‘Thinking Through’ Games in the Classroom: Using Discursive Game Design to Play and Engage with Historical Datasets

In this contribution, we outline Discursive Game Design (DGD)
as a practice-based educational framework, explain how to use
this design framework to teach game historiography, and report
on findings from a series of in-class experiments. Using Nandeck,
a freely available software tool for card game prototyping, we
created sets of playing cards based on two game-historical
datasets. Students were then asked to prototype simple games with
these card decks; both playtesting and co-creating each other’s games in an ongoing quasi-conversational process between
different student groups fostered discussions on, and produced
alternative insights into, the complex notion of (Dutch) game
history, canonization/selection and games as national cultural
heritage. The article shows how DGD can be implemented to allow
for students with little or no design background to actively ‘think
through’ games about the subject matter at hand.