Prisoner’s Dilemma in Among Us: Using games to teach strategy
When the scope of an English as a foreign language (EFL) curriculum stretches beyond the limited confines of lessons intended to bolster basic language skills, then games can be powerful tools to help non-native English speakers engage with and potentially comprehend curricular content more deeply. Careful selection and integration of commercial digital games into EFL curricula may encourage these deeper levels of engagement by providing concrete examples of curricular content in a simplified structure which the students can both interact with and improve their in-game strategies for. This research presents findings from a seven-week EFL curriculum for majors in business administration at a Japanese university which utilized the social deduction game Among Us (Inner Sloth LLC, 2018) and a point system with parallels to the Flood-Dresher Prisoner’s Dilemma to provide instruction on strategy development in competitive situations. The results suggest that this game-based curriculum effectively demonstrated crucial tenets of strategy development within a Prisoner’s Dilemma by eliciting the dominant strategy of non-cooperation.