How Games in the Liberal Arts Classroom Teach Critical Thinking
August 10, 2026
from the Record, Spring 2026
By Alexandra Evans
In his 1938 seminal work Homo Ludens, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argues that activities like war, art, law, science, and even the evolution of language are all rooted in play. Huizinga explores how festal practices of ancient Chinese clans laid the groundwork for complex social hierarchies. He argues that the battles in Beowulf are more than battles for survival, but stylized games of strength and courage that reinforce the heroic code. He also posits that barrister wigs transform the wearer into another being and transport them into a specialized, selfcontained world, much like a character in a game.
“Play is a necessary condition of culture, but it’s often treated as frivolous,” says Dr. Michele King, ludologist and director of the Flemming Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Dr. King explains that play is more than entertainment; it is a vehicle for cultural formation and transmission.
Centuries removed from Beowulf and Grendel, gaming is still a driving cultural force. “Today, gaming is a $400 billion industry, holding more economic power than movies, music, and live sports combined” says Elliott Associate Professor of Rhetoric Jake Euteneuer. A 2024 Statista report found that American men spent an average of 42.6 minutes a day playing games, compared to the 25.8 minutes that women spent playing games. With gaming holding such immense economic power and cultural significance, Hampden-Sydney faculty members are embracing the natural inclinations of our young men and leveraging it to create valuable opportunities for engagement.
Games work in liberal arts classrooms because they create stakes, require decision-making under constraints, and expose systems and consequences, all while encouraging active participation. At Hampden-Sydney, faculty members are discovering that ancient pedagogical questions of how to teach judgment, ethical reasoning, rhetoric, leadership, and critical thinking may have an equally ancient answer: let them play.
WHEN FAILURE MATTERS: HOW GAMES CREATE MEANINGFUL STAKES
More than reading a case study does, games create consequences that feel real to students—not because the game itself affects their grades, but because gameplay necessitates decisions that have immediate, visible outcomes. Whether a student is competitive by nature is immaterial. Tying a tangible outcome so directly to a decision is impactful and allows students to feel the weight of their decisions. In a game, students aren’t analyzing decisions in retrospect—they’re making them on the fly.
Director of the Wilson Center for Leadership in the Public Interest Vinton Bruton recalls a moment in Introduction to Leadership (INDS 101) during a round of Captain Sonar where a student lost sight of the big picture, “zigging when he should have zagged” in his words, to which Bruton replied, “Welcome to leadership!” With time for one more round, the student was nominated to play captain again. This time, he managed all the information, deciphered what was important, identified gaps, and led his team to the win.
“Running this class perfectly in my mind means that my students have a 50 percent fail rate,” Bruton says. “We want them to fail when the stakes are real, albeit low, and they’re learning—not when someone’s job or a big contract is on the line. Carrying around a theoretical framework that you haven’t personally tested doesn’t do anyone a whole lot of good.”
In Computer Organization (COMS 361), taught by Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science William Tolley, students race against the clock and their peers in virtual Capture the Flag competitions to find and exploit system vulnerabilities, all while their progress is publicly tracked and displayed on live scoreboards.
This competitive structure generates stakes organically. Dr. Tolley observes that the pedagogical value of the scoreboard lies in helping students gauge: “Am I doing badly because everyone’s doing badly, or is it uniquely me?” The public nature of performance creates accountability while providing crucial context for self-assessment.
The technical challenges themselves—reverse engineering binaries, exploiting vulnerabilities, hunting for hidden flags—carry inherent stakes because failure is immediately visible. When a player lags behind while others advance on the scoreboard, the gap requires the student to pivot, seek new approaches, and persist through difficult problems.
The satisfaction of solving puzzles compounds these stakes. Each captured flag represents both technical mastery and competitive advancement, creating a feedback loop that sustains engagement.
THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE: TEACHING JUDGMENT THROUGH CONSTRAINT
But stakes alone aren’t enough. What makes games pedagogically powerful is that those stakes exist within constraints that mirror the real world.
Thompson Professor of Philosophy Marc Hight uses Normic to exemplify this principle. The objective of Normic is deceptively simple: create and exploit rules better than your opponents…ahem, classmates. Once passed, though, a rule must be followed exactly as it was worded, a sometimes-uncomfortable constraint if the proposed verbiage was imprecise.
“It encourages creativity and long-term, principled thinking, but it also encourages students to think about unintended consequences,” Hight explains. “Normic forces students to slow down to reflect upon what they really mean and all the ways that their rule could potentially be implemented in practice.”
Students quickly discover that, as Dr. Hight points out, humans are not naturally good at principled reasoning. Early gameplay leans toward conservative moves as students test boundaries. As confidence builds, creative rulebending emerges, as do unintended consequences. The game becomes a laboratory for philosophical thinking about how systems shape behavior, how language creates reality, and how strategic thinking requires anticipating others’ responses to your actions.
Where Normic teaches students to manipulate abstract rules, Professor Bruton’s use of This War of Mine forces them to confront constraints with immediate moral weight. Set during the 1994 siege of Sarajevo, This War of Mine places students in control of civilians struggling to survive: “Students have to make hard decisions. Who on my team gets to eat today? Who on my team gets to sleep? Who has to venture out and scavenge?” Bruton explains.
These operational constraints force students to prioritize competing needs with scarce resources, negotiating life-and-death trade-offs, which Bruton says initially produced troubling results, reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. Students made expedient, morally questionable choices in pursuit of victory. “It really puts you in one ethical dilemma after another, and ethics is so important to leadership,” Bruton says.
To center the question of ethics, instead of mere survival, Bruton restructured the constraints. He gave students a mission such as roleplaying the part of a humanitarian volunteer organization. “I wanted them to practice living out being good men and good citizens in this really tough environment,” he explains.
The transformation was remarkable as students abandoned the brutal pragmatism of Jack Merridew for the principled governance of Ralph. With the humanitarian framework, students shifted from self-interested chaos to principled decision-making, thoughtfully debating whether to help strangers at cost to themselves.
When faced with grueling constraints such as limited time, scarce resources, incomplete information, or competing values, students can’t theorize their way out. They must decide, act, and carry “the weight of responsibility,” as Bruton puts it, adding that “ethics is a tough concept to teach without giving them one decision after another, and this game makes them do that.”
SEEING THE INVISIBLE: HOW GAMES REVEAL HIDDEN SYSTEMS
“I don’t think Alexander the Great was born and then just got to do anything he wanted,” says Elliott Professor of History James Frusetta-Ulfhrafn, “and I want students to understand that people make decisions in context.” One way that Professor Frusetta does this is by running Reacting to the Past games like “The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.E.”
Students inhabit historical roles and debate constitutional reform, navigate factional alliances, and wrestle with the tension between oligarchy and democracy. By negotiating within the political, social, and economic systems of the era, students reverse engineer the invisible architecture that shaped historical actors’ choices. When stakes meet constraints, systems emerge.
“I don’t have to lecture them, they’re putting it together,” Frusetta observes. The game creates the conditions for discovery. The lesson transcends any single historical moment: all actors, in all periods, make choices within systems that limit what’s possible.
In Digital Media and Rhetoric (RHET 350), Professor Euteneuer uses Even Steven’s Odd to transform a simple dice game into revelations about hidden systems of fairness and power. Students race to roll specific combinations and grab a dice doll placed deliberately at the front of the room, exposing how proximity can create structural advantage. The student in back loses even when they succeed simultaneously with someone up front, making invisible inequality suddenly tangible.
This physical setup of Even Steven’s Odd becomes a lens for examining how fairness can be constructed. Does basketball favor tall people because James Naismith hung the basket high? If he had dug a hole instead, would short players dominate? The game forces students to ask: Does equality mean equal opportunity, equal starting places, or equal access to help? When does persuasion become manipulation? Even Steven’s Odd exposes how systems have the power to determine outcomes before anyone even starts playing.
The most radical thing games do is necessitate active learning, encouraging engagement with the course material in ways that traditional lectures struggle to replicate.
A game may be intended to function as a neutral vehicle to deliver course content, but the ways in which students engage with the game determine whether the outcome is collaborative, competitive, or co-opetitive—a blend of cooperation and competition. Exposure to various kinds of outcomes empowers students to forecast unintended consequences, communicate expectations more efficiently, and develop critical interpersonal skills essential for navigating ambiguous situations in their personal and professional lives.
“Games give students permission to let their guards down and think creatively,” King says.
“I still lecture. But now the lectures land differently because students have lived the questions,” says Frusetta-Ulfhrafn.
“Games require professors to cede a lot of control, and that can be uncomfortable. But it allows students to exert greater autonomy over their academic journey,” says Hight.
“The easiest, quickest way to build community is through play,” says Euteneuer.
“The more abstract a principle, the more handson a professor needs to teach it. Character and leadership are as abstract as it gets,” says Bruton.
Games can’t replace traditional pedagogy, but they can deepen students’ connections with it. For an institution now 250 years in to forming good men and good citizens, Hampden-Sydney’s embrace of gameplay as a proving ground for judgment, ethical reasoning, and leadership is more than innovative pedagogy—it’s a return to an ancient truth about how character can be forged.