Games + Learning + Society Conference Proceedings

To support business, health professions, and social work students develop certain habits of mind, including incorporating data in their arguments, identifying agendas that may be behind seemingly objective arguments, and considering ethical quantitative communication, we developed a role-playing game built around a budget crisis at a rural health clinic. In the game, students take on roles described in character sheets, each with their own victory conditions. Characters are grouped in teams, or “factions,” with faction-level victory conditions. As a class, the students must solve the budget crisis by finding appropriate cuts to make. In their factions, students develop arguments to make cuts that support their victory conditions. They present their arguments to the class, and students vote on budget proposals. The game is used to introduce a quantitative reasoning course that was designed by an interdisciplinary team for students in service-oriented majors.