From “Gaming the Metrics” to the “Well-Played University”: Audit Culture, Game Design Patterns and Re-designing Our Institutions

Standards, targets, key performance indicators and league tables are different expressions of audit culture in universities which have become key structural factors in determining the direction of educational organisations, something that warps both their societal purpose and everyday experience, as well articulated by Shore & Wright (2015). While metrification in Higher Education has been explored and critiqued at length, I propose here to use a different lens through which to view it and build an alternative. Game design, I will argue can provide both powerful analytical tools
and provocative rhetorical salience.
The chapter will examine different aspects of audit culture as a set of formal “games” that Universities, departments and individuals on both the staff and student sides are forced to play and “win”, deploying the conceptual tools of game theory, game design studies, and systems thinking (particularly Meadows’s “systemic leverage points”) to deconstruct their rules, objectives, player positionings and design paradigms.
Following a distinction articulated by Bernie De Koven, the chapter will then argue for a shift away from this university as a “game community” (where the “game” comes first, and selects who can keep playing) to university as a “play community” (where the “players” come first, and are able to collectively question and reshape the rules of the game), examining the same “leverage points” as steps towards re-designing universities to prevent the damaging effects of “gaming”, and re-centre
care, community and the link between excellence and health.