Introduction

This contribution falls into three parts. In the first I share some philosophical and pedagogical reflections on playing “serious games” in an ancient studies undergraduate seminar on economics, law, and society in Ancient Greece. The second part, which appears below as an Appendix to the pedagogical prolegomena, describes the game we play, Agoranomika, which I designed to help students learn experientially about the challenges and costs of measuring goods in ancient Greek markets. This part ends with a brief presentation of some of the historical responses that those who inhabited the classical and Hellenistic world devised to meet some of those challenges. The third and final part is a condensed version of Appendix 1, a downloadable document abstracting the basic rules and game play of Agoranomika for those who would like to adapt and play this game for their own pedagogical purposes.⬈#p1

Serious games and teaching ancient Greece

Several years ago, at the suggestion of a colleague at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, I created a course called “Risky Business: Law, Economics, and Society in the Ancient World.” This course was designed specifically to appeal to business-oriented undergraduates who wish to satisfy their pre-modern distributional requirement with a course that speaks to their interests in business and finance. The subject matter (i.e., law and economics) lends itself naturally to teaching via games, but all the more so when it comes to Classical Greece, since its agonistic culture prompted many communities to organize their political, legal, economic, and fiscal institutions quite explicitly as contests.¹ Plato decried this predilection in his critique of Athenian democracy (e.g., Resp. 6.492b–d), and yet despite (or perhaps because) of this, he was what we might call an early educational play theorist, arguing that a society that ignores the psychological and social impact of the games it plays does so at its peril.² Plato understood games as social exercises in moral and political inculcation, with “good” games preparing a free citizenry for the “serious play” of a fully realized human life.³ Contemporary interest in “serious games,” on the other hand, is rooted in the less overtly political (though for that no less normative) dynamics of pedagogy, representing a 20th-century confluence of developmental psychology, educational theory, public policy studies, cultural critique (following Huizinga), and, most recently, digital gaming.⁴⬈#p2

The game I offer in the first Appendix is firmly in the tradition of Clark Abt’s vision of serious games, or an analogue simulation that takes place in the course of a single session, as opposed to the more ambitious and open-ended, multi-week role-playing games promoted by the Reacting to the Past consortium.⁵ While my game has more limited or, perhaps more precisely, more targeted pedagogical aims than, say, The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.E. (Ober, Norman, and Carnes 2015), it nevertheless shares many of the same overarching goals and salutary educational outcomes of these more elaborate games. Anyone who has attempted to teach ancient history will understand why it has become a byword for irrelevance: most students find the prosopography, geography, and dates stultifying, in large part because they seem to have so little connection to the places, people, events, interests, and pressures of contemporary life. This fundamental alienation often effectively prevents students from entering into the properly imaginative world of historical analysis and critical engagement with primary evidence. Games, as Abt argued a half century ago, are the perfect device for structuring critical engagement through problem-based learning: they are fun, cheap, harness our competitive natures, encourage interaction between students, and prompt second-order thinking and deep learning, i.e., not passively knowing basic facts or primary evidence, but doing something synthetic with the material.⁶⬈#p3

It is in this last connection that we should draw a distinction between what we are here calling “serious games,” which are problem-based simulations, and gamification.⁷ By “gamification” I mean game experiences wherein:⬈#p4

• the game structure is essentially independent of the occasion for playing and the subject matter of the lesson or course;
• the game design, mechanisms, and tactics respond first and foremost to the social and physical dimensions of the class and the classroom, not the subject matter;
• competition typically revolves around demonstrating traditional mastery of subject matter;
• cooperation is typically restricted to within teams, as opposed to between teams
• winning is typically signaled by a notionally impartial umpire, and any rewards are often awarded by the same non-player authority and are themselves arbitrarily related or exogenous to the game, e.g., points, stickers, classroom perks, prizes, etc.
• the results rarely surprise, since the goals are narrowly focused and the game mechanism comparatively simple, leaving little room for improvisation or emergence

So, for instance, breaking a class up into teams to compete in a contest of generating Greek verbal morphology would be an example of gamification.⁸ There is, of course, nothing wrong with deploying gamification tactics in a classroom (indeed, I have often done so myself); but this is very different from refracting a topic through the lens of a game.⬈#p5

I take the following as the hallmarks of a pedagogically-integrated simulation, or a serious game:⁹⬈#p6

• the game structure attempts to model and simulate the basic elements of a current, historical, or hypothetical situation or problem as a structured, problem-solving scenario
• game design, mechanisms, and tactics are all expressions of an integrated theory of the parameters of the strategic problem, which in turn activate knowledge or implicit theories of material, environmental, historical, cultural, and behavioral factors
• play requires that the players adopt and internalize strategic roles or personae to solve problems
• opportunities for competition and cooperation are complex, multi-leveled, and dynamic; and so
• results are frequently unanticipated by the game designer (in the parlance of game design, it is an “emergent game”)¹⁰

One of the most difficult challenges in designing an educational, goal-oriented, historical simulation (or one modeling a different culture) is the need to balance two opposed imperatives: (a) incentivizing player engagement, which necessarily requires players to operate from within their own thought-worlds while making choices inside the game; and (b) the structuring of heuristic discontinuities between the players’ thought-world and that of the society being modeled. In other words, one cannot privilege engagement to the point where one collapses completely the distance that separates (in this instance) antiquity from modernity, except at the expense of the substantive lesson of the game, which is to learn something about antiquity: doing so would be tantamount to trading self-defeating alienation for the false and no less inert familiarity of the accidental historical tourist. So, players must bring their whole, contemporary selves to the game; but in the course of play they must also discover that the assumptions guiding their choices are often inapt, and more specifically, that they are historically and culturally contingent – just as contingent as the assumptions and paradigms that must have guided ancient Greeks! – with the result that they begin to attempt to see things from a new (and in this case, quite old) perspective. This almost Hegelian antithesis inherent in the structure of historically serious games proceeds from a theory of human nature implicit in practice of history itself, namely that human nature is sufficiently stable to allow us to understand and interpret the actions of people who lived in places, times, and political, social, and cultural milieux far different from our own. As Arnaldo Momigliano once said, the reason we study change is that we are changeable;¹¹ however, to recognize and give meaning to change we must practice a historicism grounded in a certain set of universal human drives and propensities.¹²⬈#p7

I conclude with these reflections because they have important implications for what the students who play my game, or any ancient simulation, learn. What they do not learn is the experience of antiquity. By playing this or any other game, students no more relive the experience of ancient Greeks any more than Pierre Menard became Cervantes when he wrote the Quixote. Not only is this not possible; it is also, as Borges correctly insisted, not interesting. The ancient history we write may be about the Greeks, but it is most definitely our history of them. Instead, we should understand students playing serious historical games in class as engaging in an exercise very like what their classmates do in a scientific laboratory. So, when chemistry students experiment with air columns, pumps, and pressure valves to confirm Boyle’s Constant, they learn something about the physical properties of gasses and the mechanics and methods of experimentation. If the experiment fails, they know to repeat it: what failed was their method, not physics. No one, I think, would assert that chemistry students are attempting to recreate Boyle’s specific experience of discovery: modern students come to their experiments not only with a different purpose and perspective, but also with foreknowledge of what Boyle had to discover for himself. Their laboratory experience, however, is nevertheless pedagogically useful precisely because it is characterized by engagement and the discovery of all the (often frustrating) real-world elements of process that get elided in merely memorizing that pv = k.⬈#p8

In a similar fashion, I suggest that in playing the game about weights and measures in the ancient Greek world in the first Appendix my students learn four distinct, if interconnected, lessons. (1) They learn about some of the fundamental, ineluctable problems and costs associated with measurement, the manifestations of and responses to which are conditioned by the historical intersection of the physical properties of goods, technological capabilities or constraints, the economic value of goods, informal (i.e., norms) and formal (i.e., laws) modes of regulation, and political power. (2) After the game students study examples of specific responses or solutions Greeks (or in some cases, ancient people solving problems in a Hellenized society) devised to address certain measurement problems. They thereby also learn how to deploy their own experience creatively, critically, and responsibly in the analysis of ancient primary evidence, i.e., without losing sight of the distance that lies between them and antiquity. Indeed, in coming to understand measurement as a properly historical problem they often learn as much about measurement in their own lives as they do in the lives of ancient Greeks. (3) By playing they begin to appreciate the embeddedness of any social activity, since they must erect “market” norms for themselves in the classroom laboratory. They are thus more attuned to the importance of rules other than law, namely personal ethics and social norms, rules which often leave little explicit trace in our documentary or archaeological record. (4) Finally, they learn that “every historical topic is more or less explicitly a choice of problems to resolve.”¹³ History does not stop once we have answered the question, “What happened?” Indeed, it does not even begin at “What happened?”, since one first needs to ask, “What am I interested in knowing?” By modeling their historical inquiry as a game, and one that requires them to understand the problems, limitations, circumstances, and motivations of other players, students learn to approach history as a “Why?” in two registers: first, to interrogate what lies behind their own questions of historical cultures; and second, to search for the “why” that explains the evidence that survives and the ancient lives it represents. Learning this last lesson goes a long way to answering the question of relevance that so many students find insuperable at first, since it helps to construct history not as the science of an irrelevant past, but as the perennially relevant science of people in time.¹⁴⬈#p9

Agoranomika: Developing an Ancient Greek Trading Game

The game that I developed for the course “Risky Business,” which I have called Agoranomika, is designed to appeal to students with an academic interest in business and finance. The version I have taught to date is set in classical Greece, framed by the emerging case for substantial economic growth during this period (as compared to the pre-modern norm), roughly the sixth to the third centuries BCE.¹⁵ Set against this historical frame are a series of case studies exploring how individuals, organizations, and governments solved a variety of economic and organizational problems in their comparatively low-information, small-government institutional environments. The overarching theory of the course is that in the absence of major productivity gains related to technological innovation (even after granting the fact that most ancient historians today see technological innovation as more economically impactful than their predecessors a generation ago), it was these various institutional arrangements, solutions, and strategies that drove a significant proportion of the growth in this period, and so they repay serious study.⬈#p10

One of the chief pedagogical aims of the course is to have the students develop and practice legal and economic problem-solving skills, but with specific attention to historical and comparative approaches to law, society, and economics. This in turn requires that students not only become comfortable with legal and economic analysis, but also build over the term a basic cultural competency with respect to ancient Greek social structures, norms, and preferences, so that they begin to understand (in Douglass North’s metaphor) “the rules of the game” as it was “played” in Classical Greece, including some of the Greeks’ go-to strategies and tactics in economic life.¹⁶ The course is divided into thematic units, which progressively introduce the interconnected evolution and development of various institutions and related developments over this extended period, particularly, but not exclusively, in Athens, such as: poleis and oikoi (households), markets, courts, democracy, literacy, coinage, and banking. We also devote a significant number of our class sessions to analyzing specific disputes (e.g., Hypereides 3, “Against Athenogenes,” a contract case) and policy responses (e.g., Nikophon’s law [SEG XXVI 72] regulating coinage in the Athenian agora), most of which survive in court speeches or inscriptions. Finally, I supplement these case studies with ancient and contemporary theoretical readings in law, society, and economics, so that we develop a vocabulary to think economically, institutionally, and historically about concepts like: competition, conflict, cooperation, reputation, and self-help; courts, formal enforcement, and crime; private property and public goods; money supply and credit relations and instruments; contracts, torts, insurance, and liability; regulation and taxation; etc.⬈#p11

Agoranomika, described in detail in the first Appendix to this paper, takes place at an important inflection point in the term.¹⁷ Since most of these students come to this course without any formal study of either classical Greece or institutional economics, we spend the first few weeks reading descriptive overviews of the Greek economy (e.g., chapters from Scheidel et al. (eds.) 2007), a foundational text in institutional economics (e.g., North 1990), and a representative example of ancient “economic theory” (usually Xenophon’s Oeconomicus). After this introduction, we begin our first unit dedicated to a specific institution and its history and practices, the Greek agora, using Athens as our main case study. This shift in intellectual object is marked by a concomitant shift in pedagogical method: we move from establishing background and broad familiarity to active engagement with the history and sociology of a specific institution in the economic life of a classical Greek polis. North’s “rules of the game metaphor” is now reified in an actual game modeling an ancient strategic scenario in the Athenian agora, for what might otherwise be the most boring topic of the term: measurement.⬈#p12

Now, I suppose that markets as a certain kind of economic governance structure can function without standardized weights and measures, but not very well: the development and policing of standardized weights and measures represent vital institutional innovations for the lowering of key transaction costs associated with transacting in a market.¹⁸ Yet who but the most dedicated graduate student could ever sit through a lecture, much less a seminar meeting, devoted to historical weights and measures? Perhaps more to the point, I do not care if these students leave this course knowing the kinds of things one is likely to get from readings, such as the metric equivalent volume of a chous – in fact, this is precisely what I want them not to walk away with, because there really was no such thing as a standard chous, at least in the way we think of standardized pints or quarts or liters (that is, if we ever bother to think about them at all), except in very particular settings and circumstances.¹⁹ It is these qualifications – the very particular settings and circumstances – on which I wish them to meditate: the historical, political, and economic contingencies of weights and measures. To study abstract tables of equivalencies of ancient weights and measures in the absence of understanding their institutional contexts, their specific uses, and indeed their political origins and functions, avoids, if not obscures, what is fundamentally important and useful in studying measures in this particular educational context, which is the phenomenon and history of measurement itself.⬈#p13

In the context of this course, perhaps the most important thing to come to understand institutionally about measurement is that it was – and indeed remains – costly. It takes resources to measure valuable attributes and to make goods conform to standardized attributes, an essential ingredient in the alchemy that turns natural or craft products into commodities. The cost of measuring goods has an obvious impact on prices; but so does the awareness of the costliness of measurement itself: the recognition of the need to ascertain whether goods have been measured accurately and the costliness of doing so combine to create a platform for strategic opportunism, or an occasion for cheating, and one so broad as potentially to forestall many possible transactions in a market.²⁰ My object lesson for this class, in the first instance, is to make the students grapple with the fundamental problems of measurement: What are we measuring? How do we do it? How do we agree (or coordinate) on which measures to use and when to use them? And then: How might I be cheated? How might I cheat? My secondary aim is to communicate the ways in which these problems of measurement manifested in the ancient world and how they were “solved” in the specific historical and institutional context of the Athenian agora.⬈#p14

My suggestion, therefore, is that students will only really understand Greek measurement practices and regulations, and their social and economic significance, if they first learn their measurement challenges. This is, perhaps, a common contention when it comes to teaching ancient studies: the ancient world is in some ways deceptively familiar, and so one often has to emphasize the ways in which it was foreign to our social structures, our experiences, and our habits of thinking, so that students can confront it with an open mind. Measurement is just one such experience. What makes its exploration simultaneously challenging and rewarding for my students is precisely the fact that their own world is so thoroughly and incredibly standardized: so much measurement takes place behind the scenes, or has been routinized, that most people take it for granted. Consider the standardization of time, as it comes, simultaneously, instantaneously, identically, indeed almost magically, and yet unremarkably, to smart devices all over the world. Or the fact that a kilogram is obviously, self-evidently, tediously a kilogram in Los Angeles, Sao Paolo, Bucharest, and Ulaanbaatar. Or the fact that the internet works, erected on the basis of a series of standards that only a fraction of its users are even aware of, much less comprehend. Pulling back this particular (and particularly modern) veil and revealing the hidden investment and institutional success it represents is both useful and, in my experience, stimulating for students. In my own teaching, I have found that one of the best ways to get students to feel the problem of living in a world without organizations like NIST or ANSI, is to inhabit the problem in the form of a game.²¹⬈#p15

Conclusion

Although I cannot say with scientific certainty that the ancient evidence presented in the endgame of Agoranomika is more meaningful to the students on average because of the game they just played, it does seem to me that they are much more willing to engage with this and other ancient evidence presented hereafter. I also find that they are much more willing to engage with each other in class after this experience and suggest hypothetical situations, or draw comparisons to their own lives, in suggesting an interpretation of an ancient policy or the trajectory of an ancient dispute. Finally, I allow students to design their own serious game in lieu of a traditional paper for the third and final writing assignment for the course. This is definitely a “high-risk, high-reward” proposition (which I am careful to stress); but the best of the games submitted are easily on a par with the best of the papers, and typically the students who excel in taking this route engage in an impressive amount of research in their quest to ground their game in the realia of economic and social life of Classical Greece.⬈#p16

Appendix: Agoranomika, the Ancient Greek Trading Game

What follows is a detailed description of a typical playing session of Agoranomika. See Appendix 2: Links to Basic Instructions to access a PDF intended to be useful for instructors interested in playing a version of this game in their own classrooms.⬈#p17

Rules of play

Time required for set-up and play

• 30-minute, one-time investment in making a simple DIY beam balance (figs. 4–5; instructions easily found online)
• 5–10 minutes for set-up before class
• 1 standard 50–75-minute class period for play
• 5 minutes to clean up

Players

• No more than 25 students, broken up into teams of 2–5 students each, depending on the size of your class. You need at least four teams to play; more than six gets unwieldy, unless you have a very large classroom.

Equipment

Commodities (fig. 1)

• 1 2-lb. bag of rice
• 1-lb. bag of red beans or kidney beans
• 1-lb. bag of red or green lentils (they should be easily distinguished from the red beans)
• 1-lb bag of small black lentils
• 1 large bag of cotton balls
• 1 pint strawberries, black berries, or raspberries (whatever is cheapest!)
• NB. These are minimum suggested quantities

Storage and measuring (figs. 2–5)

• 2 non-standardized, non-transparent small cups per student group, to be used as “traditional measures” (fig. 2)
• A random assortment of three-dimensional objects or figurines, to be used as “counterweights,” 1–2 per group, of various shapes, sizes, and weights (fig. 3)
• 3 different types of plastic, non-transparent cups to hold rice, beans, and lentils, so that each group has a set of three “silos” for commodities (cf. fig. 6)
• For the DIY beam balance (figs. 4–5)
  • 1 coat hanger
  • String
  • 2 identical, plastic take-out containers
  • A sharp knife to cut string and make small holes in the containers