the potential of collectible trading card games to teach business

I recently stumbled upon one of the latest entries to the Wizards of the Coast?s transmedial world that is the Magic: The Gathering franchise. I have a history with MtG, although it is a very small one. I have played the game for a year when I was about 13 years old. My impression of it was that it was a highly enjoyable and strategically deep game, that costed a ton of money (that I was not able to invest into it). Also, it is important to realize here that I played the game somewhat isolated since it was a very niche hobby in the part of Belgium where I lived, and there were no tournaments, trading events or shop selling single cards anywhere near. As a result, the only way I could ever get an elusive Black Lotus, for example, would be by finding it in a booster pack. So needless to say that MtG died out for me as I decided that there were more enjoyable games to spend money on (in my situation back then).

As time went on I played the 1997 Microprose game and the more recent Duel of the Planeswalkers for Playstation 3 a bit, but did not find them as fun as playing with actual people. I also wanted to give MtG: Online a try, but decided not to do so since I thought that it would cost a lot of money to build a reasonable deck. And then I saw MtG: Tactics on Steam and decided to have a quick peak, simply to see how well they managed to blend a turn-based tactics game (e.g. Heroscape, Final Fantasy Tactics, etc.) with the original card game.

To answer that question briefly (because that is probably not why you are reading this considering the title of this post), they did a decent job. The card game part is brilliant, the tactics part is a bit thin and could be improved (e.g. by adding a more intuitive line of sight, diminishing the power of the random critical hits, etc.), but I would rate it an 8 out of 10 game, which matches its score on?Metacritic?if you?d deduct extra points for the terrible interface, outdated graphics and some annoying bugs. If you like mild tactics games and MtG then it is definitely work checking out. I would just give it a try to see the amazing MtG artwork come alive on the screen.

So what about the business skills, Bob? I am glad you asked. When I started playing the game, I liked it quite a bit, but I was still worried about the money it would cost me to keep playing. After all, free to play micro-payment games are seldomly, well? free to play. Reading the comments on Metacritic confirms this. For example, Aquila noted how:

?The free to play part is shockingly short. Dishonest marketing where people will trap for spending huge amounts of money. And a HUGE pay to win factor is present. So don?t trap for it people! But the game itself is fun if it was normally priced it will be a between 6 and 8. (Aquila, Metacritic)?

Normally, that would turn me away from the game, but I enjoyed the game enough to see if I could find a loop. After all, in Warstorm, another TCG I once played, I had managed to become a free player with a few competitive decks and that game sure was very tight in terms of its economic system. MtG: Tactics is a lot more flexible towards the amount of money a player needs to spend to enjoy the game. Here is what I found:

• In-game gold can be acquired by completing daily missions, up to 14 gold per day.
• Boosters can only be bought by paying $3.
• Boosters can also be acquired by defeating at least one opponent in a tournament that costs 20 in-game gold.
• Singles can be bought and sold in an auction house.
• Players are allowed to trade cards and in-game gold.

So that means that if you use tournaments as your main income of cards, that you can play a tournament every two days. The cards you win there can then be sold at the auction house for more in-game gold, potentially creating a positive feedback loop. Unfortunately, you have to defeat an opponent to convert 20 gold into a booster, so that will difficult without already having many good cards.

However, the MtGT community realized that this would make the game a lot less accessible for people who want to play it casually, and has made it very common for the winner of round one to refund the loser?s 20 in-game gold. After all, selling off the cards you do not need from your free booster easily nets more than 20 in-game gold.

Figuring all this out seems like an interesting exercise for economy students in secondary school. I?ll admit that this is not exactly the same as writing up a business model, but I do see some potential here. Another ? albeit more obvious ? application of the game is in its trading aspects. I have recently attended a session on negotation techniques at an empty moment at a conference, and it is remarkable how those techniques have paid off in MtG: Tactics.

So this could be an interesting topic for a master?s thesis or design research project. Based on my experiences with MtG: Tactics, I would therefore say that there is a lot of potential in developing a ?homework? trading card game for secondary school, in particular if the game itself could be a learning experience as well (such as?Elementeo). Economy teachers could use it to study the economic system that grows from within the game, art teachers could let students design their own cards, math teachers could use the game to teach probabilities, language teachers could let students write stories within the game world, and so on.

You can see more of Bob De Schutter?s writing?here

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Tags: Belgium, Collectible card game, Elementeo, Final Fantasy Tactics, Magic The Gathering, Metacritic, Warstorm, Wizards of the Coast

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Source: http://aims.muohio.edu/2013/06/27/the-potential-of-collectible-trading-card-games-to-teach-business-and-negotiation-skills/

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