The potential for the use of games is completely on Realize at the moment. We are just scratching the surface some Skeptics, but game playing and game making was serious business to a group of Macalester College students during the 5-week winter interim session several students met with Professor Raymond Michaelson to learn such games as clue Monopoly saree seduction in Battleship and then taking into account the complexity of play the skill required and the entertainment and educational value proceeded to invent their own games student. Anita McCoy was part of a team that developed the game called Underground Railroad Casey Smythe with other students invented a board game called sheepskin and teacher Michaelson thought the whole experience was well worth whileDid you learn about yourself from this adventure in game in game playing in game inventing? I would say. That I learned that I can be creative. I never thought that I was type of person that could even you know began to invent a game and actually think of rules and then work it out in and see what was wrong. I just some well I'm more Lessa factual for the person and I think it did me a lot of good because I really enjoy doing this you know it when I first went to the course, I was dreading the time has come for me to have to sit down and think about inventing a game but when I started it, I really enjoyed it and I guess it is stimulated my thinking process in a creative thinking process, of course in the strategy of game-playing I really didn't have that much exposure to Gainesville for I took this course, but also it made me sort of look at things. Deeper to see what they are. Like does this game actually simulate life and if it if so how well does it do it? You know, you know, it makes me look Beyond The Superficial aspects of a game. Well this game we named it escaped is a simulation of the Underground Railroad and the original reason why we thought of this game was it will all three of us who invented the game our education majors and some kind of court and we just thought that we would pick something. Out of the history books that only got a small one or two lines and then we make it into a educational sort of game so that even though you never really read into death about the Underground Railroad. If you play this game something had to stick in your mind game simulating Life, what are the general conclusions of of this group on that subject talked about that a bit the last day of class and of course we limited ourselves to games that we thought ahead of time did simulate human activities most of them rather. The question of what makes a good game is it is along these lines and one of the elements in a good game is competition. And if you start thinking about life the people who get ahead are the competitive kinds of people Apparently one of the students in the class made the observation that if you have a winner someone has to lose and In a sense, I guess life is that way there are interesting questions one can make is it necessary for example to have games in such a way that in order to have a winner someone must lose and you can ask the same question about Society. Is it possible to set up a society where everyone wins so to speak whatever over 100 you find that term when and there were some students who were considered the possibility of trying to invent games that didn't have losers. But apparently it's not an easy thing to do and that it maybe is not easy to have ordinary human interactions in what we call Life work that way either. Someone always wants to be that the biggest winner even if they aren't losers. Also, it's interesting to look at and see how games reflect their cultures that would be like an interesting answer for logical study to study a culture about a by just looking at its games and one of the other students brought this up saying how the games we play pretend to reflect the uglier aspects of our culture. Like Monopoly is this dog-eat-dog real estate business a clue about a murder. Without the war games are you know things like this, you know, just sort of you look at this and just wonder about the the people who play these games. Have you played any games? I've been playing games for the past. I guess it's about the past three or four weekends now and all we've even gone out and bought another chain. So we we really struck up an interesting and now we we do we look deeper into the game before we play them that we don't buy them so much for entertainment as we did before about you. Have you been playing any games? Yeah, I've been playing some but they aren't necessarily simulation game site. I did like I did get into playing games in the class for the fun of it to there is one game that sort of a simulation game of a friend owns it it's called life cheat and steal. It's about politics and I enjoy playing that a lot and you know, some of the games are fantasy like Monopoly it came out during the Depression so people could not do so, they wouldn't dwell on their poverty, you know, and people still like to play games for this so they can you no feel like for a moment that they have all this power and all this welding though. They don't really happen in real life. Most people don't tend not to look at games for their educational value when I was home for like Christmas vacation and I tell people what my interim is going to be there a table. This is a college course, you know that sort of thing, but you really can learn an awful lot from playing games are some games that are just made for their educational value. I had one in Highschool of the simulated International diplomacy. You can really learn an awful lot about like wider situations. There are games that approximates simulations very well. We did take out. Or two at the from time to time during the course to take up games of a certain sort. For example, one day we had a war game tutorial. Where are the roughly a third of the class members who had played war games like Gettysburg Napoleon at Waterloo and so forth played tutors and taught the other people the basics of playing these so-called War Games is my understanding is that much more advanced versions of these war games are being used by the military quite commonly or in the military academies and so forth. I think it's important for an ordinary individual to have a feeling for what a war game is. Another interesting interesting thing about the war games is that I discovered when I first became acquainted with the Napoleon at Waterloo or Napoleon's battle at borodino that I was somehow driven in turn the light to go off and read about how did Napoleon get into those situations and What year did it happen even something that symbolize something I suppose I should have learned in the 10th grade but have long forgotten. I imagine using well-constructed games can tell us a lot about ourselves games and Innovative course offered at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota a class that teaches about life as well as games. This is Connie Goldman.