Battle for the Presidency is out there, now.

Teachers are mediating games, and students are trying to beat each other irrespective of whether they agree or disagree with the side they play.

If the six games I have played until now are an indicator, Trump, more often than not, will find it hard to collect 270 electorates. That was not prophetic game design – rather an unintended side effect of the relative size difference between the secure states of the two sides.

And it does not change the learning pattern of the game one bit. It is all about playing the game – not about winning it.

When the students play, they make decisions. Some of them are exactly the right decisions at the right time, but wrong decisions or an unlucky timing may give them just the lesson they need. Nobody knows which one is the most important.

It is my experience that all learning takes place in a confusing and disordered environment – not the classroom, but the chaotic reality of 20+ developing adolescent minds. 

We cannot force all of them to stay on track at the same time, but we can make it easier for them. 

The algorithms of a good game tempt you with the chance of winning and the thrill of competition. Furthermore, the game sequence calls everybody back to the learning activity at very regular intervals. 

For the entrepreneurial students, there is a chance of testing out the mechanisms, doing unexpected things, cooking up new strategies. For the less adventurous, there is still the security of rules and purpose.

The role of the teacher also changes. The teacher is  no longer the judge and jury, the employer and the entertainer. Instead, they becomes the mediator of a process, who has to help it along,  but at the same time must accept any action within the set rules.

I hope Battle for the Presidency makes Democrats as well as Republicans wonder about the many states, which have only three electorates; marvel at the seeming randomness in which swing-state suddenly swallows half their budget; and question whether the right issues were chosen for North Carolina.

But even if they do not get that far – hopefully the action and the competition will give them a framework to remember a lot of the basic data in. I design educational games to help students learn. 

My next project is The Scramble for Africa, and I hope to share a lot of my ideas about games and learning when I am closer to publication.