Using Board Game Design to Teach the Sociology of Morality

• In Event: Teaching and Learning Symposium Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Creative Teaching Practices

Abstract

Teaching morality in a social psychology course often relies on abstract theorizing, which can be inaccessible for students who learn better through experiential and collaborative methods. In addition, most board game-related activities focus heavily on teaching race, class, and gender stratification. To address these challenges and gaps, we developed a group-based board game project for a class on the social psychology of good and evil that allows students to operationalize and test sociological theories of morality by constructing their own moral systems in a playable world.

Students are tasked with designing a board game that encodes moral norms, power structures, rewards, and sanctions into its mechanics. Rather than treating morality as an innate or purely individual, the project emphasizes its social construction. Students translate concepts such as norms, deviance, labeling, altruism, inequality, social control, attribution, stigma, and impression management into concrete rules, roles, and outcomes. Through this process, morality becomes visible as a structured system shaped by power and consequences, and students strengthen their sociological imaginations by seeing how everyday interactions become moralized.

Groups will receive guided instruction on game mechanics and draw on the theories covered in lectures and peer-reviewed research from earlier assignments. Each group submits a game prototype and a written sociological reflection explaining how their mechanics operationalize moral frameworks and how players would experience moral behaviors.

Learning objectives include translating abstract sociological theories of morality into concrete systems, analyzing how rules and institutions shape moral hierarchy, critically reflecting on how moral judgments are shaped by society, and collaborating to produce a game that reflects our social world. We share assignment design, sample projects, assessment strategies, and student learning outcomes. Ultimately, we argue that board game design serves as a moral laboratory, offering a creative and rigorous way to teach morality across sociology courses.

Authors

• Andrea Char'Lee Smith, University of Iowa

• Alexandra Elora Herron, University of Iowa