Teaching with Games: Formative Gaming in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics

Karl Egerton's paper examines whether a competitive card game can serve as a formative teaching tool in philosophy, using Are You Flourishing?, a game designed to illustrate transformative experience theory in a third-year UK module called Communicating Philosophy. That module emphasizes transferable skills and applied communication across eight professional domains, and students in the cohort reported enjoying the course while finding it demanding, particularly because of low confidence in their understanding and unclear marking criteria. The game was designed to let students explore a genuine philosophical problem through play: players pursue Values-based "good lives," and transformative experiences can change what they value, raising questions about whether expected utility theory can judge such choices rational. The design deliberately avoids "generic gamification" by preserving player agency.

The evaluation drew on a student survey of 32 enrolled students, with nine responses (28% of enrolment, or 39% of those who attended the sessions). Respondents rated enjoyment moderately, with a mean of 3.11 out of 5, and on average agreed that the game helped them think about transformative experience, gamification, and communicating philosophy. Notably, 89% agreed it improved their confidence in communicating philosophical ideas. The weakest result concerned whether the game contributed to learning, and open responses consistently identified complex, unclearly explained rules and insufficient time to learn them as the main shortcomings.

The author is careful to present these findings as indicative only, given the small, self-selected sample and delayed survey administration. A broader review of 286 modules from the top ten UK philosophy programmes adds context: only 6 were explicitly skills-based and 2 communication-based, and none resembled the activity studied, suggesting a gap in comparable provision. The paper's principal conclusion is that the game shows promise for building confidence and engagement, but that its rule design and facilitation require simplification before its contribution to learning can be firmly established.