This article presents a gamification experiment using serious games to teach History of Ideas in the course Contemporary Civilization (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile), conducted over 80 Zoom sessions between March 2020 and December 2021. Faced with a drop in participation during remote teaching, the instructors designed playful dynamics aligned with readings from Plato to Freud.
The research combined the teacher’s autoethnography with ethnographic observation of students’ oral and written interventions, aiming to explore how play could activate skills of critical and historical understanding.
The games, dilemmas, role plays, debates, and simulations (e.g., Giges, Cave, Contract, Manifesto, Urticario Crudelis) connected philosophical problems with contemporary scenarios, fostering hermeneutic and intersubjective reasoning, historical imagination, a sense of contingency, and contextual thinking.
Valuable side effects were observed: greater engagement, cooperation, and group identity; plural and comparative discussion of authors; and even social bonds that mitigated pandemic isolation. Students translated classical ideas into present-day dilemmas (democracy, property, post-truth), deepening their perspectives.
Drawing on the theoretical work of Huizinga, Bally, and Fink, the authors interpret play as a kairotic ritual that creates a “playground” with its own rules and goals, capable of breaking the productivist routine and promoting focus, contemplation, and intellectual friendship. Although the autoethnographic approach limits generalization, the results suggest that gamification in the humanities strengthens historical awareness and counters the detemporalization of philosophy.
Conclusion: serious games should be systematized beyond the pandemic, given their formative power to read thought critically in context and to think about the present through new lenses.
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How to Cite: García Fernández, G. A., & Escribano Roca, R. (2023). Gamification, Pandemic and Learning the History of Ideas. Experiments in the Context of Core Curriculum. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 26(2), 69–87. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.26.2.36246
