A look into the Political Studies Department’s country simulation and empathy boardgame classes, and how students learn from blending theory and practice

Political Studies 261: Global Politics

In POLS 261: Global Politics, students fight it out in a UN model-style online game called the Statecraft Simulation. Students are first asked to fill out a foreign policy aptitude test to group like-minded students, and these groups are assigned to one of 12 countries on a map and made to choose their government and country types from a list of pre-made options. 

Students elect a president, a United Nations representative, and other government roles, and choose any country type from a Scientific Pacifist Democracy to a Military Industrial Communist Totalitarian state. The rest of the game involves students taking turns trading, building structures and sometimes going to war against each other.

Gaal, who has been teaching the simulation class for the last five years, explains that the idea for an interactive simulation came out of a need to bridge theory and practice. 

“Students would [often] ask, ‘Well, we know that war is bad, so why don’t we stop shooting each other?’ Or they would say, ‘We understand that we should stop nuclear proliferation, so why aren’t we?’ People weren’t understanding the dilemmas that decision makers face.”

Gaal explains that the map is a blank slate, meaning that “the world can be the thing they say they want, [like] a Marxist utopia [where] everybody shares and everybody solves problems collectively. There can be no violence. Or they can develop nuclear weapons and kill each other. What tends to happen is that many people start off either center or center left, but they don’t realize the difficulty of achieving the change they want [or] the difficulty decision makers face.”

Both participation and how well a country performs in the simulation, determined by the amount of goals they win and their country’s quality of life score, are graded. With typically 12 countries participating and around nine to 10 competitive goals, not every country will win a goal. The ‘winner’ of the simulation is the country with the most competitive goals and quality of life score.

Gaal says that the scarcity in the simulation “creates a lot of tension, and it’s the best way I’ve found for students to experience the tension that decision makers have between acting on the interests of their own citizens and acting on their ethical, moral or collective good.”

When asked if Gaal had noticed a shift in simulation strategy over the years, he points to a few factors that may have influenced students’ decision-making. “I do note that the external context of politics influences how students play it. As we’ve seen the rise of Trump [and] more authoritarian states [like] Russia or China, I have seen an increase in the number of states choosing militaristic options and negotiating in a more authoritarian way, where at the beginning there was more emphasis on shared decision-making and reaching equitable outcomes. It tends to break down because people compete for those grades, but I have seen a turn towards it being a little harsher, a little more authoritarian, a little more privilege in the military over economic development.”

Gaal also says that students from previous years have been acting as information resources for current players. “There’s this ‘this is what you need to do to win’ kind of thing being passed on from year to year. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. In some ways, it actually represents liberal theory in global politics, where life is an iterated game, where we’re learning from each round of interaction. But it’s also leaving some at a disadvantage because some don’t come in with that [knowledge].” 

To break that cycle, Gaal is looking at running two different simulations to counteract students’ metagaming between successive classes.

Although metagaming may give a country a leg up, perhaps the real mark of a successful simulation is about team makeup. “One of the biggest transferable skills out of the simulation is how you work together as a team. There’s usually a dominant person that takes the lead, [since] you have to elect a president. I tell all the students at the very beginning [that] a good president doesn’t do much. A good president delegates [their] job to keep everybody involved and make sure everybody has something to do … Nine times out of 10, when you have a dominant person, they take over everything. So this is [also] something for them to learn [because] it doesn’t end well. You can impeach your leader, and it’s happened, and when it happens, people are disgruntled. The question I [always] ask is ‘Well, if they impeached you, it meant you weren’t working with them because you either weren’t listening or you ignored them or you cut them out somehow, so this is something you have to learn from.’”

No matter what happens in the simulation, Gaal says, “I’m not so concerned with what they do in the sim, [but] what they learned from it. Why did that happen? How could it be avoided? In whose interest was it?  In whose interest was it against? … We try to combine learning from the game and the lectures through our weekly memos, [where] each country has to answer questions that relate to what happened in the sim [by] using the material we learned in the lecture.”

A previous year’s winner, Federico Szechtman Pintos, is now a graduate student in political studies at USask. Szechtman Pintos explains that in his view, there are two main types of players in the simulation: those who treat it like a regular class and those who are fully dedicated to winning. “There are people who spend upwards [of] 30 hours a week on the sim, and there’s probably just two to five students each sim who do that max. And that makes it so people who think they’re playing the sim are not really. There [are] different levels [to playing the sim].”

He continues, “The sim starts, and you have all sorts of ideas about how [you’re] gonna win. And then it turns out there [are] people who will literally make it their entire life. They’ll do worse in other classes. For the sake of the sim, they’ll meet daily with all sorts of different countries. They’ll communicate on Discord, on all sorts of social media [and] have each other’s numbers.”

During his simulation, he says, “I had [a group member] following this team in the library because I knew they were meeting at a particular time. She started taking pictures [of their screens] because they were logged on to the big TVs in the [study] rooms.”

When asked what his thoughts on metagaming in the simulation were, Szechtman Pintos replied that “I think that it’s a part of the game because it [simulates] real-world corruption … Even in the real world, it’s just a point system. You either get the highest [or you lose].”

Although some students would disagree, Szechtman Pintos said he would be interested in taking the simulation again. “I want to see what it’s like when every single member of the sim is also equally invested, so some sort of super sim where universities can compete against universities, and it’s only the winning team of that particular year or all presidents of former sims, because those [people] tend to put the most time in. And then [seeing] how they’re able to work together, because that might break down.”

Political Studies 201: Global Citizenship

The other interactive learning class that Gaal teaches is POLS 201: Global Citizenship. In this class, students are tasked with creating empathy board games that typically focus on the experience of a marginalized group in society.

Gaal explains that “POLS 261 is doing, because they’re having to do global politics. And POLS 201 is teaching. Global Citizenship is about questions of to what degree do we owe others outside of our in-group, whether that be a church, province, country, ethnicity. [Essentially,] what rights and responsibilities do we have to others?”

Gaal says that “The board games the students make identify a marginalized group or an issue that we need to build empathy towards, and then they have to find a mechanism to do it. Some mechanisms are super simple — there [was] a great one last year, which was a Snakes and Ladders type game for irregular migrants trying to get into the United States. At the bottom, it had the Rio Grande, [where] you had to roll doubles to get across, and then you get a bit further, and there’s a border wall where ICE and other patriot groups are trying to get you … Then you also have cards that determine who your character is. If you’re a character that is in a more marginalized position, say a single mother with three kids trying to make it, your dice only has numbers one to three, but if you are, say, a young 19 year old fit male trying to make it for a job they already have set up for [you] in Chicago, then you have one to six.”

“All the games should be to some degree frustrating,” Gaal continues. “They’re intended for you to learn the experience of these people that you think are important to learn [about].”

Gaal finds that a diverse range of student perspectives adds nuance and depth to the board games. “We get a significant number of international students in 201, so what I found really fascinating is many of them have brought their story into [the] game. We had a student from Sudan who was talking about the plight of workers who were trying to get away from militant groups and [had] to survive. We had a student from Nigeria, we’ve had a student from Ukraine, we’ve had students from different places, and they help bring the context in. That’s been really interesting [because] it wasn’t just teaching, but it was kind of [a] personal reflection that’s come into the games as well.”

“The one thing we always have to be careful with the empathy gaming,” Gaal adds, “is that we don’t stereotype marginalized [peoples] … There’s always going to be an element of that, because a game has to be a simplification of the world, but we ask them to come up with as much detail and context [as they can].”

Interactive Learning 

Gaal’s favourite parts of running active learning classes are twofold: “I love watching the learning process through the sim. [It’s] where do people start? How do they change, and why do they do that? … And then I like the output of learning. I like having conversations with students after the class. They understand the world better, and they’re able to act on it better. My default position for everything I do is that I want students to have agency in their own lives and in our collective reality for change, because there [are] a lot of changes that need to happen.”

“This probably won’t sound good, [but] I love to see students struggle, because learning is struggling,” Gaal adds. “Whether it be my POLS 112 class, where I tell my class every week you should be frustrated because justice isn’t simple, [POLS] 261 when they’re worried about positionality or equity or power differentials … [or POLS] 201, there’s a lot of things in the world we need to fix and we need to be involved with, and the first step of that is understanding it and having empathy for those that are facing these problems. [It’s about asking] what are we going to do about it, individually and collectively? That’s what I love about it — it’s not just [a] one-way regurgitation of information. It’s about learning, doing, reflecting and hopefully growing.”

Students interested in running the gauntlet of Gaal’s statecraft or board game classes can check the course catalogue for when POLS 261 and POLS 201 become available. Typically each class runs once a year or once every two years.