The Multiplayer Classroom: Game Plans

The Multiplayer Classroom: Game Plans is a companion to The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game, now in its second edition from CRC Press. This book covers four multiplayer classroom projects played in the real world in real time to teach and entertain. They were funded by grants or institutions, collaborations between Lee Sheldon, as writer/designer, and subject matter experts in various fields. They are written to be accessible to anyone--designer, educator, or layperson--interested in game-based learning. The subjects are increasingly relevant in this day and age: physical fitness, Mandarin, cybersecurity, and especially an online class exploring culture and identity on the internet that is unlike any online class you have ever seen. Read the annotated, often-suspenseful stories of how each game, with its unique challenges, thrills, and spills, was built.

Lee Sheldon began his writing career in television as a writer-producer, eventually writing more than 200 shows ranging from Charlie’s Angels (writer) to Edge of Night (head writer) to Star Trek: The Next Generation (writer-producer). Having written and designed more than forty commercial and applied video games, Lee spearheaded the first full writing for games concentration in North America at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the second writing concentration at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is a regular lecturer and consultant on game design and writing in the United States and abroad. His most recent commercial game, the award-winning The Lion’s Song, is currently on Steam. For the past two years he consulted on an ＂escape room in a box,＂ funded by NASA, that gives visitors to hundreds of science museums and planetariums the opportunity to play colonizers on the moon. He is currently writing his second mystery novel.

Lee Sheldon began his writing career in television as a writer-producer, eventually writing over 200 produced shows ranging from Charlie’s Angels (writer) to Edge of Night (head writer) to Star Trek: The Next Generation (writer-producer). In 1994, tired of television, Lee turned to his new love: video games. Since then he has worked on over 40 games. In 2006 he began teaching video game writing and design at Indiana University. While there he first started designing classes as games. He also wrote and designed an alternate reality game that went through three iterations. The first two, The Skeleton Chase and Skeleton Chase 2: The Psychic, were funded by the Robert Wood Foundation and were designed to improve student fitness. The third, Skeleton Chase: Warp Speed was a redesign of the second game, shrinking playtime from 7 weeks to 3 days for a group of Coca Cola executives from North Africa.In 2010 Lee moved to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he was an Associate Professor in the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program. There he was co-director of the GSAS program for three years and created the first full writing for games program in North America. He was lead writer and creative director on several incarnations, both a class designed as a game and a digital version, of The Lost Manuscript a narrative-driven game teaching Chinese language and culture.He joined the Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD) program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2015 where he is again designing classes as games and has developed the second full writing for games curriculum in North America. Lee’s book Character Development and Storytelling for Games (Second Edition, 2013) is the standard text in the field. He wrote the bestselling book The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (2011). Over 1500 people in 45 countries now follow the Facebook page for his method of teaching classes as multiplayer games. His recent applied game projects include The Janus Door, a cybersecurity class designed as a game, funded by an NSF grant, and currently running at California Polytechnic State University. He wrote and designed Secrets: A Cyberculture Mystery Game, an online class designed as a game teaching culture and identity on the Internet for Excelsior College that went live Fall 2015; and wrote Crimson Dilemma, a business ethics video game for his old school, Indiana University, that debuted Fall 2014. His most recent entertainment games are The Lion’s Song, an episodic game following the creative and personal struggles of four