June 13, 2024

"Contra" vs. "Rogue" and How an Old Gaming Beef Might Shed Light on How Educators Hold EdTech To Task

There has been some buzz surrounding the potential for EdTech to transform learning through gamification. It makes sense, and I greatly value games in learning. Nearly all of my students enjoy video games, and if more traditional schooling can’t compete with gaming, perhaps schools should adapt gamification to improve engagement. But if we are going to do this, I thought it might be worthwhile asking ourselves what further gamification of learning might look like with advances in GenAI.
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One of my favorite video game experiences as a kid was beating the Nintendo game "Contra." Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, select, start. Code inputted, I was now in side-scrolling, level-clearing, alien-killing bliss. With a friend, we would do what we could never dream of doing with our measly three little lives…we would beat the game. Our engagement was held by the novelty of experiencing each new level and its respective boss. That took us all the way to the end where we got to experience the euphoria of taking down the big boss, which would cue a pixelated explosion and a triumphant chiptune melody.

Once we’d beaten the game, though, it never really occurred to us to try to do it with only three lives. That was well outside the zone of proximal development for me and my friends–cue the Luke Skywalker “That’s impossible” meme. And besides, we’d already seen what happened at the end, so there was nothing really to engage with unless you were into looking for Easter Eggs, which we weren’t. For us, the objective was to keep scrolling to the right until there was no more scrolling to do. As there was nothing more novel to experience, our engagement was sapped, we got bored, and we moved on.
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Now compare that experience to the PC game "Rogue," a dungeon crawler that randomizes resources and challenges. When you die, you go back to the beginning, armed with the experience that you will have to apply to novel circumstances. The game has a cult appeal that spawned the creation of various other games, where the player’s avatar is re-skilled and retooled for adventures they failed at and get to return to as a stronger version of themselves. The objective is still to complete the game, but there is re-playability because the player’s evolving skills are applied and adapt to changing circumstances. As novelty is retained and there are multiple pathways to achieving the goal, engagement remains. You eventually get bored of the parameters that the game allows for, but the experience is arguably more robust. ​

I mention both of these games because in the GenAI age, Edtech is repeatedly offering promises of gamification that would “personalize” learning. I sat in a presentation the other day where the speaker repeatedly quoted John Dewey’s constructivist, Rogue-like, model of education while pointing to a linear, side-scrolling, articulation of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

In my early explorations of personalized learning, there was a clear distinction between personalized learning and individualized learning. Individualization meant the student went at their own pace through a fixed path towards a fixed end. Personalization was something different. It could encompass an individualized approach at times, but the purpose was to have students construct their own paths and meaning towards a combination of external and personal objectives. Though not a perfect analogy, individualization is to "Contra" what personalization is to "Rogue." But in the branding and marketing of Edtech services, these terms are repeatedly being conflated.

Rogue and what was Rogue-like went through similar conflations, and the disagreements came to a head at a Berlin Conference in 2008 where they hammered out 15 aspects consistent with Rogue-like games. While that might seem like a trite point of comparison and a needless pursuit of purism, what you had was a group of gamers who had experienced something different, and they wanted to push others to build in that vein. When games compromised those aspects but still called themselves Rogue-like, they corrupted that pursuit, thereby corrupting the sensibilities of the users. For such sins committed after that conference, falling even one aspect short of the requisite core led your game to be labeled Rogue-lite.

With this in mind, which of the two game models above would best serve the needs of our students in today’s world, and which one are Edtech companies currently offering us? It’s primarily individualized, which is fine, but they are marketing them as personalized, which is not. Perhaps education is in need of its own Berlin conference so as to clearly define what is meant when the word “personalized” gets brandished. If that happened, I wonder what kinds of products and services we might have at our disposal, particularly if they were seeking to avoid the ignominious labels of “Personalized-lite” or “Individualized”?

Imagine the EdTech version of "Rogue," where students mapped out their own goals, leveled up on formalized side quests, collaborated with others, failed, regrouped, retooled, re-skilled, tried again...perhaps choosing to alter the path and/or objective they’d originally set out upon. Now imagine the Edtech version of "Contra," side-scrolling to a fixed end but getting the help you need along the way. Both have their place, but clearly they are not the same.

Regardless of what EdTech offers us, it will be up to teachers and administrators to build systems that can responsibly incorporate what is currently available and what will become increasingly available soon. We need to explore and better understand the capabilities of this technology, and we need to think about what it is that we want for our students. Individualization has its place, but personalization is the gold standard, and we need to know and recognize that distinction.


Next Time:
In next week’s piece, the final one before the summer break, I will show some of the benefits that the latter has had on my students and how thoughtful incorporation of GenAI into a personalized learning structure can potentially take them even further.