Episode 147 Shaun McMillan on Turning Lectures into Games
Shaun McMillan on Turning Lectures into Games
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Experience Points, host Dave Eng interviews educational game designer Shaun McMillan about transforming traditional lectures into interactive, game-like experiences. Shaun shares his framework for designing lectures around a single compelling multiple-choice scenario, enabling students to engage deeply with content by making critical decisions. He discusses integrating game mechanics such as voting, uncertainty, and narrative outcomes to enhance didactic instruction. The episode also explores Shaun’s classroom megagame ALLIANCE, a geopolitical simulation for up to 100 players. Shaun emphasizes modular design, accessibility, and the power of storytelling in creating immersive, educational experiences. Learn more at BestClassEver.org.
Shaun McMillan
he/him/his
Educational Game Designer
BestClassEver.org
Shaun D. McMillan worked as a professional Animator, Graphic Designer, and Game Artist for various studios, and taught game design for high schoolers. He also designed the Bible Study adventure card game Great Boy the Game, and ALLIANCE, the Ultimate World Leader Political Science Megagame, in which 72 participants are given 4 hours to solve a simulation of all the world’s geopolitical problems. You can find more of his educational games at Best Class Ever, at www.BestClassEver.org
(Twitter): https://x.com/Shaun_Mc
(Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/shaundmcmillan
(YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@bestclassever
(Website): https://www.bestclassever.org/
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host, Dave Eng, from games-based learning by University XP. Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com. On today's episode, we'll learn from Shaun McMillan. Shaun is a creative with experience as an animator, graphic designer, and game artist, plus a background teaching game design to high schoolers. He designed Great Boy the Game, and ALLIANCE, a political science megagame where 72 players raced to solve global crises. Explore more of his work at www.bestclassever.org. Shaun, welcome to the show.
Shaun McMillan:
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Dave Eng:
Great. Shaun, so I know that I asked you originally on the show because of your past presentation from the Games-Based Learning Virtual Alliance... Games-Based Learning Virtual Conference, I should say. And specifically, I want to focus this episode on games-based lecturing because a lot of people may not be familiar with your work. So overall, I want to focus this question on you introduce how to turn a lecture into a game from your past presentation. Can you share more about this concept and how it shifts how an audience engages with the content overall?
Shaun McMillan:
Oh, sure. Yeah. So I have a presentation that I did for your game conference, and then I actually recorded it and posted it on my website. So it's available if you want to see the full recording or just see it written out as an article. It's on bestclassever.org/lecturegame. And there, when you first bring it up, it has a big flow chart, and at the end of the article, it talks about how to add mechanics like dice rolling, and probability, and odds, and things like this, make it look and feel like a game, a complicated game.
But in reality, to take any lecture and turn it into a game, it really just comes down to one thing. You just need to design one really great multiple-choice question as a scenario. So a political science scenario or a difficult choice that the protagonist has to make. And so most stories, most literature, most historical events, they come down to one critical decision, usually in what we call the midpoint crisis, which is the peak of act two. Okay? So the middle of act two, the protagonist is faced with a choice that's going to have dire consequences for himself, for his community, it could be life and death, or it could be even low stakes, but to him, it feels high stakes. Right? And so if you can put the audience in that protagonist's shoes, and then just give them three really viable options, three seemingly right answers, if you can design that one multiple-choice question and lead with that question, that can take your lecture and make it really, really engaging, every bit is engaging as a good game.
And then if you design backwards from that question, well then now you know exactly what historical context, details you need to provide. You actually want the protagonist or the audience to be in that scenario where they have limited Intel, right? You're making a critical choice with time pressure, but you don't know everything. And so you do need to provide some context and lead up to this question, lead up to the scenario, but you only want to give the details that make each of the options seem really viable. And so this helps you to know exactly how you should design your entire lecture because it helps you to know, "Okay, I need these historical context, these details, the weather matters, the weather's going to weigh in on the decision." So for example, the two stories that I use in the scenarios, in the video, I used a story from the Bible in Joshua chapter nine. So it's Joshua's political science simulation or scenario.
But then in the written article, I use Shakespeare's King Henry V who had to make a critical decision as to whether to go into battle or not. And they're both go-into-battle-or-not decisions. And so, yeah, basically you need to provide whatever details and historical context to help you understand that protagonist's biases, choices, intel in both of these situations, whether it was going to rain or not that day, had huge consequences for the outcome of the battle. That's basically all you need. But on top of that, if you want to, you could come in with complicated flow charts of like, "Okay, if they choose A, then it's going to have this result. B, if they choose the second option, is going to have this other story outcome." So you could prepare two different alternative story outcomes, or you can just say like, "Hey, this is what the character chose, let's see what the consequences were."
And then for mechanics to make it interesting or more engaging, you could just literally have the audience vote. So everyone gets a live poll. And then the audience actually gets to see, as the members of the audience use their cell phones to commit to a choice, they can see the live poll populating. And you can have this interesting social proof that like, "Oh, I was going to go A, but everyone else seems to be going B," and so then you can discuss about these... There's just so many different possibilities you can go after that. You could throw in dice to say there's a 50% chance of there being rain, and then that's going to weigh in in some certain way. And so it becomes really fun after that. But it's so great that you can make it everybody as engaging as a game by simply designing one really well-done multiple-choice question.
Dave Eng:
I see. All right. Thanks, Shaun. I appreciate that. I know that usually people are... I guess if you're creating any lecture content, a lot of people are really focusing on like, "Well, it's a lecture. It's very didactic, I just have to share information, share content." But your approach is very much based on, "Listen, there's going to be a choice. There's going to be a... You could say, a decision framework, a structure. A lot of people I think are really familiar with a multiple-choice question. It has one stem, three distractors, and maybe one correct choice. But I think the way that you framed it here is that you present everyone with a choice at the very beginning, and then you are now presenting all of the content and context around making that choice. And I think your discussion about the social proof about how people make choices within this framework is really interesting.
But my question for you, and I don't know if you had addressed this before because it's been a while since I rewatched it, but for people that are skeptics about lectures, people I know some of my colleagues are just very much about lecture being completely didactic, it's, "I'm sharing with you information for 45 minutes. It's not necessarily something that's going to be engaging. That's something I'm going to do later," how do you address people's skepticism about lectures being, "It should not be engaging, it should be didactic"? Have you ever talked to a colleague or professional like that?
Shaun McMillan:
I haven't had that pushback. I actually come from a very strong Christian background. I'm a minister at my church and I've done a lot of preaching over the years. Didactic basically means this is preachy or it has a key objective, a moral philosophical point you're trying to make with the lesson. And it's funny because actually when I do this the best, this lecturing, it is didactic actually. It has a didactic point. And so for example, instead of creating alternative histories, which is what you would have to do to give consequences for a choice that the audience makes, but the protagonist did not make, what I do is actually compare it to...
So for example, if I use the Bible story, I'll just compare it to another Bible story in which the protagonist did have a similar choice and did make that alternative choice. So for example, in the story of Joshua chapter nine, Joshua is pressured to make a high stakes commitment to war, and he could do it quickly. So he chooses to act very quickly. King Josiah, in 2 Chronicles, has a similar scenario, and Joshua comes out being the hero. And then Joshua is an ancestor of Josiah. So Josiah would've known about Joshua. And so he has a certain bias towards these very strong ancestral protagonists, very strong war hero ancestors that have reputations he's trying to live up to. And so he also commits to making what appears to be a very rash and foolish decision to commit head in on going into battle. And it turns it tragic for him.
And so I plant seeds from the very beginning of each lecture that like, "Hey... Because it's a Christian, right? So it's about prayer. It's like, "Hey, he prayed, and then he made the right decision, but Josiah didn't pray... And he made the same decision. He chose A just like Joshua chose A, but it ended up being the wrong decision because he didn't pray, he didn't... So I caused the audience to question their own choices. And then I have seeds that I planted from the beginning saying, "Hey, A, B or C is not actually the answer. The real answer is the advice I gave you at the very, very beginning, which is you need to pray, that any given scenario might have better option, but you're not going to know unless you're being very intuitive and you're really dialed in with God or whatever you believe in, your ideals."
So there is definitely a way to make it more didactic if you want to, and it has that much more power when you cause the audience to commit to a choice, and then to question it afterwards. And some of the best movies and stuff I've seen are capable of doing this. Sometimes they'll do it through they'll show you a critical scene at the very beginning, and then they'll give you the context. And then when you revisit that scene with the context, you realize, "Oh, I totally judged with a bias or made some false assumptions," and it causes you to question your assumptions, which is very powerful.
Dave Eng:
All right. No, that's a really good insight, Shaun. And I'm trying to think of an example right now, but there's many, I guess, books or movies or just stories or television shows that begin in medias res. So right in the middle of the action. So us as the audience, we see that, "Oh, this protagonist has to make a choice," or me in the role as the protagonist, I have to make a choice. But then the rest of the story, the medium unlocks the rest of the content and context and you realize that what looks like on the surface, a very simple choice actually has a lot of layers and a lot of deeply contextualized decision points that this character now needs to navigate through. And I think those are really good learning experiences because learners can realize that there are very few choices that are very black and white, very straightforward, when really you need to critically examine the context and the content around everything. So I think this is a really great framework for addressing that. Thank you, Shaun.
Second question I have for you is, again, I want this to be as applicable as possible to educators or anyone that may want to use or adapt some of your framework for their own practice. So my second question is on the advice to educators, what advice would you give to educators who are curious about gamification, but feel overwhelmed by the idea of, quote-unquote, designing a game? I know you already talked about basing your lecture around that one really good multiple-choice question, but you and your background and what you've developed and applied so far, what are some advice you would give to other educators that want to start applying games to their work or to gamify something?
Shaun McMillan:
Yeah. So games are great. If you can add a game... We all know that games are great. We know students love games. We know that we ourselves like games, and we like having a sense of agency, a sense of having a choice. I like this idea that for the really important things, there is no answer in the back of the book. I like business because there's no clear path or strategy. And a lot of times, games create this dynamism in the classroom and it can be more engaging. So it's like, "Okay, great, let's add games to our curriculum." But it's another layer on top of an already very demanding... There's already so many demands on every educator's plate from the admin from above, and to getting grades in, and having to satisfy all of the checks on all these boxes, and it's like, "Where are they going to find time for this?"
So as a high school teacher, I found myself thinking creatively about this in the summertime when I had a lot of free time and getting all excited, and then abandoning everything the moment I hit reality in the beginning of the school year, because there's just so many demands like, "How am I going to prepare a game ahead of time on top of, on top of on top of?" And so to design a game is really hard, and then to test it and to make sure it works. So that could be a nightmare. But luckily, some people have already designed the game so we can just adopt some games. Well, they're not necessarily intended for that key learning objective. Does the mechanics even fit the key learning objective, or am I just adding points to the curriculum that they can earn by going an extra mile or something that's gamification as opposed to actual games and game-based learning?
But all of this is problematic. Right? And so, yeah, for me, I was like, "Okay, maybe... Of course, we can adopt. We all know some games and some of those games do suit certain key learning objectives. So if you happen to be teaching about how viruses spread, well then you can clearly have people play that popular Pandemic game by Matt Leacock. So great, perfect match, but that's not going to become a key go-to tool for all your lessons. So that's why I focus more on this game-based lecturing or just taking some game components and adding them to your game. And I also like systems... Maybe not Dungeons and Dragons, but tabletop RPG elements that you can bring into your lectures. So just bringing a little bit of dice into the game or bringing a critical choice into the game or giving everyone some tokens and these tokens are going to represent certain things.
And so I ended up making... I was teaching game design for high school, and I was like, "Okay. Well, let's make a game. Let's make some games." So we actually intentionally made games for the classroom that have a lot of loose and easy rules that are very modular. You can take this rule or abandon that one or add this... You don't need all the rules, you can just pick and choose the ones you want, and it lends itself to a lot of different themes. And so we actually made a political science simulation game that can easily be adapted to... As few as three players or as many as 72. But we were trying to go for... I got the idea actually from the TED Talk by John Hunter, and he introduced the World Peace Game. And doing heavy, extensive research about how his game worked, I found out, "Oh, actually, he was inspired by Buckminster Fuller who made the World Game.
And so we were trying to make a version that was suitable for high school students and maybe even college students, and that's when I went down the designer board game rabbit hole. I started playing with a lot of different board games. And then one of my students came in and showed me about megagames. And so megagames are huge political science simulations inspired by some old war gamers in Europe. And so around that time, one YouTube video made it really popular, and so Americans started getting involved in making megagames. And so our class made one of the first megagames in America, but we made it specifically for the classroom to be adopted to any situation, and scenario, and into any theme. And so, yeah, ever since then, I've been promoting it on my website and working with different educators to see how they use it and how it could be even more easily adapted to the classroom, things like that.
Dave Eng:
Nice. Thanks, Shaun. I know that you skewed in a little bit to the next question, which is I was going to ask you about ALLIANCE, because I know that that is the megagame that you designed, but I just wanted to summarize for all of our listeners that I think one of the great takeaways that you've embodied here and you discussed before was the modularity of everything. You said you could just take a game that's already been designed, like about the spread about... A contagion, like Pandemic, because that game already exists and it already meets that learning outcome. So you don't need to recreate the wheel if you're an educator. You can just take a game that already exists, something that commercially already exists, and just adapt it for your purposes.
But another really good point that you brought up, Shaun, was the fact that you can just make things modular. You can just gamify or adapt one game or use one game or just parts of a game or just even individual rules for certain games and adapt it for your individual learners, classroom, learning outcomes, and modality, content, et cetera. And I run into this with a lot of other educators I talked to, which is the fact that you don't need to gamify everything. You can just take one very small part, apply it to whatever work you're doing or whatever you're teaching or whatever educational project you're working on, and just apply that one aspect. You don't need to create the wheel from scratch. You can just apply some games that are available right now.
So, Shaun, you brought this up. I want to go into it here because you already defined what megagames were, I think, but you specifically described that classroom game, ALLIANCE, the ultimate world leader political science megagame, which I believe is the one that you played with 72 students. So, two, can you please just briefly explain what a megagame is for our audience? Because I know you talked about it a little bit, but if you could offer up your own personal definition, I would appreciate it. And then two, can you talk more about ALLIANCE? You provided the background on it, but can you tell us more about what the game was, and how it plays, and what its impact was for your students?
Shaun McMillan:
Yeah. So we got really excited when we discovered this concept of megagames. We'd already been playing some designer board games. And it was a YouTube board game reviewer that went and played a megagame, and then exposed us to what megagames were. So mega games are typically political science simulations... Not always, some of them have a fantastical element to them. Ours doesn't. It's more of a near future realistic political science simulations. And they come out of a history of war gaming. So war gaming, I don't know if you guys know or not, but the state for decades and centuries has been doing war gaming where they do simulations to try to figure out, "Okay, if we go to war... Say, for instance, before the Vietnam War. Johnny Harris recently did a... He's a very popular YouTuber, recently did a video about the history of war games and about how the state does these war games to figure out what are the possibilities that we should expect if we're going to go to war in Vietnam or if we're going to go into World War II.
And it's really fascinating because it turns out the four-star generals that participated in these games, they said that they were very rarely surprised in World War II because they had gamed out so many scenarios. And in Vietnam, when they gamed out Vietnam before going in, they dismissed all the learnings from the game because they thought it was ridiculous that such a low-technology country could hold up against America with heavy tech. Right? Because it foresaw actually in the game scenarios that the American political constituents would not stand... They would turn against the government and start protesting the government and that this low technology enemy would be able to hold up against high technology. And so they ignored the results, went into war, but they weren't surprised because they had gamed this out.
And so out of that history, I thought, "Well, this is the way to teach students. Let's let the students be the leaders, see themselves as war leaders and set up the geopolitical situations, and then see how they handle it, and even give them open-ended creative possibilities and see what they come up with." But, yeah, a megagame is basically just a big, big game. And in speaking specifically, technically, how it compares to other games, typically, megagames are using war game rules, which basically makes it fall somewhere between LARP, tabletop RPG, and board games. They're not as tightly designed as board games, so there's a much more open-ended element to it the way that tabletop RPG has a very creative storytelling element to it, and it has looser rules like tabletop RPGs. So we use dice to simulate all the uncertainty and probabilities which are predetermined. So those are some of the assumptions that go into the game design.
And there can be big elements of LARP to it, because, I mean, when my students played it, one of the first things they ask is like, "Can we cosplay? Can we dress up as our team?" And it ends up being one of the most OP things in the game because when you're in a room with 70 people and when you're trying to find the player from Russia or the three players from Russia, well, if they're all wearing Siberian Husky hats, they're very easy to identify and it creates an impression. So cosplay ends up being a... Or just the role-playing element. There's a huge role play element to megagames almost always.
Dave Eng:
Nice. Thank you, Shaun. I appreciate that-
Shaun McMillan:
Oh, but I should mention about the scale.
Dave Eng:
Yeah.
Shaun McMillan:
So as soon as you have, say, 30 or more players or even 12 or 24 players, only then do we start considering it not just a role-playing game, but it's actually a megagame. And you can have as many as 100. And there's been megagames in Europe with two or 300 people.
Dave Eng:
I see. And you said that your game, ALLIANCE, that had 72 players the last time you played it?
Shaun McMillan:
I've been running it for 10 years now, and I did do it at Gen Con with 100 players.
Dave Eng:
Oh, I see.
Shaun McMillan:
But we had some problems with the game, which we thought it was because we had too big of a player count and that the game failed at that scale. But, actually, looking back on it now and having seen more megagames run at Gen Con, we're starting to realize that these are just the problems you have at convention games. It wasn't necessarily because of ALLIANCE or the way it was designed. And so... But it could be, where it's hard to say, but I do think you can run ALLIANCE successfully with 100 players now that I've streamlined it and made the rules easier to learn and stuff.
Dave Eng:
And can you give us a broad overview on ALLIANCE for those that are not familiar with it?
Shaun McMillan:
Yeah. And this will give you a good idea of how a megagame is designed too. So what you do is you set a time, so we're going to run this game for four hours or over four one-hour class periods, and then you're going to have a big war room map. So you're going to have a big map of all the nations involved. And for ALLIANCE, they're real nations, but we only have the key big nations, and there's varying sizes. So we'll have a pseudonym for China, we call China Fast Growing Nation, we call America Rich Nation, we call Latin America Colorful Nation, and then we'll have Russia, which is Strong Nation, and Japan, which is Tech Nation, and South Korea, which is Cloud Nation, North Korea, which is Shadow Nation.
So we use pseudonyms and it's near future so that we can have a slightly sci-fi burgeoning technologies introduced into the games and to create all these moral dilemmas, and collective action problems, and problem of the commons, basically geopolitical issues. And so we throw all these geopolitical issues at them... Oh, I should explain how it's structured. So you have three or four players are committed to a team. Each of them has a role on that team. So one of them will be the president or the prime minister, one of them will be the secretary of defense, of military, and then one of them will be the lead scientist. Yeah, so they each have their role within that nation, and then they have their national agenda. And so their job is to try to achieve these key objectives for their nation. But their objectives directly conflict with some other nation's objectives. So Canada, which is called Peaceful Nation, is trying to maintain world peace, but Strong Nation is strongly incentivized to start a war, so that we'll have some tension and conflict in the game.
And so you have these 20 different nation teams, and then we'll have a team of control players, which are the referees. They're the only ones who actually really know the game in detail and they're DMing or dungeon-mastering the game, game-mastering the game for the rest of the players, and walking them through how to play, and what they need to do next, and what decision they need to make right now. We use poker chips to represent national assets. So we have five different color poker chips, and each color represents a different resource from their nation. Each nation has a surplus in one and a deficiency in another, so there's a strong incentive for them to trade, and then they can use those tokens to try to do whatever it is they come up with that they want to do and to try to solve all these geopolitical problems. And, basically, we give them four hours to solve all the world's problems.
Dave Eng:
Exactly four hours to solve all of the world's problems. Have you gotten some good feedback from your students when you've played it with them? I know you've run it many times, but what would you say is the most impactful outcome you've gotten from your students in terms of their learning?
Shaun McMillan:
Well, sometimes the players... We work with younger players and older players, and even older players will play quite diabolically, right? Because it's all role play. The stakes aren't real, right? So you can experiment and try stuff, and you can be really dastardly just to try to make... Because the goal really is to make... There's no winners or losers in the game. There's just control of the narrative. And so you might do something really diabolical to have a huge say in the narrative at the end. So you go against everybody else and you use some really powerful trump card to really surprise everyone. And we've had players do that, and we basically just say like, "Look, if you guys are still at war by the end of the thing and you haven't settled everything, then it's a Shakespearean... We just label it as Shakespearean tragedy, and everyone basically loses the game.
Dave Eng:
Oh, I see.
Shaun McMillan:
Because the goal is it's supposed to be a world peace game. That's the ultimate theme. So it's all win or all lose. It's not really like, "Oh, this person had this many points and this person had that many points." We can't track points. We've tried to implement that system because, logically, it seems like the right thing to do, but it becomes such a crazy, chaotic collaborative... There's so many people involved. We just can't keep track of everything at the end.
Dave Eng:
I see. Wow. Great. Thanks, Shaun. I appreciate that. I know that megagames are a large project, and it may not be something that all educators can attempt at least on their first try, but I think that ALLIANCE, with you and your students, has been a really good at least template in order to follow going into the future. So I appreciate it, Shaun.
Shaun McMillan:
Yeah. And it could sound really intimidating, but I do want to add that some of the more recent innovations that I've added to the game is I have actually made a three-player one round of turns, 20 to 30-minute tutorial version of the game. So I've made the megagame... We're trying to make these things more accessible, right? And I want to make it to where even teachers who don't know designer board games could actually try this. And so, yeah, at my website, you can try it, you can just download this three-page printout, and then you print that out, and then you and two other players can sit down and actually see how amazing this is and have a very short, very fast experience of a megagame for three players. So it's not really mega, but it gives you a taste of how a megagame works and what the basic mechanics are.
Dave Eng:
Nice. Thank you, Shaun. That brings us to our outro. So now you mentioned your website, so where's the best place that people can go to find out more about you and hopefully download some of your great resources?
Shaun McMillan:
Yeah, so my main website is www.bestclassever.org, and that's got all the things that I do there. But if you're more specifically interested in ALLIANCE, the megagame, it's on that website, but if you want to go directly to that, you can just go to www.mymegagame.com.
Dave Eng:
All right. Sounds good. Thank you, Shaun. I appreciate that.
Shaun McMillan:
Yeah.
Dave Eng:
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links or references in a description or show notes. Thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng, from games-based learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. If you liked this episode, please consider commenting, sharing, and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you. I'd also love it if you took some time to rate the show. We live to lift others with learning. So if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit. Also, make sure to visit University XP online at www.universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter, and Bluesky as University XP, and on Facebook and LinkedIn as University XP. Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on.
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2025, September 28). Shaun McMillan on Turning Lectures into Games. (No. 147) Video]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/video/147
Internal Ref: UXPLDS25KQNR
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