Video Transcript: How I Use Dungeons and Dragons to Teach Ethics

Like so many good stories, this one takes place in the 1980s at first. That's the  80s. It's MTV, when the little astronaut and the moon, when they showed, like,  actual music videos. It's Ghostbusters, it's Indiana Jones, right? It's ET it0's it's a time in which we had things like Pac Man, and when we had a Donkey Kong,  when we had Atari and television and ColecoVision. It's also a time when a  game, a tabletop game, was gaining in tremendous amount of popularity,  surging in interest, and that game, of course, is Dungeons and Dragons. This is  a picture of my own personal collection, a small, very small fraction of my own  personal collection. Dungeon dragons was not invented in the 1980s it was  invented in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. But by the 80s, it had taken off, and for people like me, it was just absolutely fantastic. I remember when I  first got my red box set of Dungeons and Dragons. This came one winter night,  Christmas Eve, my uncle got it for me, and I never looked back. I absolutely, I  absolutely adore the game. I've been playing it for the remainder of my life now.  It turns out that not everyone, even though the game has been around for  decades, not everyone. This makes me, this makes me a little savage, true. Not  everyone knows what Dungeons and Dragons is about. So I will point to Gary  Gygax himself, the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons. He gives us a little bit of  an idea of what it is in the introduction to the first edition advanced dungeon  dragons players handbook. But roughly the what made this such an interesting  game is it didn't have edges. And by that, I mean it wasn't a board you sat down  at a table with your friends. Most people took on the role of an individual  character, right? And it was all was all borrowed from tropes involving fantasy  characters, from Tolkien swords and wizardry, this sort of thing. So you were a  rogue, you were a warrior, you were a spellcaster, and you had a sheet in front  of you, and the sheet would give you information about what your character  could do, what your character couldn't do. There was a set of rules to resolve  some things. And then there was this other person, the Dungeon Master, and  she or he would would invent a world and invent certain scenarios, a dungeon to explore. And a lot of it was talking back and forth, you know, I want to go here. I  wouldn't want to go there. And the Dungeon Master would then help resolve  certain things through a set of through a set of die rolls. And so it was, it was a  tremendous amount of fun. We all had a great time with it. But something else  started happening in the 1980s with Dungeons and Dragons, and that was the  Satanic Panic, or the moral panic, believe it or not, in the 1980s dungeon  dragons came under scrutiny, a lot of scrutiny, as the sort of game that would  lead to physical harm and moral ruin. And this was not just this was not just  found in some small towns across the United States. There ended up being a 60 Minutes episode about this. There ended up being a movie called mazes and  monsters, starring, of all people, Tom Hanks about this. There was a little  pamphlet from Jack Chick, notoriously called Dark dungeons that was supposed to show a lot of terrible things that were happening. You had, you had people 

who were professionals, saying that the content of this game was was really  problematic, and this satanic moral panic ended up hitting home for me, literally,  hometown, right? I grew up in Chardon, Ohio. It's a small town east of  Cleveland, population 5000 . One day as a kid, 1980s I see pamphlets going  around saying that there's going to be a town discussion about dungeon  dragons in the basement of the library. At least they got the basement part right,  because most Dungeons and Dragons playing took place in parents basement,  right? So, all right, we're going to be in the basement. And I went there, and it  was just a spectacular moment. There was a psychiatrist who was sharing her  stories about how she was absolutely convinced that some of the cases that she saw people who wanted to kill themselves were wanting to kill themselves  because of Dungeons and Dragons there was, there was a police officer  dressed as a police officer with, you know, with a gun and a badge saying that  he had gone to arrest someone on drug charges. And when he went to arrest  this person, this person was playing Dungeons and Dragons, and when he then  went to make the actual arrest this person seem to reveal supernatural power.  And the only thing I could think is, I'm playing this game wrong, and I want to  start playing it like that, right? Maybe I read too many comic books as well, but  none of this rang true with the lived experience of this game. I mean, it's a bunch of geeks sitting around, you know, drinking Mountain Dew, you know, eating  Doritos, fighting over who got the last Oreo. The content of the game. You know, I was a dungeon master often, and my players would spend 45 minutes arguing  about whether to listen to a door or not. You know, do you want to listen to the  door? I don't know if I want to listen to the door. What if it's trapped? Well, if it's  trapped, someone should look for the traps. Well, wait a minute, I'm not going to  look for the traps. This is the content of. The game. It was still awesome. I  probably didn't describe it right then as sounding awesome, but it was still  awesome. All right, so at that moment in the basement of the library of my  hometown, I stood up and said that I would devote my life to showing the  goodness that dungeon dragons brings into the world. That's absolutely not true, right? I mean, that's what was going on my head at the moment, but I was still  really young and completely intimidated. But it turns out that I found myself  decades later in a profession where I could demonstrate that this game gives us some interesting insights that can help us make people better moral agents, and that's what I want to turn to now. So I am a professor at the Harvard Kennedy  School of Government, and my my job is to help teach ethics in an impactful,  meaningful way for professionals to find ways to make ethics sticky. And so  common ethics pedagogy, when you take a look at it, is mostly some back and  forth between between theory and cases. So some courses lean pretty heavily  on theory. You know, we're going to go through it all. We're going to go through  consequentialism, deontology, John Rawls and so forth, and maybe just do a  little bit of dabbling with cases. Others lean in hard on cases. Let's look at 

protagonists in these situations and seeing what they're doing. But it's typically  this back and forth. However, I recognize that there was much merit in the  movement to add more experiential learning into the classroom. Experiential  learning, not just being generally active learning. I think classrooms and ethics  can have active learning when you just have people, you know, engaging the  Socratic math method back and forth, talking to each other in small groups  about what's going on, but experiential learning the kinds of things that you get  with simulations. And so, you know, I wanted to add simulations into this cycle  where you can have students engage in some kind of an activity that's not just  analyzing a case or not just consuming theory, and come out of that with some  really, really interesting insights about their own moral character and about how  they want to navigate the world. The challenge that I found is that standard  simulations worked in great ways for teaching things like negotiations or  leadership and so forth. It wasn't entirely useful for what I wanted to do in ethics. So a typical simulation is one where participants are given roles, and sometimes those roles are fairly, fairly tight. You're supposed to you know, you like this  person, you don't like that person. Here's your goal, here's what you're  supposed to do. You use simulations to develop skills. Sometimes, as I said,  there are leadership and negotiation skills professionals sometimes go through  live simulations to make sure that they can help in emergency situations. There  is an ethical dimension that I've seen in some simulations where you take on a  wholly different perspective. You get inside the skin of someone else, and you  use that to build your ability to understand how different people think about the  world and see the world. And I thought all that was was fine and well, but I  wanted to do something different. One of the things I found happening with my  students, especially when they looked at cases, is they would look at this case it was, you know, often a real case, not just an imaginative one. And when going  through the case, they would always imagine themselves as the protagonist,  acting heroically, right? I recognize that from my dungeon dragons playing as  well, right? But they would always, they would never have made the mistakes  that these other individuals have made. And look, that's a very natural  disposition to have, right? We all sort of want to think about ourselves as acting  heroically in these sorts of situations. I wanted to put students into situations  where they got we got to test that we got to see. Well, what would you actually  do in some of these things without really putting them into a situation where  there's high stakes ethics in play? So what I ended up doing is stepping back  and thinking about some of the general design principles from Dungeons and  Dragons. Because it turns out that in a lot of Dungeons and Dragons gameplay,  you end up thinking about ethical issues. You end up doing things that I thought  would be extraordinarily useful to bring into the classroom. And so here are  some abstractions of gameplay from Dungeon dragons that I wanted to then use to design ethics simulations. One is you confront scenarios where there's no 

clear line of authority on on how to make a decision, right? And so the thought  here is, you can't just say, Wow, this is a really tough issue. Who should be the  person that is answering this? It's up to you. So someone has to figure out how  to go about answering this thing. Roles are assigned, but they're minimal in old  

school dungeon dragons, you know, you were a fighter, you were you were  wizard, whatever. You had some invented personality, but mostly was you, the  decision making. The rest of it was entirely on you. You couldn't hide behind this  being an exercise in acting that has changed a little bit in the years since the  original game came out, but I like that old school feature of it. There's a simple  set of rules that can adapt to any sort of course of decision that's made. You  know, you are not It's not choose your own adventure. Dungeon dragons does  not choose your own adventure. You know, if you go this way, turn to page five.  If you go this way, turn to page 25 really, it's very open ended. You can end up  doing whatever you want, and the rules will help resolve whatever it is that you  do. All right, so participants must cope with ongoing uncertainty. There's those  dice, and this is something that I found, especially in simulations, that a lot of  simulations did not build into them, which is uncertainty. Right, not arbitrariness,  uncertainty. You always know that when you make a decision, there's going to  have to be a roll of the die that's going to determine what actually happens. And  you can play the odds a little bit, but at the end of the day, you have to live with  the consequences of what the dice say. And last is that you have to establish  most of the goals. You know, this is a running joke, and people who are just  learning about dungeon dragons, they say, Well, you know who won? There's  not winning in dungeon dragons, really. You play just to keep on playing. You  play to have your characters advance and so forth and so on. If you want more  goals than that, you have to put them in play. They don't come by way of the  game. So what I want to take you through now briefly is an example of a  simulation that I built using these design principles. And the simulation is called  Patient Zero game of ethics, leadership and negotiation. And the first thing, and I want to mention, is that this is inspired by a lot of the design of Dungeon  dragons, but it's importantly different in some respects. So what happens is I get and I typically do this in professional schools like the Harvard Kennedy School.  I've done it at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I've done it at the  School of Business. I've done it at the Harvard Extension School. And so you  get individuals into groups of about five, and there are simulation managers. We  call them simulation managers, not dungeon masters, for what I hope are  completely obvious reasons. And they have been trained with me on how to how to do the work that a dungeon master would do in these sorts of things. But you  have groups of individuals at tables, let's say five or seven individuals, and the  first task that we give them is to create a country. So this is simulation where,  rather than handing them, hey, you're Brazil, right? Hey, you're the United States and so forth, it's no you've got to actually invent your own country. Some of that 

is done with just decisions right on the ground, and some of that is done through the rolling of dice. And so the first thing that we get is buy in, because the  country is created right there on the spot. It is the player character in the  simulation. This country co created by individuals, somewhat randomly and  somewhat by decisions that are made. And the country has attributes, like ability scores that I consider to be the sort of core features of a country. What's the  country's economy like, what's its infrastructure, like military institutions and  health, and again, what you end up getting is some distribution and choices here based on what the group decides is most important, and also what happened  with the dice roll. So some groups will roll very well and have a nice pool of  points to distribute amongst these things, others won't. It's always interesting to  see what happens when the first dice roll made is a bad one, and you have a  team that's like, ugh, because we're going to have to go through the simulation  with a country that's already a little bit hobbled. But that happened in dungeon  dragons too with some characters. So just to give you an idea, when you  distribute points across these various attributes. What we do is we give  individuals a chart like this that helps explain what the numbers are supposed to mean. So it's, you know, there's a level of abstraction, but we don't want it to be  too abstract. It's kind of, it's kind of crazy to just say to someone, hey, you know,  do you want a one, a, two, three or zero? Military? The right response to that at  first is, I have no idea what you're talking about, right? But here with this, you get an idea of what the what the numbers end up meaning narratively, in the in the  simulation, all right? And then we get some short we give some choices to them  so that they can help really build their country from the ground up. What kind of  government do you want to have? What's the environment of your country? Like the cuisine, obviously the most important one, right? The cuisine, tourist sites,  but you would be amazed, right? And again, this is modeled off of some  Dungeon and Dragons. You know, character development. There's the core  abilities, and that's really important. But then there's the things that sometimes  called fluff, that ends up really playing an important role as you as you move on.  And we also asked participants to decide two things that are true of their  country. It doesn't mean that the others are false, but these are the things that  are really important and in some sense, identity forming for their country. What is your country essentially like? Do you have constitutionally guaranteed right? Is  there homogeneity in religious beliefs, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a bunch of  decisions that are made, and then the team is given a generic role. So I don't  spend much time building in details of the role, because that's not what the  simulation is supposed to be about. They're just a group of high ranking officials. They're told that they're going to be the closest advisors to their leader. Their  leader could be a queen, a king, right? Whatever kind of country that they  decided right, President, Prime Minister, you get the idea. And they're told that  they have to make the best decisions they can under the information constraints

and time constraints that they're given. The main dynamic of the simulation is  they're given an event. At first, it's an event that everyone has, and then it's the  events that the simulation manager gives them. They come up with something,  you know, think about it. They argue with themselves. They come up with some  response, and then there's a resolution, and that resolution involves rolling dice.  What is patient zero about? Specifically, zombies? Yes, I have gotten away with  running a eight hour zombie apocalypse at Harvard, Kennedy School, Harvard  Business School, Harvard Extension School. Etc, etc. Turns out, though, that a  zombie apocalypse is actually a really interesting simulation, in that you can  model the evolution of pandemics very well with it, and it puts you into that very  nice place where you know that absolutely no one sitting down at the table will  have had any experience with this whatsoever, right? That's a really interesting  and important point, right? I mean, this simulation was designed for people  coming from all over people coming from all over the world with all sorts of  experience. And I always tell students at the very beginning of this, if you, in  fact, have had experience with the content of the simulation, you should talk to  me individually, right? And and we'll go from there. So we give we sit them  down, we give them this opening outbreak. The opening outbreak is exactly  what you might imagine. There have been rumors about some kind of some kind of events. People are cognitively compromised. They're behaving violently.  They're not responding to reason, or any of these sorts of things. Then we have  them make some decisions, and the core mechanic is to roll a couple of six  sided dice and add their country tribute. That's not a dungeon dragons  mechanic. It's a mechanic from a different game that I found very useful. The  basic way that this unfolds is that if you get a 10 or higher, you got a success. If  you get a seven to nine, you get a success. With some complications. If you get  a six or lower, you fail. Obamacare is the perfect example of a seven to nine. If  you do the math on this, there's going to be a lot of roles that fall into that range.  You succeed, but it's complicated. So you can imagine an Obamacare role is  what do you want to do? I want to create better health care role seven to nine.  All right? Well, here's the good news, you succeeded. Here's the bad news, it  came at tremendous political cost, right? And you're going to be tied up in the  courts for a long, long time. That's the kind of complications that you want in  these simulations, success happens, but it's never exactly as clean as you  would you would want it to be. This mechanic is powered by a system called  Apocalypse world. And so I want to give credit where credit is due. And so I just  want to step back for a minute and say that it's a really fun and exciting  experience to do this. And you can move in a couple different directions based  on what you want to do. If you want to take away simulation managers, because that's too much you can do so, but it's and that will improve scalability if you  want to on the other side of it, really increase individual roles you can do that as  well. So you can really play with this in a couple of different directions that I think

is, is quite, quite exciting and useful. I think I want to just mention three big  takeaways. One is simulation should be introduced into ethics pedagogy. I think  that Dungeons and Dragons and the games that have been designed in light of  Dungeon dragons, gives us a really good way of thinking about how to do that,  and simulations like patient zero end up showing us how this can happen in a  way where you merge ethics with leadership and negotiation. I've been doing  this for years now, and the reason I'm standing in front of you is because there's  been overwhelming, not universal, but overwhelming enthusiasm from  professionals across the world in running through this. If I have one last thing to  say, it's this, and I hope this is obvious, it's certainly not original, but I think it's  worth mentioning all the same, and that is that playing and learning are  complementary, not incompatible. And it's been a great, great opportunity to  share this with you today and also to rehabilitate, I hope the role the dungeon  dragons can play in in moral reflection. Thank you very much.