For this week’s podcast, we interviewed Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, founder of Expert Theory, a classroom platform for immersive classroom gaming.
We cover what gave rise to the business, the academic theory and empirical evidence behind it, and experiential learning, interdisciplinary learning, and how any teacher or professor can integrate gaming into the traditional classroom space.
AI x Higher Ed Podcast: Immersive Learning through Simulation
The Genesis of Game-Based Learning
Stefan: Daveed, we go back to just before 2013—close to a couple of decades now. But let’s start in 2013 at Georgetown. By your account, in a class you were teaching, the material was right and the students were engaged to a degree, but something just wasn’t connecting or clicking in that traditional format. Can you walk us through what was happening in that classroom and how you ended up designing a game instead of just rewriting the syllabus or complaining on social media that today’s students aren’t what they used to be?
Daveed: It’s a great question. In 2013, I was teaching in Georgetown’s Security Studies program. One unique thing about that program is that when you are a first-year adjunct, they have students fill out evaluations after the first four weeks to give you a benchmark for how you’re doing. We should caveat that students don’t have to fill out evaluations, so generally speaking, they only fill them out if they want you to teach differently.
The evaluations were not too kind and were all over the map. I stepped back and realized it was no big deal—people aren’t always into a class after only four weeks, and there was plenty of time to adjust. Looking at these sometimes contradictory evaluations, I asked myself, “What’s the common thread here? What are students looking for, even if they have opposite views of what I should do?” I realized the common thread was that they all wanted something more tactile. That is what led me to start building games. I realized there was a way to make the material more tactile. I’ve always enjoyed games, so I built very simple ones for that class. To tell the rest of the story: when the semester was done, the student evaluations were spectacular, and it eventually became one of the program’s most popular classes.
The “Click” Moment: Engagement and Agency
Anand: That’s fantastic. Once you ran that first game, what did you notice students doing or saying that convinced you this wasn’t just a novelty or a one-off? What is it about putting people inside the problem that made it different from simply teaching about it?
Daveed: That’s a wonderful question. I would describe it as something you know when you see it. If you’re familiar with Justice Potter Stewart’s infamous definition of pornography—that he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it—that’s sort of what this was. There’s a moment when something clicks. Since we have a debate background, we know that debate intersects with public speaking. When you give a good public speech or presentation, you know when it’s working because there is a “click” moment where you realize you are connecting with the audience.
That’s what happened with the first game I ran, which was a post-9/11 scenario. The class I was teaching was “Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics.” I created an alternative history of 9/11 where all the students were major actors in the events following the attacks. There was an energy and a level of engagement that I had never seen before. It was exactly what I was looking for. It satisfied the students, and I realized that I, as a professor, enjoyed it much more.
Over the course of that semester, I created five or six simple games and explored each week’s topic through that medium. It was a different experience where everything clicked. The key thing you look for is whether this is just fun or if people are actually learning. I found there was deep engagement with the subject; students weren’t just doing random things. Their actions required knowledge, showing me they had done the reading, processed it, and were trying to manipulate the game world in ways that comported with that reading. That showed me it achieved the level of engagement that both the students and I wanted.
The AI Breakthrough and the Providence Platform
Stefan: For years, designing a single simulation or game would take months. You were designing these for a class as you went, but normally you’d have to write everything, create the materials, and think through all the logic. Most educators simply don’t have that time. We often criticize professors for not making classes engaging, but they don’t have the time to reprocess the entire curriculum or the personal experience with games to do so. What finally pushed you from building these one at a time for your own classes to realizing we need a platform that everyone can use?
Daveed: The problem has been clear for a long time, particularly regarding the time required and the lack of game design expertise. Most people just don’t have the background to design games; it’s a hard thing to do. Prior to founding Expert Theory, I ran another company for about a decade called Valens Global. Initially, my games were run through Valens Global before I split the practice group out into Expert Theory.
The issue we always had with our games was how labor-intensive and intricate they were. For our signature style, the price point was always out of step with the market. We weren’t able to consistently run games and have them be profitable as a viable line of business. Then came the large language model (LLM) revolution. I remember when ChatGPT was first unveiled and suddenly it could do things no model could do before. My first night with it, I stayed up all night trying to understand its capabilities.
I’m not a coder or an engineer, but I’ve worked with several coding languages in the past and I had an understanding of how computers “think.” I realized rapidly that with this revolution in LLMs and chain-of-thought prompt engineering, I could train a platform to create games the same way I did. It wasn’t hard to do because my process relates to specific inputs and the outputs that result from them. Once I understood how my design process could be transferred into an LLM, I knew what we needed to do to create the Providence platform, which we use for our games now.
Redefining Active Learning
Anand: Jesse, I want to bring you in to talk about your role as Lead Product for both Expert Theory and Providence. For a listener who’s never watched a simulation unfold, how do you describe what Providence actually is? What does it do that a lecture, case study, or role-play simply can’t?
Jesse: As Daveed said, the Providence platform enables the rapid creation of these simulations. Simulations are, in my opinion, the best strategy available because when people are placed inside these scenarios, they experience the same cognitive process they would in a real-life situation. Studies consistently show that active learning increases memory retention and engagement both inside and outside the classroom. It creates a feedback loop that helps people understand the subject as if they had experienced it in real life.
Providence is an end-to-end solution for simulations. It walks you through the game design process in our question setup, which allows people without advanced game design knowledge to use the platform. It also provides player portals to play the game. At Expert Theory, we used to use Microsoft Teams to run our simulations, and it would take hours just to add people to the various channels and distribute materials. There was a real need for this, and I’m very proud to be building Providence.
Measuring Success from the Referee’s Chair
Stefan: I should thank you for the platform and Daveed for inviting me. About a month ago, I played a game you created titled “After Maduro” with experts in military affairs and political science. I was on a team with an MVP player on your platform and we ended up winning. I told Daveed beforehand that I’d love to try it, but I wanted to make sure I won!
From the referee’s chair—which is a vague term for the game developer—what are you looking for during a game? How do you know it’s working because the players are doing specific things, rather than just going through the steps without achieving the goal?
Daveed: Stefan mentioned the “MVP” of Providence Game Nights, so I need to give a shout-out to Joey Brennan. He is an undergraduate who is about to graduate and has won both Providence Game Nights he participated in while competing against professionals.
In terms of how we know it’s working: we run many different kinds of games. Stefan participated in a Game Night, which lasts about two and a half hours. Currently, we are running our first tournament for the Army Strategist Association. We lengthened that a bit for competitive play, giving people three hours for gameplay. Those are very fast-paced.
In contrast, our signature games are often run as the backbone of a university class. This is done at Duke University and Arizona State University (ASU). At ASU, our game is the capstone for their Master of Arts in Global Security (MAGS) program. There are different things we look for in those mediums because speeding up or slowing down a game brings out different dimensions. For example, the game we’re running at ASU, “Arctic Awakenings,” is run over the course of a full semester. Sometimes we run that same game in four hours for a different audience, which changes the dimension entirely.
The common thread I look for to see if a game is working is the extent to which people are interacting with the game environment. Does it seem real to them? When you played “After Maduro,” a lot was happening regarding the ELN—which is described variously as a narco-terrorist group or an armed political group. They were using rural areas in interesting ways, the US military was launching tactical operations, and the Democratic opposition had embedded people within the Venezuelan military. We saw people really interacting with the tools they were given and figuring out what they could do.
In our signature games, we have fictional characters who are well-fleshed out and important to the world. I always enjoy when people interact with these characters in deep ways, often gaining advantageous positions by figuring out how to manipulate or draw in these key figures for their own purposes. Jesse, what do you think indicates that a game is resonating?
Jesse: You covered that well, but I’ll speak to my experience with “Providence Plus,” where I work with a professor to build and run a game together. These are fully AI-generated games. In my conversations with professors and students, I see that they are consistently remembering and bringing up things they’ve learned in class through reading or lectures. They leverage those things throughout the game.
When I get on adjudication calls with professors, they’ll note that a student brought in a specific reading and tried to apply it. We see students grasping what they know and doing additional research. While we occasionally have teams that are just having fun and not focusing on the core objective, they are still immersed in the environment. I’m confident they are still learning, even if they are trying to talk to a neutral country while terrorist groups are running around.
The Power of Storytelling and Perspective-Taking
Stefan: That’s part of the fun of any game. I’d like to pick up on what you started with regarding education. There is often a tension where teachers feel they have to choose between covering the curriculum and focusing on process-oriented learning like games or projects. However, research shows—and I remember a study from 2025 regarding your work—that when students engage with the material this way, they are more likely to remember it.
When there is an outcome other than just writing a paper or taking a test, students get excited and want to build context. Even in the game I played, I still remember the information a month later. It adds to the complexity. On our team, we were lying to China the whole time. You don’t get that dynamic in a paper where you just articulate how things might play out. A paper is a one-off, but these activities make students engage and remember what they are learning.
Daveed: Absolutely. Humans are storytelling creatures and we tend to anchor our understanding of abstract concepts in something concrete. We also aren’t naturally good at stepping into someone else’s shoes and understanding their relationships.
A number of years ago, in 2016 and 2017, I was the lead instructor for the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Individual Terrorism Awareness class. We were training people who were deploying to places where terrorist groups were active. The classroom portion gave them an overview of the major areas of operation. Because a full day of classroom instruction is boring, I created a game for it centered on the Middle East. At that point, ISIS’s caliphate hadn’t collapsed yet. It was interesting because you had many different actors—the US, Iran, Israel, the Kurds, the Syrian government, Turkey, and even al-Qaeda—all fighting ISIS despite having major conflicts with each other.
The game asked a simple question: when the caliphate collapses, what happens to the relationships among all these other actors? One time I was leading this game for a group of Special Forces who had just returned from northern Syria where they were embedded with the Kurds. One of them came up to me afterward and said, “Thanks for that; now I understand what was happening over there.” I was taken aback because he was literally just there. But I understood what he meant. While he understood many dimensions better than I did, he was stepping into a complex web of relationships and it wasn’t clear how they fit together.
The game made those abstract relationships concrete by putting him in a specific role. This is why games help people learn better—you start to understand the world from someone else’s eyes. You understand why different actors work together or don’t, and how they view different developments.
The Secret Sauce: High Fidelity and Agency
Anand: I haven’t had a chance to participate in a Game Night yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I just want to make sure I’m on the MVP’s team! It sounds amazing that you can get that level of engagement. Jesse, what does it take to make a simulation feel alive, where team decisions ripple through the whole system and consequences start compounding? Where do most attempts at interactive learning fall short?
Jesse: The “secret sauce” is ensuring that every action is integrated into the world and creates wider consequences. Many games take a long time to adjudicate but lack high fidelity. We can create an entire news feed based on what each team did in the last round. In an educational context, that makes the experience feel alive.
Our simulations are document-based. We replicate a full media environment, including news articles from sources like the Washington Post or CNN, as well as social media posts and interviews. Each team also gets individual memos with deeper or secret information. This variety of voices and plot lines makes the world feel truly living. Making players feel agency in their decisions and then watching the consequences grow is what makes it work.
Addressing Modern Unpredictability
Stefan: Daveed, your background is in security studies and international relations. It’s easy to see how these games apply to war games or strategy. But I have two questions: First, could you give an example of another type of game, such as an economic or local simulation? Second, do you ever use things that are happening right now? For example, in the current information war, there are companies generating Lego videos for TikTok that portray the US and Trump positively. That’s a whole new thing to react to. There isn’t much past practice for responding to a Lego character of Donald Trump in a boat. I wonder how gaming can help with that.
Daveed: There are two questions there and I’ll hit both. First, the world as we traditionally understood it is breaking down, and our games are designed to address that unpredictability.
Before getting back to security, I’ll give a non-security example. Last week, I had the privilege of running a game for the 2026 leadership conference of the Virginia Lottery. The executive director, Khaled Jones, was on the Wake Forest debate team when I was. We ran a game for them that served as both an icebreaker and a topical exercise. It focused on technology and how communicate changes markets.
For years, state lotteries had a monopoly on gambling. Now, with online betting and esports, the market is changing. We built a game called “Monopoly No More.” To avoid being too “on the nose,” we created a fictional state called Mid Carolina where the spirits retail market had been deregulated. In North Carolina, spirits are sold through a government monopoly (ABC stores). We asked, “If the monopoly went away, what would your place be?” It was a game of negotiation and business planning that culminated in Shark Tank-style pitches. It had nothing to do with security, but it dealt with the same technological unpredictability.
Traditionally, wargaming assumes a static world of maneuver warfare. If you’ve never been to a traditional war game, it looks a lot like the game Risk, with maps, counters, and Dungeons & Dragons dice used to determine outcomes. Those games are lovingly done, but they don’t handle unpredictable factors well. Our focus is on everything other than maneuver warfare. We capture unusual things—not to predict them, but to make us think about them.
For example, our creative director, Eleanor Ross, created “Arctic Awakenings.” One aspect looks at the changing nature of soft power where a North Korean K-pop band emerges as a tool for cultural diplomacy. This creates dilemmas for everyone, including North Korea, because if the band becomes too popular, it might threaten the regime. This puts the unpredictable into a real, interesting context before we have to confront those issues in reality.
When Gameplay Goes Off the Rails
Anand: That unpredictability seems like an important payoff. It reminds me of what Jesse said about teams just “having fun” or going off-script. That sounds valuable because if they do something unexpected, you can explore new outcomes. How much of that do you anticipate? Do you ever tell a team to secretly go “off the rails” to push the game in a different direction?
Jesse: We usually have trigger events. If a team loses focus, we have ways of nudging them back via memos. During live games, we have specific decision points they must address, so at least some of their actions remain on point. However, the rest is their own strategy. Most of the time, players see what’s important in the news feed and memos and they follow those cues.
Daveed: Sometimes this adds value to a game. Unpredictable actions can be used for competitive advantage. For example, we once ran a game at a think tank for national security fellows. There was alcohol at the event, and two guys on the Russia team got a bottle of vodka and went around socializing with all the other teams. It was devastatingly effective for two reasons: First, it was a time-pressured game, and they slowed other teams down by being “those drunk guys.” Second, they were actually spying. One of them left his cell phone on in another team’s room and his team listened to the entire conversation.
Another example is when different teams are essentially playing different games. We sometimes use commercial entities as players. In one game, one team was Google. While the other teams played a geopolitical game, Google was playing a business game. They aren’t as powerful as states, but they can still win by going “off the rails.” Jesse was actually on a Google team before she worked for us. That was her trial run, and we hired her because she was so good at it. Similarly, we hired Joey Brennan. In that game, they had a great business strategy that focused on multi-platform growth. Sometimes a diversion is actually the point of the game.
Combatting AI Anxiety in the Classroom
Stefan: I remember playing Risk with my kids where my goal wasn’t to win, but just to make sure my oldest son was taken out. It created a different dynamic because the younger siblings had to maneuver around my chaotic strategy.
It’s interesting that you hired people based on their performance in these games—not just because they could play, but because they understood dynamic situations. It’s like a work portfolio. Regarding the complexity of thinking: many professors are having a meltdown on social media saying that kids won’t think anymore and will just write papers with AI. My son, who is a college student, sent me a TikTok showing a ChatGPT robot at a graduation party because “he was there the whole time.” If more professors used games, the “AI cheating” problem would go away because there would be more thinking involved than there is in a traditional paper.
You’ve mentioned college, graduate school, and military professionals. I know you did a project at a high school. I think middle schools could also adopt this. Can you tell us about that experience?
Daveed: That was at the Galloway School in Atlanta—a phenomenal school. While many of our games are digital on the Providence platform, our “live games” involve my team facilitating in person. The futurist John Naisbitt said that the more we live in a high-tech society, the more we crave “high touch” or human interaction. Our games promote high touch via high-tech means.
At the Galloway School, almost all the students were part of the Model UN team. We ran “Arctic Awakenings.” For Canada, Arctic climate change is a top national security issue. For a long time, their northern border was defended by impassable ice. As the Arctic becomes navigable, it becomes a rough neighborhood where everyone, especially Russia, wants access.
We had previously run this game for the Canadian Department of National Defense, Duke University, and ASU. It was interesting to see how high school students engaged. My team said it was definitely not the worst-played version of the game; we were impressed by the quality of play. The school produced a video where one student said it was the best day she’d ever had at school. Multiple students talked about their sense of accomplishment. They felt they had achieved something concrete.
Jesse also got a note from a high school teacher who used Providence to look at Columbus’s voyage. He said students would come in excited, asking if it was a “Providence day.” I have no doubt this is a powerful tool for middle school as well. Jesse, you built a game for a sixth-grade class recently, didn’t you?
Applying the “Six Touches” Rule
Jesse: Yes. It was for a gifted sixth-grade class looking at Iraqi medicine in the Middle Ages. I created a simulation with an unknown disease outbreak. There were five different groups, including security services, the city council, and physicians. Each had a piece of the puzzle to solve the outbreak.
A teacher once told me that students need “six touches” on a subject before they start to remember it. By playing a simulation through multiple rounds and reading different documents, you exceed those six touches much faster than through a standard lecture. We haven’t played that one yet, but I’m sure it will be fantastic.
Stefan: In my work coaching high school and college debate, I find that middle schoolers can engage with these issues just as well. I have a student now—a seventh-grader—who wrote his own debate “case” regarding increased development in the Arctic. He wrote his own strategy blocks to deploy hypersonic missiles. It’s incredible how easily they can engage with this.
Daveed: Hypersonic missiles are actually a key plot point in “Arctic Awakenings.” We should put him in one of these games; that would be awesome.
The Limits and Future of Gaming in Education
Stefan: We’ll see if he can beat Joey Brennan! There is a great case for these being successful, but a critic might say we are cherry-picking the most talented students or professionals. How far can we push this? Can we teach all content through games? I have a friend who wanted to start a school where you only did debate, and you learned every subject through that process. The criticism was that you still need a foundation. Could we take it that far?
Daveed: It’s a great question. I think there are certain classes you can’t replace with games. I don’t think there is value in replacing most math or hard science classes with games. Some people might disagree, but for most people, it wouldn’t appeal to the whole class.
Additionally, most people who have seen games in education have had a terrible experience with them. That’s why this company is important to me; I’m confident we can bring in something that is 10 to 100 times better than what people imagine an educational game can be. We want to change the culture. It can’t just be “gamification,” which is often just a boring task with badges or stars.
For our classes at ASU and Duke, we no longer run games as standalone classes. Instead, the game is half of the class and the other half is a normal classroom setting on the same topic. They learn in class and apply it in the game in parallel. They are learning like a practitioner does. In the real world, information doesn’t trickle to you in a perfect sequence; there is a flood of information you don’t need and a lack of information you do. Our games are structured that way. Having a portion of the class be a traditional lecture and a portion be a simulation increases engagement in both.
Regarding “cherry-picking,” we have over six years of data and over a thousand student evaluations. We use a four-point scale because it forces people to make sharper choices. 95% of our ratings have been three or four stars.
Finally, I wanted to create this company because the simulations I did at Valens Global were too expensive for many schools. That’s not fair. I want everyone to have access to high-quality games. With AI, that access is now possible. We give out some free licenses at the high school level. We also have a partnership with Follett Publishers, so any professor can price out the game as a textbook. Currently, our licenses cost less than even a cheap traditional textbook.
We are also working on full AI adjudication. Some professors won’t implement games if they have to adjudicate them personally. While humans will always be better in combination with AI, our AI alone will eventually be better than 80% of human adjudicators. This will reduce variability and allow more institutions to incorporate games into their curriculum.
The Case for Interdisciplinary Learning
Stefan: I want to push back slightly. I would normally not want to debate an NDT winner, but regarding whether games work in every subject—when I took probability and statistics in grad school, it was very dry. I was more interested in rhetoric. But if I could have applied those statistics to how judge preferences are distributed across a tournament, I probably would have gotten an A.
Also, education reform is moving toward interdisciplinary learning. Imagine a project where you need to understand chemistry or math to achieve an output. I had no interest in math in college, but now I wish I had learned more because I’m interested in AI. You could really explode the traditional model because games are naturally interdisciplinary. There is a school in Mexico that is entirely interdisciplinary with no subject-specific classes. There is potential to push this much further.
Daveed: I agree strongly. I’m not going to argue with someone who sees an application for a game. I’m just trying to be modest and not overclaim. Our games are designed to be interdisciplinary. When someone plays a business role, it must function like a real business. Business games coexist with geopolitical games.
Also, regarding the Joey Brennan example: I want people with different backgrounds to contribute. When Jesse won her first game as an undergraduate, she was the youngest member of the team. Because she was Gen Z, she understood social media better than the older team members. As Google, her team moved away from being just a search company and made a push into social media. Jesse had a significant advantage over team members who had more traditional experience.
Jesse: Absolutely. Before I walked into that game, I was so nervous that I emailed Daveed’s team asking if I should just observe. I was on Team Google and was surprised by how much I could contribute. I was taking a class on tech ethics at the time, so I had a lot to say. People were looking to me for answers more than the people from the State Department! For someone younger, it feels like a real accomplishment even if it is a “fake” game world. It’s a great experience to have a voice and have people listen to you.
Closing and Contact Information
Anand: This has been a fantastic conversation. Before we wrap up, I want to clarify: I want to be on the seventh-grader’s team and argue for hypersonic missiles in the Arctic! How can our listeners find out more about the platform or a Game Night? Where can they find you both online?
Daveed: You can visit our website at expert-theory.com to learn about Providence. Both Jesse and I are on LinkedIn. I am the only Daveed Gartenstein-Ross there. You can also email me at daveed@expert-theory.com.
Jesse: I am also the only Jesse Nimmons on LinkedIn. My email is jnimons@expert-theory.com—Nimons only has one “m.”
Stefan: Congratulations to you both. There is so much to contribute to the world of education. This is ultimately where it’s all going to end up. It was exciting to talk to you both. Thank you so much.