On 13 of September we were joined in the Studio by Sophie Sampson to give a Lunchtime Talk about her REACT funded project Sex and History: Playing with objects. The following is an extract from the write up she posted on her website – ‘Looking at your own society from outside.’ She has kindly allowed us post an extract, but the full talk and accompanying slides can be found here.

Looking at your own society from outside

Kate and Rebecca weren’t able to attend, so this is very much a talk about the learnings from the project from a gamemaker’s point of view. I’m here with my game designer and producer hat on. I make games which do things, which prompt people to think differently or look at the world with new eyes.

You can see some of the previous projects I’ve worked on here – the threads that unite them are designing for people playing together in real life, rather than always and only looking at a screen, and a concentration on explaining history through games and game mechanics.

Our REACT funding

Kate Fisher, Rebecca Langlands and I received some money under the REACT Pump Priming fund to do a piece of R&D that extended work that Kate and Rebecca had been doing at Exeter, around framing sex and relationships education with historical erotic objects. We did some prototyping around using games and historical objects to frame PSHE lessons.

Getting to grips with PSHE

It has an odd place in the curriculum. Most of my generation got a Biology teacher showing diagrams, possibly demonstrating how to put on a condom. Also, depending on what country you were educated in, perhaps the opportunity to put questions anonymously in a box and have the teacher go through them and lead a class discussion about issues raised.

This last is an example of othering – allowing pupils to ask personal questions in a way that does not feel like it’s about them, which is key to being able to break away from the strictly factual towards a more emotionally nuanced conversation, without too much risk to the individual. Framing something about others allows pupils to be braver in their questions.

PSHE through games and objects

I met Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands through the REACT programme – they’ve been grappling with these questions through the lens of history. Their subject is historical erotic objects and the meanings modern people put on them. With their Sex and History project, they have hit on a great way of othering, which is framing PSHE lessons around historical erotic objects

We got interested in the potential of games to also do this. People lose themselves in playing, they have plausible deniability because they’re ‘just following the rules’.

Games in the classroom

Game space is one where, within limits, people divest themselves of their regular personalities – so much that is not acceptable in normal life is encouraged when playing some kind of game. Trash talking, deviousness, going all out to win, screwing over your fellow competitors entertainingly. You can get away with acting like a terrible friend when you’re playing croquet.

So, we looked at the activities they had previously tested in the Sex and History project, and with Simon Katan, we put together several prototypes which used games and objects in different ways to start the type of conversations we were looking for.

So, the games themselves. One asked the class in small groups to create ads for the objects we gave them, specifically to advertise them as if to the society they were made for. They needed to think their way into the shoes of those people, and there was a voting system which asked the groups to vote on which they thought the entire class would find most convincing.

We gave them objects like this anti-masturbation device, roman lamps and we also prototyped a card game about Chinese concubines which asked all the pupils (boys and girls) to play as concubines, trying to gain power by putting down other concubines, gathering the support of eunuchs, and scheming to get their own child elected as the next emperor.

This looked to use the game rules to model a historical society as a way of getting pupils to step outside their own world, and think about how those rules and constraints affected the decisions they were making.

Both were surrounded by discussion. For the first, we let the class introduce the objects to each other, then led a discussion about what the societies that produced those objects must have been like. For the second, we introduced the class to objects, images and testimonies from real eunuchs and concubines to bring alive the world. We showed tiny shoes for bound feet, images of some of the 19th century eunuchs serving the empress, and testimony from the last surviving court Eunuch, who remembers when there were hundreds more candidates than were able to get positions at court.

Afterwards, we again asked the pupils to discuss what seemed strange to them about that society that they’d just stepped into. Brilliantly, they themselves did a really good job of then turning the discussion around to look at what people a thousand years ago would feel about their own society, what they’d think was strange. Which is exactly what we’d hoped they would do.

Using historical objects in the classroom

Having done this piece of R&D, the conclusion I came to is actually that the game and the object are both acting in the same kind of way. Both are performing othering, leading to discussion, but in a single activity, you don’t need both at the same time. There is a problem with the objects though – they live in museum. Models have a long history in museums. Something like a quarter of what’s on display at the Natural History Museum, for example, is reproduction, reproduced well enough that the objects have the emotional charge of the real thing.

We decided to look into 3d scanning and printing and see where it might get us – the price and accessibility is coming down the whole time, and it’s an intriguing area to look at. Currently most copies of objects are made through silicon and rubber moulds. It’s inexpensive, but risks damaging fragile objects, and the fidelity isn’t great, whereas with 3d scanning you can pick up every tiny crack, chip and usage mark.

We worked with a great 3d scanning house, Sample and Hold in Hackney.

They were originally going to come with us to the museum, but it proved difficult to schedule, and we wouldn’t have been able to go back with the models and do a direct side by side comparison, so I turned to ebay. It turns out there’s is a roaring trade in historical erotic objects on ebay. Who knew?

They are often found by metal detector fans near roman military camps, because the two groups in Roman society who wore bronze phalluses around their necks are Roman soldiers and preadolescent boys. Eventually, after weeks of being sniped, I managed to buy two contrasting amulets, one Roman bronze, one Chinese and made of stearite. I took them down to Sample & Hold, and they were rendered beautifully into ones and zeros. And we made some first prototypes, to get a feel for what we could and couldn’t expect from the process. Laser-sintered bronze is now widely available, and this reproduction feels successful. The surface of the 3d printed object isn’t as beautiful, but a jeweller can cheaply patinate it with fake verdigris, and the weight and hand feel are perfect.

Was there a difference between using historical objects and using games?

In evaluation, I felt there was remarkably little difference in effect between sessions that were framed by objects, and those that were framed by a game. Both served as strong devices for othering, for triggering strong thinking about society that could be turned round to self examination without much danger of becoming too personal. In fact when the games were about the objects themselves, it felt redundant. Too much. They are both fairly powerful framing devices, and the path of objects which introduced the world of a game as real, then a session of play, felt like the right way forward.

Final Conclusions

In this short piece of R&D, we didn’t design robust, finished lessons, but the route to them is clear. The evaluations [notes in original post] clearly showed that the class surprised themselves with their level of engagement.

Not everyone spoke out in the lessons we ran, but the majority did, and the class as a whole appeared to be very engaged. The othering leading to a safe space appeared to work well – the classes discussed topics from removal of pubic hair to the stigma around pedophilia with an air of comfort, and appeared to be making new connections and thoughts around those subjects.

Much of the discussions focussed on gender and power issues as they affected the daily lives of the class, and there is clearly more to bring explore around these subjects. PSHE is especially seeking ways in to having conversations around the availability of internet porn, and this could be a way in which is much easier on pupils and teachers than most.

So what’s next?

Kate and Rebecca’s wider Sex and History project will of course continue. This particular portion clearly has further to run, and we’ll be seeking further funding to push forward to some robust, well tested game designs in the context of lessons, and do further testing within classrooms.

I’m keen to continue to explore the idea that games can help develop an understanding of distant and historical cultures. In particular how they can prompt thinking and conversation around the moral issues that making hard decisions in the course of a game raises. This piece of R&D has shown that this is effective, particularly with teenagers, and we have only scratched the surface of its possibilities so far.

 The full talk and accompanying slides can be found here.