Episode 93 Naomi Pariseault and HerStory
Naomi Pariseault and HerStory
Episode Summary
In this episode of "Experience Points" by University XP, Dave Eng and Naomi Pariseault discuss the educational value of the board game "HerStory." They explore its gameplay mechanics, the connection to learning design, and its potential as a tool for teaching and learning. The game allows players to become authors, writing a book about remarkable women in history. They delve into the game's abstraction of research and its tight connection to the goal of publishing. Both Dave and Naomi also discuss the game's accessibility, its potential for serious games in education, and how it inspires players to tell women's stories.
Naomi Pariseault
she/her/hers
Senior Learning Designer & Gamification Mastercraftsman
Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
(Twitter): https://twitter.com/elearngeekette
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomi-pariseault/
(Instagram): https://www.instagram.com/elearngeekette/
(Website): https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/people/naomi-pariseault
As a senior learning designer in Digital Learning & Design at Brown University, Naomi considers her role to be best articulated as a learning engineer and experience designer. She believes that learning is a multifaceted experience (engaging, inspiring, challenging, etc.) and should serve as a catalyst for reflection, change, and appreciation of our world. She is a certified Master Craftsman in gamification design for learning and has earned the Level 1, 2, and 3 Certifications from Sententia Gamification. She is also a certified facilitator for teaching the Level 1 Certification Program. Gamification design is by far her most favorite approach to learning design. One of the Brown University undergraduate courses she designed with Professor Jim Egan, "Fantastic Places, Unhuman Humans," won two international awards for excellence in gamification design. Naomi holds an M.A. in English Literature and a Master in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from the University of Rhode Island.
Dave, Naomi, Danielle HerStory PAX East 2023
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host, Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com.
On today's episode, we'll learn from Naomi Pariseault. Naomi is a senior learning designer at Brown University who believes learning should be engaging, inspiring, and challenging, and serve as a catalyst for reflection and change. As a master craftsman in gamification design, she specializes in creating immersive and award-winning learning experiences that promote appreciation of our world. Naomi, welcome to the show.
Naomi Pariseault:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Dave. I'm really, really thrilled to be here and I cannot wait to talk about HerStory.
Dave Eng:
Great. Well, I'm glad that you brought that up at the very beginning because that is exactly what I want to focus this episode on, HerStory the board game. So recently we had an excellent opportunity to play HerStory the board game with one of its designers, Danielle Reynolds at PAX East 2023. So for those who have never heard of the game before and haven't played it, how would you summarize it in a way that would get people to want to play it as well as see the educational value in it?
Naomi Pariseault:
That's a tall order, but I'm ready to take on the challenge. So in this particular game, you are an author writing a book to tell the stories of all of these remarkable women in history. And so you're doing research, and I'll explain that in a minute, and you're drafting chapters. And as you're drafting chapters of your book featuring one woman per chapter, you're going to uncover that these women have special advantages and powers depending upon which women you're choosing to include in your book. And so the person who completes the highest scoring book at the end is the one who's declared the winner. So it's a really cool game.
And I'll explain a couple other elements of the game, which I think will be helpful for you to visualize the educational opportunities with this game. So when you're an author as a player in this game, you're working towards a book who has eight chapters and one woman's featured in each chapter. When you are doing the research, there's tokens and each token has different symbols. And so you have to grab one of the square tokens and put it on your own play board right in front of you that's next to the chapters that you're drafting. And so what's really cool is if you end up publishing a chapter in your book with the exact number of symbols needed from your research tokens, you get a bonus. So calibrating your resources, you're rewarded for that.
And during gameplay, it's really simple. You can only do one of three things. You can research by taking a research token, you can draft a chapter, which is taking a card from the idea board. So there's an idea board in the middle, and that has, I believe, six different women on their cards. So you can grab one of those women and put it in your draft area and you can have two drafts total. Or you can complete a chapter, one of your eight chapters that you're going to. So pretty much, it's really, really simple. You're going to have some nice research tokens. You're going to have your up to two drafts of women that you're working on. And then you have all of your chapters that you're working on. And I'll mention too, that when you're playing, you can't help but flip the cards over to read the biographies of the women feature on the cards. It is just amazing when you're playing through to see all of the women that you do know and all the women that you haven't been aware of in the past.
Dave Eng:
Yeah, I think that one of the most interesting parts when we were playing at the convention was that there is many women that are indicated in the game that I was familiar with, but there was a lot of other women who I did not know. And what I appreciated, Naomi, and you explained really well was how the game kind of just abstracts this research element. So you talked about those individual tokens and those tokens of individual icons on it, meaning like magnifying glass, like speech bubble, book, et cetera. And those represent, I guess, different research activities you could be doing like finding particular information, conducting interviews and everything else.
The game, you said this kind of sets it up so that you as a player, you're actually conducting this research yourself. Of course, like a board game that actually represented research 100% accurately would not be that interesting, but I think HerStory did a pretty good job of just kind of abstracting this idea of having tokens and have icons to them and then fulfilling an "order" in order to write a particular chapter about a famous woman from history by collecting those individual tokens. Would you say that that was a pretty approachable way in order to address research for these individual women?
Naomi Pariseault:
Absolutely. I mean, just the way that the tightness of the play and the abstract mirroring of the research process I thought was really brilliant. The design just does a really, really great job at breaking down those parts in a meaningful way to the gameplay, but also helping you think about the process of research and of featuring subjects in a book. I just thought it was really, really brilliant and you feel really empowered as an author or I would argue maybe perhaps the role of editor actually when you're putting together your chapters. But it's ultra, ultra cool.
Dave Eng:
Right. And that leads me into the second question I want to ask you here, which is applications for education. And I saw this particularly with this particular game of HerStory, which is it was designed from the ground up as a commercial game that has a specific learning focus and outcomes as well as being entertaining, engaging, and thoughtful. But based on your background specifically, I'd like to get your take on this. On designing, engaging in gameful learning experiences, what do you think are the biggest applicable takeaways in learning design that you got from playing this game?
Naomi Pariseault:
Oh, this is such a great question Dave, and I'm excited to dive into this. I think we've touched on it a little bit. The first thing I would say is that I think the game mechanics really map well to the principle of the game of publishing and writing a book. In an abstract way, they kind of distill down some of the essential elements of how research could be abstracted. And so when you are taking those research tokens, each of the symbols stands for an aspect of someone's research. So there's a book icon which can stand for reading. You're reading a lot of materials. There's thinking with the light bulb and processing. There's the speech bubble icon, which could be interviewing subjects and also the magnifying glass. You're searching for more sources, searching for more people to interview, the kind of searching process.
I have a master of library science degree and a master's in English literature, so this game feels like it was made for me, but I think that other people would really enjoy this game. But it hits a sweet spot for me in a number of ways. And I'll also share that I think the drafting of the chapter and the publishing of the book and the resources and time for revision, the fact that you would draft first and then publish makes a lot of sense when you're laying out and kind of picking which one you're going to draft next, and that you may choose to draft one women from the idea board first or you might wait and hope that another woman will stay on the idea board for later for you to draft. And you might draft a certain woman into your book because you're anticipating being able to take advantage of one of the special powers that she may have. So I just thought that that was really nice too with thinking about the resources and time it would take for the revision and drafting and publishing process as well.
And then I think the tight core loop of what you're doing, there's nothing that you're doing in this game that doesn't connect to the overall goal and also isn't really tightly woven to the process of publishing. We didn't talk about this yet, but you're able to go to the library up to two times. And again, you have a library card and you flip it when you want to use it the first time, and then you flip it back and move it to the side when you're done. But if there's no research tokens with any symbols that are going to work for you, you can go to the library and get a complete refresh. I believe there's six or eight spots where the research tokens go in the middle where people can take on their turn.
So that's a really, really nice nod to the function of the libraries and I thought a really nice mechanic as well, and that you could do it up to twice in the game per person. So I thought that was a really nice mechanic, a really nice implementation of that mechanic and thematically worked really well with the core loop and the whole game play.
Dave Eng:
I think that I'm really glad that you indicated your background in library science because I was thinking about that as we were playing this game because it's generally about research, about writing this particular book.
One area that I want to draw attention to, and I want to know if you've noticed, but the main board where you can see the different chapters of the different women you could write about, it kind of looks like a peg board. And on that peg board you can see different pictures of different women there. And as you draft them, that's basically like you going at the peg board and being like, "Let's investigate this woman" and you take her card and put her on your own individual player board, which is like your desk. And on your desk you can begin writing some research, you can begin drafting your chapter.
You brought this up before with a core loop in that it's a rather mechanically very simple game to play. You either do this or you do this or you do this. There's really only those kind of three actions available. I think talking to other educators that want to use Games-Based Learning, they often get very caught up in this aspect of, "This is going to be complicated," or "I don't want to design a game from the ground up." But in this particular instance, you can just use HerStory right out of the box as a great teaching tool because it's very simple and easy to play.
And the last thing you talked about, Naomi, and I want to point this out, is that library card. And it just, again, makes very much sense with the theme of this game because you may reach a point where there are no tokens available that of symbols that you need, and you kind of need an ability to be able to reset the entire board. And in my head at least, this library card is one where you just say, "Okay, well, we just have to go back to the drawing board on this. Let's just go back to the library, see what we can come up, and then refresh the tokens from there." So all of those individual elements I think really tie into the theme of the game, but also make it so that it's not overwhelming. I never really felt overwhelmed by decisions here. How about you? Did you feel it overwhelmed by any decisions in the game?
Naomi Pariseault:
No, I didn't. I felt very curious and I felt very relaxed. So you are kind of doing your thing at your desk and looking at the idea board and interacting the women, and it feels very zen. I don't know. It's a very calm game. I will say Dave, I've played it six times-
Dave Eng:
Oh, nice.
Naomi Pariseault:
... since purchasing it in, I don't know, six weeks. But I spent an afternoon and played four times in a row-
Dave Eng:
Nice.
Naomi Pariseault:
... with one of my faculty collaborators who I had purchased the game for as a gift. And she's very taken with it. She's actually a journal editor, an academic journal editor and also a feminist so this was something that was really interesting to her for a variety of reasons, but it was fun to watch her enjoy and play as well. But yeah, it was very chill game to play. There was definitely enough that gets simple enough where you're not feeling overwhelmed decisions, but it can get really complex with the strategies as well. So I think it's a really nice balance and an entry point into serious games.
And I love Dave that you brought up the fact that it can be played out of the box or it's a really nice model to think about like, "Don't go crazy with mechanics and play. Come up with a really tight core loop with limited decisions in a really clean implementation and have everything make sense to the theme." People can go in different directions with strategy within that level of simplicity. But I never have felt bored with it and I'm going to continue to play it over and over again with different approaches. But it's just I think a really nice approachable game and an entry point into serious games for people or games for learning who haven't entered into that space yet.
Dave Eng:
Yeah, I'm really glad that you're able to get those additional plays in because I brought it to my game group who are not educators, but just really playing the game for what it is, which I'm really glad because that just demonstrates that it is a viable commercial product, but it's also something that can be still used for teaching, learning, and education. And that kind of brings me into my third and last question that I wanted to ask you, Naomi, which is overall the future of Serious Games. But specifically right now, we live in a time where the possibilities and opportunities for using designing games for teaching and learning are really incredible right now. HerStory, I think, represents just the tip of the iceberg when developing serious games for learning. I'd like to know more from you. How do you think those who are just discovering this field of games-based learning can take this game, HerStory, and build upon it for their own designs and projects?
Naomi Pariseault:
Yeah, Dave, that's another great question. So I think there's so many opportunities here. I'll remark that I think that there's something really beautiful about this game. In the gameplay, you're drafting a book of HerStory. Like your actual book if you flip it over and put your cards together, it looks like a book cover of HerStory. Every time that you play, it's going to be different. But the creation of this game itself is a way to tell the stories of incredible women, some of those we may not actually be familiar with. I know I wasn't familiar with a good number of women that were featured in this game. So it's really nice that it's bringing various women's stories to light in a really accessible way to people who you might not have encountered all of those women. So I think that there's something really beautiful about the gameplay as you having the power to tell HerStory, but the game itself is having the power to bring women's stories forward. So there's this really nice multilayer thing, which I think is really powerful. And so I'd be curious if other games can do that.
I thought that this was an interesting piece, and this was something that I had only noticed recently, and I'll mention this for the future of serious games and thinking about this game and building upon it for other future designs and projects. But there's a really nice extension of the game play in a really thoughtful way. So there's bonus materials online at herstorythegame.com and they include posters of the women featured on the cards and also a biography kit. So it's templates that mirror the game biographies on the cards for the women that students can actually go and tell stories of other people through interviewing and writing biographies. So I thought that was a really, really thoughtful extension of digital materials that are available online for free. And it all mirrors the aesthetic and artwork and just kind of the way that the game was constructed itself. So I thought that was a really, really nice piece.
So I'm always taken with extra bonus materials like that. I thought that was a really nice, that works really well to kind of extend the game so that way someone could take this game and play it wholesale in the classroom, but then also do a follow-up activity and talk about the larger research process and telling people stories and what is involved with that process. So I thought that that was a really nice educational extension and something that I've seen with other games, but I thought this one was really, really well implemented.
Dave Eng:
Right. I'm glad you brought all of that up, Naomi, because as I think about it right now, you could totally play HerStory without any interest in women's history or feminism or biography writing or anything else. And it plays just like you would any other type of modern Euro tabletop game. But if you do really want to learn about these women, it's so accessible and so easy to learn about them. Like we said before, we came into the game knowing some famous women in the game. Like I remember our first game, I drafted Sally Ride first because she was the first one that I recognized. But there are many, many other women in the game that you may not have ever known. You could just slip over the card and learn a little bit of history about this individual woman, or you don't have to. It's kind of up to you.
Another thing that you brought up that I think is particularly critical is that for this game, if there is a need for additional educational resources, those are already made available online. I haven't checked out those resources yet, but after talking to you, I'd like to check them out because, again, it just makes this such an easy implementation of the game if you are an educator and want to use this in the classroom that it's already there, it's already packaged, it's already to go. If you'd like to take a little bit further, here are some of the resources online. Did you download that, Naomi? Did you check out those additional resources and see what they had to offer?
Naomi Pariseault:
Yep, I did. I went through the whole site because I was just really curious. The bonus materials are great.
Dave Eng:
Nice. Well, I will have to check that out afterwards. I haven't seen it yet, but I'd like to learn more.
Naomi Pariseault:
And all you have to do is enter your email to get the additional materials.
Dave Eng:
All right. Well Naomi, that was great. Thanks for joining us today. We appreciated your insight. If people want to learn more about you online, where can they go?
Naomi Pariseault:
Well, that's another great question to close this out. So the best place to find me is actually on LinkedIn. If you search my name, I believe I'm the only Naomi Pariseault on LinkedIn. But you could also find me on Twitter or Instagram, and that's @elearngeekette. So it's exactly like it sounds.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you Naomi. And for those of you that are listening, I'll also link Naomi's social links in the description or show notes. You'll be able to see it there.
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us.
Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. If you like this episode, please consider commenting, sharing and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you. I'd also loved it if you took some time to rate the show. I live to lift others with learning, so if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit.
Also make sure to visit University XP online at www.universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter at University_XP, and on Facebook and LinkedIn as University XP. Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on!
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2023, September 3). Naomi Pariseault and HerStory. (No. 93) [Video]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/video/93
Internal Ref: UXPRH0SN5LGS
References
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