El Prez in class? - Tropico 5 as a case study at university
Find out how the University of Warsaw incorporated Tropico 5 in their classes in the field of Political Science and International Studie


The research team at University Warsaw kindly took some time to answer our questions about the classes and incorporating Tropico 5 into them:
You successfully included Tropico 5 in your political science lectures. What makes Tropico 5 a useful tool for teaching in your field, in your opinion? Piotr Rutkowski: “Tropico 5 in my view is a strategy game and very interesting social reality simulator with a slightly humorous tone, which engages the players all the more and develops all their competences. It is an ideal game for our classes, as it allows students to develop something that Professor Ziółkowski and I call political imagination.” How do you define ‘political imagination’ and how does this manifest in Tropico 5? Piotr Rutkowski: “It is the awareness of multidimensionality, multilevelness of social reality, realizing that decisions in one aspect affect all others, that dilemmas do not have a perfect solution. In Tropico 5 we find all the features that allow us to achieve this – we have economic, political and international elements that the student must deal with at the same time while playing the game, and each decision has consequences for what will happen next. Decision-making is a key issue here, and in the entire course, one of the goals is to improve the optimization of decisions (as competencies) from the perspective of goals assumed by students. Tropico 5 also offers many possibilities here. The idea behind the classes is that the students, having familiarized themselves with the game, play a multiplayer session, where they will be able to specify what is important to them and what attitude they will adopt - will they help each other, or will they be competitive? Each of these approaches will require different priorities while dealing with day-to-day management. In addition to purely practical values, our classes and Tropico 5 have a self-reflection function. They enable students to get to know themselves and their approach to tasks and problems. Choosing a cooperative or competitive approach, with no predetermined goals from our instructors, tells us a lot about ourselves and our societies.”