I play games, and I use games in teaching.
I’ve played wargames since I was 13 – starting with the Bruce Quarrie Napoleanic Rules, and going through years of the SPI hex map and counter games – Constantinople, Crusades, Terrible Swift Sword and more. In college, I fell into bad company and took up Dungeons and Dragons, and played a variety of roleplaying games, as well as being one of the founders of WARPS and of WARPCON at UCC.
I have a fair few old computer wargames lying around, but never found them very satisfactory since most of the game mechanisms are buried in the code – I like to see how the rules have been constructed and what assumptions the designer made in putting the game together. I do like cyberboard, since it allows me to play old cardboard counter wargmaes on the PC without having to worry about cats walking all over the mapsheets.
I played Diplomacy face-to-face in WARPS, and online at dpjudge and now on stabberfou.org where I am part of Team Ireland in the Diplomacy National World Championships.
I use simulations and games in teaching. I am happy to sacrifice breadth of coverage in a course in order to use simulations to achieve a greater depth of understanding. It is one thing to feed information at people, or accept passively working through a reading list. Requiring students to step up to the plate and make decisions based on incomplete information demands deeper understanding. Even wih fairly complete information and a very simple set of rules, in a simple game like Drive on Metz, most students have hard time coming up with a concept of operations and applying it through a half dozen moves. In my International Organisations courses, requiring students to participate in a Model UN simulation demands a greater degree of historical understanding, an ability to try and walk a mile in the shoes of a diplomat representing point of view which is often very far removed from our own.
Simulations and games in teaching foster understanding, co-operation, communication skills and creativity. Using simulations in teaching is always a bit nervous – you never quite know how it will go, and it does mean sacrificing some of the control and security of a conventional lecture. While some teaching games haven’t worked out as planned, they have all in the end been a better use of class time than ‘old fashioned’ lecturing.
I have several publications, mostly conference papers, in this on my publications page. The most recent material there are two items from my Paper at ISSOTL09 in October 2009 – a video (28mb) and a pdf of the slides (6mb). The slides are not visible on the video because of the camera angle. The ‘camera’ was, as usual, my current mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson K770i which provides adequate recording of lectures. There a slide on the end that I did not get to since I was running over time.