Canvas has a badge feature. If I want to, I can open the settings for a course, attach a requirement to a module, and have the system hand out a small image to anyone who finishes it. The work does not change. The reading is the same reading, the quiz is the same quiz, and at the end a graphic shows up next to a name in a table that mostly only the instructor looks at. I have set this up for people. They ask because participation is thin and the platform offers a lever conveniently labeled engagement, and I am the person who knows where the setting lives.

That arrangement gets called game-based learning often enough that the phrase has stopped meaning much. Points, streaks, progress bars, leaderboards, all of it layered on top of instruction that was designed without any of it in mind. Nothing about the underlying experience is playful. The scoring is just more visible. I do not think the people asking for badges are wrong to want something better than what they have, and I want to be careful not to treat that request as naive. The problem is that the thing they are being handed is a reporting layer wearing the costume of a game.

What a mechanic can actually do

The game that reset my sense of the difference is Dread, a horror tabletop roleplaying game that replaces dice with a Jenga tower. When your character attempts something risky, you pull a block. If the tower falls, your character is out of the story. There are no rules for fear, no tension track, no atmosphere stat. The dread in the room comes from the fact that everyone at the table can see the tower getting worse, and from the small physical hesitation before someone reaches for a block they know is load-bearing.

One well-chosen mechanic carries the entire emotional experience. That is the part I keep coming back to, because it runs directly against how instructional design usually handles affect. In our field, when we want learners to feel urgency or investment or discomfort, we tend to write about it. We put it in the framing, the scenario narration, the facilitator notes. Dread does not describe fear to anyone. It builds a situation where fear is the reasonable response and then gets out of the way.

That principle is not new to me from games. It lines up with Koichi Kawana’s idea of maximum effect with minimum means, which has shaped how I think about learning design for years. What games gave me was a working example of the principle applied to feeling rather than to interface.

Games as design problems at scale

Magic: The Gathering has occupied most of my recent design attention, and not for its story. What interests me is that it is a design problem being solved continuously, in public, for thirty years, under commercial pressure. The color pie functions as a constraint system that tells designers what a card is allowed to do based on what color it is, which sounds arbitrary until you notice that the constraint is what keeps the game from collapsing into a single optimal strategy. That collapse is the risk sometimes described as the queen problem, where one option is so flexible and so strong that everything else becomes a worse version of it. Anyone who has watched a district adopt a platform that technically does everything, and then watched every other practice get quietly reshaped to fit it, will recognize the shape of that problem outside of games.

The other Magic idea I find useful is the cube. A cube is a curated subset of cards that a group builds themselves, which creates a play environment inside the larger game with its own logic and its own balance. The design work happens at the level of the environment rather than the individual move. That is closer to what I actually do when I configure a course shell or build a template set than any instructional design model I was taught.

I should say plainly that I am borrowing here. Magic is designed for a commercial trading card economy, and its constraints exist for reasons that have nothing to do with learning. The parallels are analogical, and they stop being useful the moment I start treating them as evidence.

What I have been playing

I have been a player my whole life and still am, across tabletop roleplaying, board and card games, and console and PC titles. When something hooks me it is almost always through story and world rather than mechanical mastery, and I am not particularly competitive about any of it. On the video game side I gravitate toward smaller independent releases that take a risk and finish in an hour or two. Before Your Eyes is the recent one that stayed with me, though I am bad about keeping a running list.

The thread that has held longest is solo journaling games. Thousand Year Old Vampire, Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop, and a small game called Village Witch published on itch.io all work roughly the same way. You get prompts, you make decisions inside constraints, and you write. What comes out is a document you made under pressure that you could not have produced by being asked to reflect. They are reflection technologies that happen to be games, and they run on paper, which puts them squarely in territory I already care about.

The games I built for a classroom

While teaching ELA, I built a set of small RPG Maker games to open project-based units. Students spent a class period wandering a simple fantasy world and running into the problem the unit was going to examine. The games did not teach the content. They did not quiz anyone or track anything. They existed so that when we opened the actual unit, students already had a version of the question in their heads and something to be annoyed about.

They were also rough. I made them on evenings and weekends with default assets, the writing was uneven, and the second one was noticeably better than the first because I had learned what not to spend time on. If I did it again I would cut the map size in half. Most of the hours went into building space that students walked through without noticing, which is a mistake I have since made in other media.

What I would keep is the decision to let the game be a hook and a frame instead of a delivery mechanism. That decision is what kept it from being gamification, and it is the same decision I would make now.

Running a table, running a room

My other formative game experience is running tabletop campaigns, and it has done more for my facilitation practice than most of the training I have taken on facilitation. A game master prepares deeply on the world and the situation, holds a few beats in mind that they hope to reach, and then hands direction over to the players. You over-prepare the environment so that you can under-script the path.

I would like to say that is how I run professional development. In practice it is harder, because someone usually paid for the session and expects to be able to describe what happened afterward, and because a room of adults who have been trained by a decade of compliance PD does not always want the wheel when you offer it. My honest position is that this is a direction I work toward rather than a method I have mastered. When it goes well, the best material in a session is something a participant raised that I did not plan for. When it goes badly, I fill the silence and we get through my slides.

Why this is coming back now

I am picking game design back up formally this fall through my doctoral coursework, and the timing is not entirely academic. My sister, Andi Licht, designs tabletop games for a living. She is behind Soulbound, a dark industrial fantasy roleplaying game about arcane weapons bound to their wielder, and Between Clouds, a biopunk game about found family aboard an enormous flying creature. We played games together growing up, and she went and made it her work while I went into classrooms and then into learning design. Getting back to it has been a long-standing intention that kept losing to other priorities.

The question I am carrying into the coursework is whether the tower survives translation. In a school or a training context, someone eventually has to be able to say what people learned, and that requirement is a constraint on the design in the same way that the color pie is a constraint on a card. It might be a productive one. It might also be the exact pressure that turns a mechanic back into a badge, because a badge is what a learning outcome looks like when you demand that a game report on itself. I do not know yet which of those is true, and I am not sure I will find out by reasoning about it.

If you build games for learning, or you have opinions about where the line between a game and gamification actually sits, I would like to hear them. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and more of my writing and tools live at bradylicht.com.