Abstract:

Gamification has emerged as a popular pedagogical approach, encouraging increased student engagement through active learning. Our paper describes our experience of developing and employing an educational board game to help demonstrate socioeconomic inequalities to students across different disciplines at two universities.

The Landlord Game is a multiplayer, turn-based board game that significantly reimagines Monopoly, leveraging players' knowledge of that popular game while problematizing its reductive economic model. Unlike Monopoly, which assumes a level socioeconomic playing field, Landlord uses real world concepts such as social class, military service, college education, healthcare, incarceration, and more, to stimulate a frustration so comically absurd that gameplay evokes discussion around the systemic inequities of contemporary capitalism.

The game was developed by the first author in consultation with economists and poverty studies scholars to determine a set of rules and game mechanics that correspond to real world inequalities.

The game has been played in the classroom over fifteen times in different courses such as Principles of Microeconomics, Intermediate Microeconomics, Development Economics, Social Inequality, Interactive Storytelling, Confronting Poverty: Bringing Service to Justice, and the First Year Experience seminar. Gameplay is accompanied by a guided discussion or reflection activity led by the game designers and instructors. The game has also been played multiple times as part of the museum exhibit “Money Worries” at Snite Museum of Art.

Players assume randomly selected roles spread across the socioeconomic spectrum—the poor ‘unemployed’, the middle class ‘employee’, the upper class ‘manager’, and the wealthy ‘owner’. The inequalities in these roles are demonstrated through game mechanics, such as different monthly incomes, movement rates, and social privileges for each role. Beyond buying property, players encounter life events through Change cards such as having a child, losing their job due to recession, being caught for insider trading, being the victim of identity theft, sitting for job interviews, getting an income tax refund, and many more.

Typically, ‘unemployed’ players find it necessary to take personal loans even to pay the rent, and have few options to rise socioeconomically besides the risky option of joining the military. The ‘wealthy’ owner moves rapidly around the board and collects the most money and properties. They have superior healthcare and spend no time in jail.

A core mechanic of the game is ‘rule making’ which represents political activism, allowing players to democratically reshape the ‘society’ of the game. Rule-making frequently engenders enthusiastic debate among players.

The game was formally evaluated using a survey designed specifically to gauge attitudes on socioeconomic inequality. This formal assessment was conducted in three game sessions across two separate courses, Principles of Microeconomics and Intermediate Microeconomics, with approximately fifty students.

We share the results of our attitudes survey and present a plan for further studying and improving the effectiveness of using the Landlord Game to teach socioeconomic inequity to students.

Keywords:

Game, socioeconomic, roleplaying, economics, inequality.