In recent years, gamification has emerged as a popular pedagogical approach. Hesburgh Library’s Emerging Technologies Librarian, Dr. Randy Harrison, recently worked with faculty from Notre Dame and St. Mary’s, to create The Landlord Game, a free educational board game designed to help faculty gamify the economic dimensions of social justice for their students.
To develop the core rules for the game, Harrison worked with business economics professors Dr. Sianne Vijay and Dr. Arian Farshbaf at St. Mary’s College, as well as Dr. Connie Mick, the Associate Director of the Center for Social Concerns, at the University of Notre Dame.
An homage to Lizzie Magie’s original The Landlord’s Game (the precursor of the game we know today as Monopoly™), The Landlord Game leverages players’ knowledge of Monopoly in order to complicate reductive economic models of a level socio-economic playing field. By adjusting game rules and content to effect real-world economic disparities, the game aims to stimulate a frustration so comically absurd that gameplay evolves into a discussion among the players around the systemic inequities of contemporary capitalism.
The game board and materials were designed with Adobe Illustrator. To encourage other instructors to freely adopt and adapt the game, Harrison has released the game under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license and built a website from which all game materials may be previewed, downloaded, and modified.
The Landlord Game may be played as part of the interactive component of the Money Worries exhibit at the Snite Museum through March 25th. Harrison also hopes that promoting the game through the exhibit may spark a discussion among faculty interested in talking more about gamification in their curricula.