Photo top: Terrell Page leans into the structure of video games to teach students about writing through world-building.

Honors College Fellow Terrell Page began handing out paper and colored pencils during his workshop on using world-building techniques in the classroom and noticed the audience’s energy change. Attendees at Serious Play—an international conference on using video games in education, psychology and other fields—started to perk up in their seats, excited to do the exercise.

Page leads conference attendees through a collaborative world-building exercise at the Serious Play Conference.

“Some attendees told me that they’d gone to this conference for years but had never seen anything like that,” Page recalled. An honors English education major from Magnolia, Arkansas, he was the only undergraduate speaker out of more than 100 presenters from the game design world. His workshop was later featured on Tabletop News, a news outlet highlighting tabletop games.

Page’s presentation provided an overview of his honors thesis on applying game-based learning techniques in a classroom setting. By incorporating game characteristics into educational activities, these strategies aim to boost student engagement and critical thinking. Collaborative worldbuilding is one game-based learning method inspired by video games and tabletop roleplaying like Dungeons & Dragons, where contributors actively work together to design a sprawling yet cohesive fictional world.

Page taught a three-week unit in a creative writing class at Fayetteville High School where collaborative worldbuilding became the basis for crafting short stories. He walked the students through the initial stages of imagining their worlds and considering what potential backstories might impact the present setting. Groups then mapped out physical points of interest for their worlds using sticky notes and poster paper.

With the world established, he taught the class how to think like game designers plotting out how players might interact with the world and its limitations. From here, students began writing stories following the characters they created.

Throughout the unit, he noticed students came to understand the key role of place in effective storytelling.

“They learned that it’s important to know your world, your setting, really well, even if you don’t tell all the details to the reader,” he said. “That makes things more believable. And that was the end goal— how to solidify their setting in writing.”

David Fredrick, an associate professor of classical studies and director of the Tesseract Center for Immersive Environments and Game Design who served as Page’s thesis advisor, highlighted how the unit taught the class how to write more immersive narratives.

“This opened up a whole new world for these students, as they realized you can create and write non-linear stories that have structure and meaning, like video games,” Fredrick explained.

Page emphasized that these game-based learning approaches often help engage students who might otherwise not be engaged in the material. The approach can also boost the comprehension of the whole class. The success of lessons, however, can be impacted by an instructor’s own familiarity with games.

“Many times, you’ll have a teacher who tries to jump on the game-based learning bandwagon, and the students who normally don’t pay attention in class perk up, but then the teacher can ruin it if they don’t know anything about games,” Page asserted, adding that this might cause these students to tune out even further. 

While already a gaming enthusiast, Page spent time researching different game genres to offer the class an informed experience. He found it valuable to know students’ gaming backgrounds and met with them in groups to learn more about games from them.

“One group decided that they wanted their world to have crafting, and I had never played Minecraft at this point,” he recalled. “I told them I would give myself homework: I’m going to go play Minecraft and then I’ll come back to you.” For Page, having this hands-on experience with the games offered a new angle for planning lessons.

The unit was a hit with the students. Amy Matthews, the English and creative writing teacher at Fayetteville High School whose class Page worked with, noted the popularity of his lessons.

“My creative writing students loved working with Mr. Page,” she said. “Many of my students said it was one of their favorite projects of the year.”

Page found it rewarding to later present this classroom experience at Serious Play surrounded by game design and education professionals. While game-based learning might get minimal coverage at other education conferences, it was the focus for all attending.

Hosted in Toronto, Canada, the conference also made Page consider the attitudes around education in the United States compared to other countries.

“Game-based learning, just mentioning using a game in the classroom, [can be] controversial in the United States—because it’s play,” Page explained. “Some of the games [at Serious Play] were city builder games talking about climate change or a visual novel about a refugee’s journey from the Middle East to Europe. I remember thinking, ‘I wish we had that, but it’s not going to work here.”’

To Fredrick, the impact of Page’s project and experience as a presenter highlights the need to promote game-based learning on campus.

“Students like Terrell are the reason why we need a game design major at the University of Arkansas, with one foot in STEM and the other in the humanities: storytelling, art, music, language learning,” he asserted. “With a game design major, we would unlock so much collaborative potential for our students, across many disciplines.”

Ultimately, the experience strengthened Page’s resolve to pursue research into game-based education. Collaborative worldbuilding proved to be a valuable learning opportunity despite logistical limitations and skeptical attitudes.

“Collaborative worldbuilding is something you can do when you don’t have access to videogames in the classroom,” he explained. “It’s creative writing, worldbuilding … and we’re collaborating which is what most teaching education discourse is [moving] towards. It [has] that in the name.”

Page led creative writing students through mapping out physical points of interest for their worlds using sticky notes and poster paper.