful in a prison atmosphere. The men shared a common thread of cooperation in order to win the game. Initially the man who assumed the leadership position easily surrendered his self-appointed role in favor of the group dynamic of mutually shared cooperation among all.

    It was with a shout of jubilation when everyone showed each individual player how to move toward the helicopter pad in order to fly off the island. The game was won and smiles and pats on the back were shared.

    I marveled at this game for the group dynamic that was quickly created and could see how much fun the group experienced. It would have been interesting to see how quickly such frivolity would evaporate into consternation if a player had assumed a role to sabotage play to lose the game. I can only surmise that the culprit would have been castigated with rude comments and other players would have been reluctant in the future to play with such a libertine.

    I would give Forbidden Island four out of five stars as a rating. I would have enjoyed playing this game as a child, as it would have helped to foster a cooperative approach to handling problems as they arose later in life instead of the me against the world approach that so many youth of my generation (Baby Boomers of the early 1950s) were taught in the games – win at any cost.

  • Advanced Literature (4/8/14)

    Mikita Brottman writes:

    In Advanced Literature (Tuesday 2-4pm) we watched Acts IV and V of Polanski’s adaptation of “Macbeth”. When watching the first three acts a week earlier, I’d been surprised the men had found the movie rather dull and slow. This may have been due to the fact that we were watching on a very small screen with the lights on, the door open and noises in the hallway outside, but it may also have been, as one of the men explained, they’re accustomed to watching action movies with fast editing and not much dialogue. Plus, since we’ve been reading the play for the last five weeks, everyone was familiar with the plot and knew what was going to happen. However, this week the men seemed far more engaged and involved, and after the movie was over we had a long discussion about the ethics of fighting a losing battle, as Macbeth does at the end, and about whether Macduff does the right thing in leaving his wife and children to go and defend his country.

  • Patronage!

    We are very excited to be able to launch our first crowdfunding effort, a Patreon campaign. Patreon allows people to donate a small amount each month to our work – which, for a project that has a steady drip-drip of costs to our instructors, is a perfect model. If you are interested in our work, please consider donating, even $1/month.

    We have also gotten our very first backer, Misha Bushyeager! Which means she gets pride of place on our new supporters page. I would hate to see her lonely there. Just saying.

  • New Book By a Student

    One of our long-time students, Lakhem Ra-Sebek, has a new book out (he’s now one book ahead of me; I’ll have to catch up). It’s a collection of poetry, called From the Pages of a Bleeding Heart.

    I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but Mr. Ra-Sebek has been part of the program for years (much longer than I have), and is always an active and valued participant in our discussions. If you’d like to see what some of our students can create, check it out.

  • Spring Cleaning!

    As you may have noticed, the website hasn’t been updated in a while. But, that doesn’t mean that the program has not been active – quite the opposite! We taught a number of classes in the Fall of 2013, and we’re now gearing up for Spring 2014. You can see what we’re doing over at the current courses page.

    We have a number of nifty new things we’re hoping to be able to tell you about soon as well. I’m recommitting to making sure that what we’re doing gets recorded on this website, and we’re asking our instructors to start posting updates and reflections on how their classes are going so that people can get a better sense of what it’s like to do this work. So, though it has not been worth your while before, watch this space!

  • Renaissanz Rzen’s Website

    Our talented cover photo artist, Renaissanz Ren, now has his own website. Check it out for more of his art.