Academia Is a Dice Roll

Game Mechanics

The details of the RPG scenario are discussed below, but some significant aspects of the game’s mechanics are worth mentioning upfront. This is not the first game, or even the first RPG, created to simulate digital humanities work. Gregory Lord, Angel David Nieves, and Janet Simons’s DHQuest, a game developed at Hamilton College, included both a pen-and-paper and a web-based adaptation of an RPG with what Rehn describes as “challenging quests that included finding time, funding, staffing power, institutional support, credibility, and networks. We couldn’t win the game unless we had a bank with all of these resources” (“Developing a Model”). Similarly, DH Unplugged, a card game created by students enrolled in the academic year 2018–2019 Introduction to Digital Humanities cohort at Carleton University, involves amassing resources to accomplish projects.2 Our DH RPG takes a different approach, centering gameplay on the choices of individuals and their relationships to others rather than resource acquisition and combination.

For the DH RPG, students were required to construct a character belonging to an institutional position that differed from their real-life role. The characters of the assistant professor/project director, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, librarians, and undergraduate students in the simulation were thus played by individuals who had to learn about and imagine what it would be like to occupy that position in a DH collaboration. This was an intentional aspect of the game design intended to cultivate empathy among players. As part of character creation, players designed their characters by allocating skill points. All skills were organized into five groups: disciplinary (e.g., language knowledge, writing good prose), technical (everything from citation management and Word formatting to programming), management (managing oneself, others, work, and time), interpersonal (e.g., empathy, deceit, charisma), and personal (hobbies, relationships, and everything else). Faculty and senior staff characters had more skill points to allocate as part of character creation to reflect their greater experience and knowledge, but senior faculty characters automatically had a penalty levied against the skills of empathy, listening, managing people, and self-control unless they spent skill points to counteract the penalty resulting from spending many years with tenure.

During a turn, players decided how their character would allocate time (measured in twenty “activity points”) over the course of one month. Some characters faced different in-game constraints based on their life circumstances; for example, a librarian with young children had fewer activity points available each month, and a noncitizen character had to spend a certain number of activity points struggling with visa issues. Players could freely choose how they spent their activity points, just as people make decisions about how to spend their time. However, if a character decided to undertake an activity that required skill for a successful outcome, the player would have to roll one or more dice. The number of dice available for a task depended on the character’s skill level (e.g., a graduate student might roll three, six-sided dice for a language translation task, which would almost certainly guarantee a higher score and better outcome than an undergraduate rolling a single six-sided die). Every roll included one differently colored “randomness die.” If the player rolled a 1 on the randomness die (even if that player rolled higher numbers on additional dice), the player then had to roll a twenty-sided die. The outcome of this D20 roll was always something unexpected for the character: something good for a high roll, bad for a low roll, or ambiguous for midrange numbers. The frequent appearance of the randomness die and its responsibility for everything from a graduate student language instructor losing students’ midterms to one of those language students winning a fellowship, made evident and consequential the fact that sometimes “stuff happens” through no fault (or merit) of one’s own and that effort and skill do not guarantee success.

Vocational Awe

One narrative that the DH RPG confronted is vocational awe, which Ettarh defines as “beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique” (“Vocational Awe and Librarianship”). Libraries are treated as safe and sacred spaces; librarians are portrayed as the defenders of freedom of access and intellectual freedom and as educators of the public. Often being a librarian is not framed as a job but as a calling, requiring sacrifice from the individual for a higher purpose. Vocational awe has been described explicitly for libraries and librarianship and cannot be co-opted wholesale, but the two professions share structural similarities: the defense of intellectual freedom, the focus on teaching and developing minds for a better society, the awe-inspiring buildings of the most lauded institutions, and the expectations of people to overwork and be underemployed or underpaid for the chance of a professional position. Awe of the institution and the concept of scholarship is at the core of academia.3

The paucity of tenure-track jobs disincentivizes scholars with precarious employment (including those occupying pretenure positions) from critiquing the system lest they be labeled as troublemakers and shut out. For newly tenured faculty, vocational awe may collide with a sense of survivor’s guilt vis-a-vis peers who have been pushed out of academia, but there are significant social pressures against scholars “lucky” or “talented” enough to secure tenure speaking poorly of the system from which they benefited. As such, vocational awe is more than a sense of pride that surrounds and imbues an institution; in academia, just as in libraries, it shapes the organization of labor as well as expectations for going above and beyond in one’s role. Inevitably, this impacts the formation and expectation of working relationships. Through confronting the narrative of vocational awe, our class sought to dismantle the assumptions that can lead to uneven and unfair working partnerships.

The vocational awe of the academy was examined from different angles in the class. Participants played a role they did not hold in real life—a grad student playing the project director and a librarian playing an undergraduate student. Particularly for students, this shifted focus from the potential academic dream path to one of the many possible jobs a student might have in the future: academic, alt-ac, or outside the academy. In the fictional DH project, students were all collaborators with important contributions. Who did basic data entry and who did research was not exclusively tied to the character’s role, exemplifying how the traditional academic path does not have to be the only one with scholarly opportunities. The game mechanic of activity points was effective in undermining the frequent overwork inspired by vocational awe, as activity points applied to all activities in the character’s life, including work, romantic partners, commutes, recreational activities, and Netflix. A player could always choose to sacrifice sleep or mental health to write or work more, but the explicit tallying of points and automatic lowering of skill level as a result of insufficient sleep showed the toll that such actions have in a way the complexities of real life can hide. Whether or not the effects of the game carried over to the students’ real lives, the students tended to act with compassion and care toward their characters, even when the characters were under the pressure of deadlines, almost always allocating at least a few activity points toward relaxation. Viewing the entire working collaboration and its impact upon their character from a “bird’s eye view” (which a role-playing game imparts to its players) thus allowed students to critically observe the toll of vocational awe and, at least hypothetically, devise ways to confront and mitigate its impacts.

The game mechanic of acquiring training also challenged vocational awe: it is not sacrifice or genius that ensures success but more likely the acquisition of skills. Project management is especially important in bigger projects, including many DH projects, which pose the added difficulty of collaborators with different backgrounds and skill sets that may make it more difficult to bring the project to a successful conclusion. For several of the students involved, this simulation was their first DH project; having gone through it once will help them see alternative solutions to challenges in future projects, as they have had the chance to make mistakes and see good practices in action.

Social Ecology of the Academy

Although DH workshops often aim to instruct learners in specific research methods and tools, the DH RPG brought attention to the facilities, services, and individuals that are indispensable to the completion of a project, providing a much-needed perspective on the social ecology of the university. The class began by looking at the variety of “character types” that could be drawn upon to build a research team with the skills and labor power to complete a large project. Then, through course readings (e.g., Alpert-Abrams et al., “Postdoctoral Laborers’ Bill of Rights”; Mann, “Paid to Do but Not to Think”) and discussions, students confronted the reality about how working relationships among collaborators are often shaped by power imbalances and conflicts of interest. The hypothetical world of the game allowed students to see “firsthand” how differences in power, status, and resources shaped behavior throughout the project. For example, when the project director felt concerned about her ability to meet project deadlines, she used her “charisma” skill to persuade an otherwise hesitant student to help digitize texts.4 Students then witnessed the arrangements and compromises the student character had to make to accommodate the PI. The game thus served as a laboratory where students practiced navigating such working relationships and could observe the consequences of their decisions. The spirit of the game was to act in good faith and with consideration for others; one routine assignment was for the students to write up how their character was feeling about the project and the group at the end of that turn of gameplay and then consider it from another character’s point of view. This pushed students to explore fairer, more compassionate modes of interaction. As such, the class simultaneously critiqued the conditions of problematic working relationships and practiced methods to foster a healthier work environment for all in academia.

A good portion of the course was dedicated to learning about the nonfaculty members of the university like IT specialists and librarians who serve as key partners on DH projects. Framed within the context of seeking potential research collaborators, as well as possible career paths, students learned about the various types of projects that IT specialists and librarians undertake in their departments. Offering a range of perspectives from data management to sustaining born-digital projects, students gained an appreciation for how these collaborators can transform a project’s execution plan for the better. Recognizing librarians and IT specialists as valuable but busy collaborators impressed upon students the importance of organized project management and clear communication. The class thus located DH as occupying a relatively central node within the social ecology of the university, a position that underscores the value of training humanists in ethical leadership and management skills.

One of the major organizational structures in DH is the research team, but there are few opportunities for graduate students to grapple with the challenges of creating and working with one without facing high stakes. How do you create a research team? And how do people interact within it? For scholars engaging with DH for the first time, these can be intimidating questions, but an RPG-style class is uniquely positioned to address them. A project simulation allows students to grasp important aspects of the potential and the complexities of assembling a research team of participants outside one’s discipline. Combined with reflexive readings and discussions, students’ experience playing the DH RPG afforded them a wider view of the university than they typically would encounter, exploring matters such as who makes decisions, how funding is allocated, and how these factors ultimately impact one’s research team. The class thus positioned future researchers to have greater environmental mastery within the university, but the nature of the class also emphasized the importance of viewing collaborations as opportunities to build fair, functioning, and productive networks, ventures that will help improve the overall working culture of the academy.

Broadening Career Paths

A powerful outcome of the course was that, almost inevitably, it led to a broadening of students’ career paths. Because students were required to choose a character type that differed from their “real-life” role, the simulation served as an opportunity to better understand the tasks and responsibilities associated with positions with which they were unfamiliar. Furthermore, it allowed students to become aware of how each of those roles interacts with one another; in particular, it provided them with a lay of the land of positions within universities and led the class to engage in open and honest conversations about the pivotal role of hierarchy and power in forging relationships, the diverging attitudes to project collaboration, and best practices for bringing a DH project to fruition.

The DH RPG also fostered self-reflection. The scarcity of academic jobs and fierce competition for the few available positions, combined with the vocational awe that is pervasive in academia, perpetuate the idea that if a PhD student or postdoc is among the few lucky ones to land a tenure-track job, they must take it, regardless of the location, type of school, teaching load, and salary. Although there are narrow margins for negotiation, the overarching message is that landing an academic job is an absolute godsend, being ecstatic is the only appropriate reaction to it, and accepting the job offer is the only possible response. In contrast to this mentality, the DH RPG pushed students to explore an approach that factored in their characters’ priorities, hobbies, and overall personal contexts in their answers to how much work their characters could put into the fictional DH project for that month. Extrapolating this attitude to career exploration, the simulation showed students that individual priorities, social and financial context, and even personal preferences not only can but should play an integral part in the decision of what type of job they seek.

Another valuable lesson from the introspection encouraged by the simulation was that dedicating time and effort to improving or diversifying one’s skills has real consequences. Each character began the DH RPG with a certain level of expertise for each skill, which depended on their character type. These skill levels were not static, however; it was possible to “level up” and obtain additional points for a given skill. Specifying clear leveling up rules instilled in students the message that dedicating time and effort to learning and training leads to visible improvement and to the opening up of new possibilities. In this light, it becomes worthwhile to invest time in developing their skills, regardless of whether or not those skills are valued in graduate education.

What effect might it have on the academy if training in project management, and, more significantly, ethical collaboration, were a mandatory prerequisite to applying for a grant or holding an administrative role from undergraduate advisor to the dean? Simulations such as the DH RPG have the potential to take the difficult decisions typically presented in training workshops and make them both personal and consequential. Although a systemic overhaul of the training expectations of the university would be a massive and difficult undertaking, the incorporation of role-playing games into the undergraduate and graduate classroom is a more manageable feat and within reach of individual instructors or program administrators (e.g., see Katina Rogers in chapter 1 of this volume). Given a moderate degree of freedom in course planning, instructors of DH courses are well-positioned to create a space for grappling with hard questions about the academy, careers, and priorities. Ultimately, the most important methods to learn in grad school do not involve text analysis, visualization, or mapping; they are grounded in how to relate to people in different positions and with different constraints and through those relationships how to reach an understanding about what a meaningful career might look like for each of us, regardless of where that career is situated within or beyond the academy.

Notes

1. 1. The rulebook, character sheets, example scenarios, and other materials for the DH RPG are available at https://dhrpg.github.io/. The syllabus for DLCL 205 is available at https://github.com/quinnanya/dlcl205.

2. 2. The materials for this game are available at https://playdhcu5000.github.io/dh-unplugged/.

3. 3. As an example, at the end of the PhD graduation ceremony at one author’s European alma mater, after the cannon shots the conferrer said (roughly translated from Latin, of course): “May your scholarly insight also in the future be a credit to yourselves, your university, your country and a benefit to humankind.”

4. 4. The gamification of rote data tasks like OCR, as commonly found on crowdsourcing sites like Zooniverse, could be seen as a real-world attempt to incentivize participation in the absence of a personal connection with a PI that can provide a more powerful motivational lever.

Bibliography

1. Alpert-Abrams, Hannah, Heather Froehlich, Amanda Henrichs, Jim McGrath, and Kim Martin, eds. “Postdoctoral Laborers’ Bill of Rights.” Humanities Commons. April 9, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/7fz6-ra81.
2. Ettarh, Fobazi. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lie We Tell Ourselves.” In The Library With the Lead Pipe. January 10, 2018. http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.
3. Lord, Gregory, Angel David Nieves, and Janet Simons. “DHQuest.” Last updated 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20160306214611/http://dhquest.com/.
4. Mann, Rachel. “Paid to Do but Not to Think: Reevaluating the Role of Graduate Student Collaborators.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 268–78. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
5. Rehn, Andrea. “Developing a Model: Highlights from DHSI 2015” Whittier College DigLibArts. June 12, 2015. http://diglibarts.whittier.edu/developing-a-model-highlights-from-dhsi-2015/.