Utrecht University

Playing the Hidden Curriculum: Designing Games to Materialize and Question the Unwritten Rules in Higher Education Classrooms

This paper examines how low-key analogue game design exercises can expose and question the "hidden curriculum," the unwritten social and cultural rules governing higher education.

• Discursive game design uses students and staff co-creating small situational games with game design materials as a shared boundary object, making implicit higher-education norms visible and open to negotiation, particularly to aid first-generation, working-class, and ethnic minority students unfamiliar with university conventions.
• The central argument is that writing rules down turns flexible social practice into prescriptive regulation, which paradoxically prompts reassessment because rules that appear fixed become contestable.
• The empirical basis is a set of classroom exercises with 170 first-year BA students and eight staff members at a Dutch university, drawing on participant reflections and classroom ethnographies.