The pandemic turned many university classes into a succession of dimmed faces on Zoom, prolonged silences, and readings that were difficult to transfer to the virtual environment. In response to this problem, Gamification, Pandemic and Learning the History of Ideas, by Gonzalo Andrés García Fernández and Rodrigo Escribano Roca, examines an experience that used serious games to restore participation, intellectual conflict, and imagination to the teaching of philosophy.
Over the course of 80 sessions of the subject Contemporary Civilisation, students from different degree programmes took on characters, resolved dilemmas, and defended decisions inspired by thinkers ranging from Plato to Freud. The aim was not to make complex texts more entertaining, but to turn philosophical ideas into tools for interpreting moral, political, and social problems.
The study’s greatest interest lies in the nature of the games that were designed. Students had to decide whether they would commit an injustice with impunity on the basis of the myth of Gyges, reorganise a post-apocalyptic society according to Plato and Aristotle, judge a murder through the ethics of Thomas Aquinas, or draft a new social contract while representing opposing interests during the French Revolution. These fictional scenarios required them to move beyond decontextualised reading and to place themselves, even if only temporarily, within other historical and moral frameworks.
According to the experience documented by the authors, the games fostered argumentation, interpretive pluralism, cooperation, and an understanding that concepts such as justice, property, sovereignty, and democracy are historical responses to specific problems rather than abstract formulas detached from their time.
The article offers a compelling defence of gamification in the humanities, although its scope should be interpreted with caution. The findings are drawn mainly from an autoethnography conducted by the teachers themselves, based on their notes, students’ oral contributions, and written messages. There were no comparison groups, standardised measures, or evidence allowing the learning outcomes to be conclusively attributed to the games. Its contribution is therefore more pedagogical and conceptual than experimental in the strict sense.
Even so, the study richly illustrates how games can function as a technology of decentring: they enable students to “become someone else”, think from unfamiliar standpoints, and discover that ideas from the past still provide languages for debating the present. Rather than proving that playing games guarantees the learning of philosophy, the article makes a perhaps more valuable case: when carefully designed, games can restore the humanities’ ability to unsettle certainties, broaden historical imagination, and generate a shared intellectual conversation.
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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
