Which was worse: seeing the message above, informing you of your Oregon Trail traveling avatar’s imminent demise, or shooting a buffalo, only to realize you had no room for additional meat in your wagon?

The question might sound facetious, but I’m not asking it in a joking manner. When playing Oregon Trail, you had to make decisions with consequences: ford the river or pay for a ferry? Buy bullets and waste days hunting, or live more frugally? Go to the fort or to the Green River? Each time you played the game, you likely made different choices to evaluate the outcome, including a round where you set a grueling pace with no food and let the characters (who you may or may not have named after your siblings) die.

One of my favorite websites, Grantland.com, recently hipped me to a subgenre of video game writing: walkthrough/review hybrids of obscure DOS games. I spent many childhood hours playing the Hugo’s House of Horrors series, and reading these pieces prompted me to think about the term “gamification” differently. Unlock the door to fortune and prosperity with a selection of money-spinning judi slot adventures.

I’ve talked around the term in this space before, and it looks like I’m setting out to do so again (and I’ll repeat that for the full guru experience, check in with my colleague Daniel Stanford). This time, these old video game reviews made me think of the “gamification of learning” as it relates to the way we design the scaffolding of learning in courses.

As I read through The Trickster’s Hugo playthrough narrative, I was surprised both by the level of detail I remembered from the game and by how much I wanted to reach through the screen and help. Don’t go into the room with the monsters until you have the monkey mask! Make Igor press all of the buttons so you can get the rubber bung! Read the message on the mirror – you’ll need it for later.

I recognize that these statements sound like gibberish, but they’re crucial to winning this game, and as I read The Trickster’s thinking narrative, all of the knowledge about this game that was stored in the deep recesses of my brain came right back to the surface. And, even more than these game details, I was remembering some DOS game best practices, like “save different versions of the game so that you can return to multiple points” and “if something doesn’t work, and it seems like it should, shift your character two pixels to the right and try again.”

Here’s the connection to learning: faculty are expert academic gamers. They’ve “won” the Oregon Trail of their content area (instead of arriving in Oregon, you get tenure!), and in addition to forwarding the knowledge of their field, they teach courses for students who are starting at the beginning.

We know that teachers spend a lot of time designing curriculum for the best possible student learning, but it’s difficult to put yourself in the mindset of someone just starting out. Once you know something, it’s impossible to un-know it. Once you’ve found Waldo, you’ll always know where he is.

This experience with the DOS game walkthrough made me think that considering specific details and embodied experiences could help. Seeing the screenshots from the game and reading the descriptions unearthed memories for me, and I knew how I would direct someone else playing the game for the first time. The next time I’m designing a new assignment, I’m going to try this type of visualization, treating the assignment as a game: What foundational knowledge do students need to get started? What tips and tricks will help them move through the “levels” of the assignment more easily? What pitfalls could I anticipate and help them avoid? Instead of gamifying my course in the traditional sense, this process will prompt me to gamify my assignment design.

Just a PSA here at the end: if you’re also a fan of old DOS games, you can play them on your Mac with the Boxer emulator and on your PC with DOSBox. There are also many, many places to download your favorite classic games.