Introduction

Science and engineering education is one important means by which professionals are trained to address sustainability issues, from climate change to biodiversity conservation to transitions to renewable energy. Sustainability issues have difficult ethical features that professionals should be prepared to confront, such as intergenerational equity and global justice. Most existing professional ethics modules in science and engineering education today are not up to this task. Indeed, they are typically structured around teaching students case studies of a few archetypal “rotten apples.” Through incompetence or pathological behavior, the decisions of these archetypal apples cause unethical outcomes that give “the barrel a bad name” (Sibley 2008). Students often learn that the outcomes of these cases pivot on the decisions of one or just a few individuals, and they are taught that were these individuals to have instead followed a list of rules or norms of professional behavior, things would have turned out better.

Pedagogy in sustainability ethics demands curricula that are oriented to problems with greater levels of complexity and a broader scope than the problems associated with cases of rotten apples. Curricula must be oriented to wickedFootnote 1 problems (Raffaelle et al. 2010; Seager et al. 2011b). Wicked problems involve deep disagreements among the various parties about how to formulate the nature of the problem, rampant surprises and scientific uncertainties, serious credibility deficits for various technical and political authorities, and ripple effects across entangled social and ecological systems that are hard to track and anticipate. A growing literature suggests that the contours of sustainability problems are best described as wicked (Norton 2005; Batie 2008; Australian Government 2007; Lach et al. 2005; Lazarus 2009; Turnpenny et al. 2009; Brown et al. 2010; Seager et al. 2011b; Thompson and Whyte 2011; Norton 2011).

The ethical scenarios of wicked problems far exceed the decisions of one or just a few individuals. Instead, they feature collective action problems, distrust, contested scientific authority, competing conceptions of right or wrong, and the impossibility of doing anything that does not implicate the actor in harms against someone else, either globally or across generations. But how can professional ethics modules even expect to impart some of what is needed to prepare students for wicked, sustainability ethics scenarios? We argue for one possible solution based on an experiential pedagogy that blends basic ideas from game theory with instructors’ improvisational abilities in the classroom environment. Our goal is to outline this theory and concretize some of its main tenets with examples of how it has been practiced in the authors’ classrooms at three different universities with strong commitments to science and engineering research and education: Arizona State University (urban public research), Michigan State University (land grant/public research), and Rochester Institute of Technology (private engineering specialty). Though the theory is framed in terms of science and engineering education, it is also applicable to humanities, arts and social science education where the pedagogy of sustainability ethics faces similar and different challenges. We envision future applications in courses on topics ranging from environmental ethics and environmental literature to interdisciplinary studies and agricultural economics.

We begin in “Sustainability Ethics Pedagogy Should Be Wicked” by explaining how the wickedness of sustainability problems require professional ethics to go beyond what Dale Jamieson calls paradigm moral problems. The section “Experiential Learning” moves on to a proposed solution—experiential game theoretic pedagogy—and outlines the mechanics of each of four ethics games: the externalities game (TEG); the tragedy of the commons games (Pisces); the Solow game (Solow); and the intergenerational equity game (Intergen). Each game is played within course modules structured according to the Kolb Learning Cycle. Instructors can facilitate experiential learning through improvising in the classroom during gameplay. In “Pilot Experiences with the Games”, we illustrate this theoretical approach through some examples of pilot classroom experiences, and suggest several possible learning outcomes that are fulfilled, such as students’ achievement of group tacit knowledge and resilience. These two key skills are needed for groups to successfully respond to surprising and unfamiliar scenarios. Lastly, in the “Conclusion” we propose a set of abilities that students may likely make progress toward achieving through gameplay.

Sustainability Ethics Pedagogy Should be Wicked

A wide array of sustainability ethics courses and modules are structured around at least two assumptions that are counterproductive for getting students to think about the wickedness of sustainability issues. The first assumption is that achieving predictable results is the goal of creating rules and codes of conduct. But ethical problems in sustainability are unpredictable and consequences cannot be evaluated simply as right or wrong. For example, much of the debate about geoengineering approaches to climate management revolves around the unknowable risks and systemic impacts of intentionally changing the climate (Jamieson 1996). In reality, ethical conduct exists in an intermediate zone where outcomes are in doubt and heuristic (rather than algorithmic) reasoning represents the best approach. Algorithmic approaches to ethics will eventually fail when confronted with conditions that could never be anticipated by rules or codes. For sustainability ethics, students must possess moral reasoning capabilities that are adaptive to the unfamiliar and unexpected situations characteristic of wicked problems.

The second assumption is that ethics education should focus on the individual as opposed to the group or the system. While such an approach might be effective for micro-level ethical dilemmas, issues in sustainability occur at the macro-level. That is, issues such as overfishing of the oceans or climate change are embedded in techno-social systems that are ever-changing and exhibit the wicked conditions described in the introduction. This calls for adaptive institutions or open organizations that are able to coordinate collective action in the face of wickedness. Allenby (2006) argues that what is required for confronting such systems is a macro-ethics that is more concerned “with processes, as opposed to single actions. The choice of the process by which the individual becomes engaged in a dialog with the system, rather than each individual choice, is what becomes ethically critical” (p. 11). In sustainability, the specific ethical consequences of a particular system cannot be traced or attributed to the decisions of any one or small group of individuals (Seager et al. 2011a). They emerge only in aggregate. Accordingly, students must learn how to work collectively to cope better with wicked sustainability problems, which is quite different from figuring out less complex professional conundrums like plagiarism or data falsification.

Dale Jamieson locates these assumptions as part of paradigm moral problems, which “presuppose that harms and their causes are individual, that they can be readily identified, and that they are local in time and space” (1992, p. 148). Paradigm moral problems are like “Jack intentionally stealing Jill’s bicycle.” Sustainability problems like climate change, however, suggest another Jack and Jill scenario: “Acting independently, Jack and a large number of unacquainted people set in motion a chain of events that causes a larger number of future people who will live in another part of the world from ever having bicycles.” (2010, p. 436). Ethics education appropriate for the intentional stealing of a bicycle will have no traction in sustainability problems where the paradigm is irrelevant: individual empowerment is diminished, uncertainty prevails, and effects are not localizable. Numerous environmental philosophers recognize the need for an ethics of collective action for sustainability problems that does not draw from paradigm moral problems, including Baird Callicott’s recent shift to relational/holistic ethics (2011), Bryan Norton’s understanding of ethics in adaptive management (2005), and Paul Thompson’s agrarian ideals for building sustainable communities (2010).

There is also recognition in environmental ethics education that simply exposing students to sustainability-relevant values and awareness is not sufficient for education that prepares them to address wicked problems. Ferkany and Whyte (2011) discuss how collective mobilizations can fail when participants lack the particular skills and traits needed for deliberation on wicked problems. These skills and traits go beyond moral reasoning and include tacit abilities to work in teams and build trust, communicate with others who disagree and have different backgrounds, and remain resilient even in the face of pervasive uncertainty and conflict. They argue that environmental education must give students the experiences needed to develop these skills and traits or else students will not be prepared to work collectively with others to address sustainability problems. Students of sustainability ethics must have the deliberative skills to coordinate their actions across varying levels and types of expertise within a group.

Wicked, sustainability issues may also differ from paradigm moral problems in terms of what student learning ought to aim for and how it should be assessed. Students who learn the right behavior for a paradigm moral problem may experience transformation from one expectation to another. That is, “before I thought it was okay to do that, but now I understand that it’s morally wrong, and why.” It might be assumed that education in wicked problems flows in this way: “before I thought climate change was a simply matter, but now I understand it as much more complex.” We resist this idea. Learning about climate change does not revolve around a transformation from reductive expectations to ones that appreciate greater complexity. Rather, students are put in a situation of moral identity crisis, which causes them to question their own behavior (as well as the behavior of others). Often the way students perceive themselves is inconsistent with their actual behavior (Kahneman 2011). In the case of ethics, this manifests as a gap between their moral ideals and moral actions (Sadowski 2011). The moral identity crisis is meant to make them reconcile their inconsistencies by placing students in ethical situations where they reflect on how they acted and compare it with their previous self-perceptions.

These considerations challenge curricular models for sustainability ethics consisting of “read-write-discuss” formulas about paradigm moral problems. How can courses and modules structured in this way prepare students to enter collective, deliberative processes and open organizations, as well as confront their moral identity crises? They cannot. Curricula of this kind are premised on the idea that instructors must explain to a passive set of students how things work in the hopes that students will absorb this information and act on it at some point in the future well after they have finished the course. All this assumes that instructors have answers to sustainability ethics problems that students must try to take from the instructor by accepting whatever form of the delivery the instructor feels best, even if it is not a very good one. This model has been criticized for some time in other contexts (Jacotot 1827; Rancière 1991; Freire 1970). The read-write-discuss model sets a stage for student learning that is very different from the collective, deliberative processes, open organizational structures and moral identity crises that future professionals will have to work within to cope with wicked, sustainability problems. Moreover, the authoritative instructor/passive student model does not reflect sustainability ethics scenarios in any way that will be recognizable to students later on in their careers and lives. For example, who is the instructor-like authority in climate change for whom students will be rewarded for demonstrating their understanding of his or her explanations? Is there any instructor who really knows a cut and dry solution to the global depletion of fish populations?

Our responses to these questions follow along some of the ideas about instruction in the educational theory of Jacotot in the early nineteenth century that was adapted to the twentieth century by Rancière in The Ignorant School Master (1991). These thinkers believe that all people have an equal capacity to learn on their own if they are moved to do so, such as when they learned their first language or when they acquired some other ubiquitous skill or expertise. Students need to be put into situations not unlike what it is like to learn a ubiquitous skill. So when an instructor tries to explain to students the right or wrong beliefs to have, or best or worst ways to do things, he or she establishes a relationship of dependence with the students. Dependent students do not realize their own learning capacities because they are not moved to experiment or practice the materials to be learned. Different from this, Jacotot and Rancière see the role of the instructor as a coordinator of students’ will to learn. No dependency relations are established. Instructors do not need to know the answers to the topics being taught. The role of instructors is to expose students directly to the topics being studied and allow their natural learning capacities to be stimulated and shape how their learning takes place. We call this the improvisational role of the instructor, or instructor as coordinator of student learning. An instructor playing this role is especially sensitive to each student’s unique learning situation.

The Kolb Learning Cycle can be looked at as a way of illustrating at least some of the thoughts of Jacotot and Rancière that we interpret as being critical of educational models built around read-write-discuss formulas. In David Kolb’s view, this cycle is composed of four categories: (1) abstract conceptualization; (2) active experimentation; (3) concrete experience; and (4) reflective observation (Kolb 1984). A read-write-discuss model relies only upon (1) abstract conceptualization and (4) reflective observation; there is no (2) experimentation or (3) experience. In other words, through this model students are made to read texts or case studies, abstractly think about the concepts and then reflect on what they read. Without incorporating (2) and (3) the reflection takes on a negative, passive characteristic because the students cannot easily tie the abstract concepts back to relevant, concrete experiences. Additionally, education missing categories (2) and (3) is fatal for the ability to cope with emergent phenomenon of complex systems, because coping often requires swift action via effective heuristic reasoning, which can only be developed through similar past experiences and experimentation.

We believe that instructors have a responsibility to orient the pedagogy of sustainability ethics toward the wickedness of the problems it inevitably addresses. In 1967, C. West Churchman drew attention to the implications for professionals in operations research and management science of recognizing wicked problems. “The moral principle is this: whoever attempts to tame a part of a wicked problem, but not the whole, is morally wrong.” This is because anyone who both recognizes the wickedness of a problem at the same time that they propose solutions or approaches for tame problems is engaging in a kind of deception: he or she is leading the other to believe that the problem is solved. In reality, such deception fails to prepare the other person for the challenges that await them. While we do not make an ethical claim as strong as Churchman’s, we agree that there is a danger in taming only part of a wicked problem. Avoiding this danger requires more than just teaching students about sustainability ethics via lectures, readings, and class discussions focused on paradigm moral problems that are, in the end, unreliable for preparing them to address sustainability problems.

To address the new requirements for teaching sustainability ethics, we have developed a novel, experiential pedagogy that is based on non-cooperative, game-theoretic problems. Our project has developed educational games that coordinate students’ collective action on four different issues in sustainability: (1) environmental externalities, (2) the Tragedy of the Commons, (3) weak vs. strong sustainability, and (4) intergenerational equity. Each causes students to act in concert in engagement with two questions: “What are my obligations to others?” and “What am I willing to risk in my own well-being to meet those obligations?”

Unlike board and video games, these games are interactional and deliberative ethical activities where students must make choices that will not only affect themselves, but all the other players in the game. For example, in the externalities game, players might be in a position that allows them to improve their own grade, but only at the expense of disadvantaged classmates (Seager et al. 2010; Spierre et al. 2011). Success in the game for the entire class will require negotiation among players operating in different roles, under different constraints, and with different ideas about how to enact the most productive course of action. Each game utilizes its own unique spreadsheet and underlying mathematics. However, rather than directing attention to the mathematics, the complexity results from the interaction among students, competition between multiple pathways for success, and emergent and unpredictable structures (such as alliances or governance mechanisms).

Also, the instructor is not simply a passive observer of game play amongst the students; nor is the instructor a puppeteer pulling students in directions of which he or she is the only one aware of exactly what the outcome will be. Instead, the instructor must be a flexible and improvisational actor in the game who sees him or herself as embedded in the problem solving activities no different from the students.

Experiential Learning

The Mechanics of Each Game

Before moving forward we will briefly describe the mechanics of each of the four games we created:

The Externalities Game (TEG) focuses on the problem of negative externalities. Students are randomly assigned to one of three production classes: Luxury, Intermediate, and Subsistence. Students then make individual decisions about how many units they wish to produce up to a set maximum per production class. Those in Luxury gain the most profit (i.e. grade points) per unit produced, but they also emit the most externalities, or social costs, which directly subtract from the profit of everybody else in the game; Intermediate players produce a medium amount of profit and externalities per unit and Subsistence players produce a low amount of profit and externalities per unit. The students must then decide whether they will lower their production so that others are not harmed or just try to maximize their own benefit at the expense of others. After all players input their production decisions and see their grade (profit—social costs), individuals have the opportunity to share grade points with others in order to help those who ended up with low grades. This provides the partial opportunity to rectify past decisions.

The Pisces Game (Pisces) simulates the Tragedy of the Commons. Students are assigned to 12 groups based on their zodiac signs in order to randomize the number and size of each group (which often leaves some zodiac groups with no students). Each group takes on the role of a fishing village that must share a common lake with all the other groups. The groups take turns catching fish out of the common lake. They then have five options for ways to use these fish. First, they can consume the fish, where one fish consumed equals one grade point; however, each player in the group has to consume at least four fish per round for sustenance. If all players cannot eat four fish then one or more of the players dies and can no longer play. This puts the larger groups at a disadvantage to the smaller groups because they must use more resources just to feed all of their members. Second, they can invest fish into building a private pond whose capacity to store fish is a function of how many fish were invested into it. Third, they can stock their private pond with fish from the common lake to match the invested capacity. Fourth, they can consume fish from their private pond. Fifth, they can share fish with other groups, either fish they catch or fish from the private pond. At the end of each full round of play, i.e. once every group has had a turn, a percentage of the remaining fish in the common lake and all the private ponds regenerate. Fish in the private ponds regenerate at a higher percentage than those in the common lake. But we have also built in a random chance of, at the end of each group’s turn, them losing three-quarters of the fish in their pond. This is meant to simulate the surprising, disastrous events that occur in real world systems. The game proceeds for either 8 full rounds or until all the groups die from not being able to eat four fish. Once the game is over students receive the grade that they have at that point in the game, as is the case with all the multi-round games we created.

The Solow Game (Solow) deals with the conception of weak vs. strong sustainability. Students are broken up into small groups of six. Each student takes turns rolling a 12-sided die. The number rolled is set to equal the number of resource points a student has to use for that turn. Resource points can either be (1) consumed, which gives the student grade points, (2) invested into raising the student’s technology level, which causes consumption to be more efficient. Efficient consumption means more grade points gained per unit consumed. There are also positive externalities built into the game. That is, a student’s technology will slowly diffuse to other students, thus raising their technology level. This creates an incentive to consume as many points as possible and just free-ride on the investment of others. The game is played for either 12 rounds of each student having a turn or until somebody achieves a grade of 100.

The Intergenerational Equity Game (Intergen) addresses issues dealing with justice between different generations. The mechanics are similar to the Solow Game in that students can either consume or invest resource points. However, instead of rolling dice to receive resource points, there is a zero-sum pool that all the students draw from. The class is broken up into three generations. To eliminate communication between generations we have each one come to class at a certain time to play. So, for example, the students in the first generation will come to class, make their decisions and leave; then the second generation will come in, and so on. Students in each generation plays for five rounds and then their generation is over and they receive the grade that they achieved in those five rounds. Since there are only a finite number of resource points shared by all the generations, students must decide how much they are going to consume for their own grade, how much to invest in technology, which is passed down to the next generation, and how many resources points to leave for future generations to use—all without talking to anybody from outside of their own generation.

These games offer a rich and diverse set of experiences that can be molded to emphasize some aspects more so than others (e.g. moral luck, the role of experts, and uncertainty of knowledge), depending on the instructor’s preferences. For more detail on the games see: Seager et al. 2010; Spierre et al. 2011. We also developed multi-university versions of the games that can be played via digital information and communication technology across different classrooms. However, for this article our delimited focus will only attend to the ethics games played within a single university. Future essays will explore the multi-university model of play.

Games and the Kolb Learning Cycle

As explained above, the most effective method for students to learn to cope with sustainability ethics is to repeatedly engage the entire Kolb Learning Cycle. Therefore, each game module consists of underlying readings (and discussion), explanation of the game model’s rules, testing of different strategies (as homework, and in on-line discussion), game play, reflection and repeated game play. For example, in Pisces, students are assigned to read Garrett Hardin’s classic article The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) as well as Elinor Ostrom et al’s later response entitled Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges (1999). This phase of abstract conceptualization is necessary for students to encounter the thought and theory around the issue being explored, as well as the potential solutions proposed in the literature. Students are also provided with short interactive lectures centered on questions designed to encourage them to explore their own beliefs (Table 1).

Table 1 This image illustrates the different stages that students must move through to complete Kolb’s experiential learning cycle as well as expected objectives, activities, assessments, and outcomes of each stage
Full size table

Following the reading assignments, we provide students with an overview of the game instructions and a spreadsheet that models game outcomes. This is a period of active experimentation, which allows students to explore the concepts just presented, as well as examine the game from multiple perspectives based on tinkering with the spreadsheet. We require students to post (on-line) a hypothesis about what they think will happen during game play. Many students devise a course of action that they think will lead to a fair or just outcome. Some students will emerge as “technical experts” as a result of figuring out the inner workings of the game model. Students may post strategies they discover while experimenting, but for strategic reasons some elect to withhold knowledge, or post decoy information in an attempt to confuse or misdirect other students. When devising gameplay strategies most students at this stage use an individualistic rule of thumb where each student only plans out what he or she should do without fully considering the range of options available to others.

During gameplay, experimentation does not stop, as students test different strategies or arguments with one another. However, in-game experimentation eventually yields to concrete experience. For example, while playing the externalities game, one student stood up and announced a plan by which all students could score high grades. The student explained the plan on a classroom whiteboard, telling the class that if they followed this plan that everybody in the class could get a ‘B’ for their grade. The student expected others to trust his knowledge and follow his plan. Several students volunteered that they were agreeable until one student declared that he was skeptical and did not trust that the “expert” knew what he was talking about. This led to a cascade of doubt and mistrust resulting in few students following the plan. The students experienced how making a claim to knowledge is an insufficient justification for others to accept this knowledge, which is typical of similar situations in wicked problems. This is just one example of the sorts of unexpected situations that occur during game-play. The unfamiliar and unpredictable nature of the games prevents students from referring to a rote list of rules or principles that can be generalized to all game situations, or to looking to the instructor for hints. No such hints exist. Rather, students have to learn how to think, reason, and improvise on their feet without a deus ex machina who happens to look like the instructor. The games not only expand the number and quality of experiences that students have to draw from, but the games motivate students to cultivate moral reasoning skills for coping with wicked problems.

Once each game is played students must have time for reflective observation for re-living their experiences. Reflection can happen in many ways. One way is through verbal class discussion after playing a game; at this point, student emotions are still engaged and some students express frustration with the behavior of their classmates. Students also reflect via formal and informal critical writing assignments. Formal writing assignments, such as critical essays, allow students to think through their experiences and work out solutions to the problems they faced. In particular, we ask to students to describe how they behaved towards others, how others behaved towards them, and whether these behaviors met the expectations they posted in their original hypotheses. During reflection, students are often confronted with the reality of a significant gap between their moral aspirations (e.g. the promises they made themselves or others) and their moral actions as represented by the choices they made in game play (Sadowski 2011). For many students this conflict leads to the above described moral identity crisis. Resolving the moral identity crisis can only be accomplished by playing again. As part of their reflective essays, we ask student how they could redesign their interactions to foster more collaborative behavior.

In one case where repeated game play occurred in a single extended period without sufficient time for reflection, the quality of play (as measured by student’s grades) deteriorated as minor defections from the collective spiraled into a systemic collapse of trust. But in other scenarios, in which replay follows the reflective exercises, it is much more common for scores to rise such that all players earn A’s. Consequently, we conclude that reflection is a critically important stage for completing the learning experience. Lastly, each game module concludes with a short essay assignment asking students to confront two salient questions: “What are my obligations to others?” and “What am I willing to risk in my own well-being to meet those obligations?” Ideally, students connect their essays back to the original readings to complete the learning cycle.

Pilot Experiences with the Games

All four game modules have been piloted in sequence at Rochester Institute of Technology as part of a new undergraduate course called “Sustainability Ethics” in which students from mechanical engineering, computer science, civil engineering and other majors (e.g. hospitality management) were enrolled.Footnote 2 Our experience demonstrates that when the complete set of modules is delivered in series, students gain communication, deliberation, and team-work skills in addition to moral reasoning. For example, at the course outset and during TEG, students did not know one another’s names. They were unable to coordinate their actions in groups, and as a consequence a large percentage of the class failed to earn passing grades in their first two attempts at game-play. This failure demonstrates the lack of communication skills necessary to find a cooperative solution to a problem of collective action. Although this failure could be attributed solely to deficiencies of interpersonal communication or leadership, Erden et al. (2008) might characterize the class in terms of group tacit knowledge (GTK). Teams with low levels of GTK operate as loose assemblages without group identity or self-knowledge. They have difficulty even following instructions or taking orders. Eventually, our students resolved difficulties of cooperation by instituting self-designed governance structures to ensure formation and enforcement of rules that instantiated a collective strategy.Footnote 3

During Pisces, students realized that their previous failures were the result of poor trust and communication. Some sub-groups elected to pool resources and play cooperatively. These students had gained a low level of GTK with each other due to their experiences playing the previous game and thus earned high grades, however, the majority of the class repeated the failures of TEG. They communicated with other players poorly or not at all. They lacked trust in one another and as a result acted selfishly in a way that eventually impoverished other students in the class. One individual student in particular became very marginalized, because the student had problems communicating with others and was randomly assigned to the last spot in the order of play. Moreover, the doubly disadvantaged student’s appeals to collective action were ignored by the class in favor of self-interest. It eventually became clear to the class as a whole that this student had been treated unfairly. After the game this prompted another student to ask publicly, without sarcasm, “Are we bad people?” Through this experience, the game exposed students to various mechanisms of social power and privilege (Table 2).

Table 2 This table explains the increasing levels of GTK that groups can gain and relates each level to specific classroom experiences during gameplay
Full size table

During Solow, students were resolved to do better at working together. They were separated into small groups, playing in parallel (but without interaction between tables), to better facilitate communication, trust, and collective action. Moreover, for the first time the games introduced an element of luck, in which the resources available to individual players were determined by rolling dice. Students quickly recognized the collective action strategies that would result in success. In fact, they realized that it was possible to cheat by fixing the roll of the die favorably for all players. Because enforcement of the dice rolls depended entirely on the willingness of the group to police one another’s rolls, success in the game could be assured if all players at the table agreed on fixing the rolls. All six tables independently arrived at these agreements, and at first, each table was convinced that they were the only table cheating. The class had achieved what Erden et al (2008) terms a GTK of Level 2: Collective Action, in which they are capable of working collectively towards the betterment of the group as a whole. Yet they had not yet achieved Level 3: Phronesis. At this stage, the group is able to judge whether the collective goal is worthy or just. When game play ended, although students had accumulated a vast excess of the number of points required of an ‘A’ grade, they nonetheless felt dissatisfied. They felt that they had not really learned anything; they had not been challenged by the game; and they had not really “played.”

Several students proposed to redesign the game to remove incentives to cheat, or better police cheating. They presented their redesigned games in the next class period, and students voted on which game they wanted to play next. Nevertheless, when playing the student-redesigned game, under the supervision of their peers who had redesigned the games, the exact same phenomenon was observed as in the first trial of play, in which students worked collectively to circumvent the rules. A second redesign and trial resulted in essentially the same result. This case also exemplifies how the improvisational ability of the instructor is crucial for coordinating gameplay.

In Intergen, students were divided into three “generations”. They were instructed that there could be no communication between the generations, that each generation would play in series such that the next generation would inherit the game conditions (but not grades) from the previous generation, and that it was impossible for all generations to earn ‘A’ grades. Having been conditioned previously by the experiences of the prior games, and divided into small groups, students quickly established strong lines of communication and constructive dialogue. Due to the students’ greatly increased GTK and their multitude of previous shared experiences, a plan emerged that seemingly ensured that all students in all generations could (in fact) achieve ‘A’ grades, provided that the first generation invested wisely, bequeathed sufficient resources to subsequent generations, and that subsequent generations properly understood and executed the plan. Despite the fact that this violated the instructions that ‘A’ grades for everyones was mathematically impossible (in fact, this instruction was purposefully false), and despite the prohibition on communication between generations, the first generation implemented their strategy. Moreover, they appealed to the instructors for permission to leave a “time capsule” for the next generation (written in chalk on the classroom blackboard) to communicate their intentions and instructions for subsequent generations. In the end, all students agreed to the plan, and all earned ‘A’ grades.

Behavior in the final game indicated that students could achieve a quality of GTK that allowed them to improvise unique and effective solutions to unfamiliar, complex problems. This ability to improvise and respond to unknown problems is also related to the characteristic of resilience when faced with unexpected hazards as the result of a natural disaster (e.g. tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.) or a man-made catastrophe (e.g. terrorist attacks, wars, etc.) (Park et al. 2011; Seager et al. 2011c). A resilience approach to hazard management requires adaption to new situations, quick decision-making, and effective collective action. Successfully completing our games requires players to exhibit all of these skills.

In addition, the students were capable of not only working together, but also understood how to differentiate between worthy and pathological goals. Moreover, they were comfortable working creatively, and trusted that others (including instructors) would constructively interpret even heterodoxical ideas. In this case, students looked past the “rules” as they had been handed to them, but instead of “cheating” solely for the purpose of grubbing grade points for themselves, they created a constructive learning environment that was supportive of the interests of all students—even those that were not present in the room. In fact, in subsequent essays, students mentioned that they were disappointed that all students could in fact earn ‘A’ grades. We believe this sentiment reflects the fact that students wanted the opportunity to demonstrate they had learned their ethical lessons so well that they no longer could be swayed by grade incentives.

Conclusion

Game theory serves as the structural framework for us to design an experiential learning environment where students gain experience addressing ethical dilemmas as well as learn how to navigate the power dynamics of cooperation and competition with other students working through the same scenarios. The students are not pushed towards one theory of human behavior over others (e.g. rational choice theory), rather they are given the opportunity to determine for themselves how real humans behave and interact with others when confronted with moral dilemmas where something is at stake.

The game-theoretic, experiential pedagogy moves the learning experience from passive to active, apathetic to emotionally invested, narratively closed to experimentally open, and from predictable to surprising. This final point may be an essential quality with respect to adapting in response to the surprising and emergent phenomena that characterize complex systems. By definition, it is impossible to completely plan a response to crises that are unforeseen. Nonetheless, the collective improvisational skills that characterize high levels of GTK are likely generalizable from one unique problem to others, and may allow for rapid resolution of wicked problems in their earliest stages of recognition. Students participating in the game-based pedagogy cultivate news skills necessary in this context, including:

  • A heightened sense of self-awareness about their own beliefs and how those beliefs relate to their actions.

  • The courage to question components of their self-identity when faced with experiences that contradict their beliefs.

  • Increased aptitude for taking risks and acting outside of their habituated norms.

  • The tolerance to learn from and be positively motivated by failures.

  • Increased comfort with problem discovery and improvisational solutions in unfamiliar and complex situations.

  • The ability to distinguish problems that require collective action from problems that can be addressed by individuals.

  • The skills necessary to deliberate in high stakes group settings when multiple perspectives compete for attention and control.

  • Enhanced awareness of the interests, communication styles, and underlying cultural values that shape interactions between peers in group settings.

  • The capacity to proactively perceive changes in a group dynamics and respond appropriately.

Students completed the sustainability ethics course with a different vision of success than they began the term with. Initially, they came to the class looking at the games as mere quizzes. In so doing, they applied a habitual model of meaning to the format: the goal of taking a quiz is to do well; wellness is defined as achieving a high score. To use Erden et al.’s (2008) language, an “I-intention” guided egocentric behavior. By the last game, however, students saw the goal differently and perceived the games as endowed with a different meaning. The new goal was for everyone to do well; a “we-intention” became the normative standard. Games that once were viewed as personal challenges transformed into opportunities for bringing about collective success, largely through the skills acquired during the term.

How is it possible that students came to perceive the last game so differently from the first? After all, each game has the same basic non-cooperative, game theoretic structure. And yet, students saw the last game in terms of latent possibilities, possibilities that existed from the start but had thus far gone unrecognized. Since nothing significant changed in the external environment while new commonly held perspective was able to take hold, we postulate an internal shift took place. The key to explaining the shift in outlook and correlative expressions in action can be attributed to an intersubjective transformation in the class’s guiding mental model. Different mental models allow for problems to be perceived as having different meanings. In the end, students crossed the metaphorical finish line together, demonstrating they acquired a mental model apt for tackling collective action problems in sustainability ethics.