I didn’t expect to be; I hadn’t expected to play the game. But I was traveling, and my wife and first grade son convinced me to give it a shot while visiting out of town sites. I was hooked immediately.

Over the next three years, I’d catch Pokemon in downtown Chicago and show them off to my son when I got home. We bonded when we caught a Victrebeel, and he gave his first school presentation about how it evolved from Bellsprout. We did community days, and attended Pokemon Go Fest a few times. Even the disastrous one.

But Pokemon was never really my geek. I was too old to be psyched about the TV show, Gameboy franchises, and cards in their heyday. The low entry point of Pokemon Go meant that wasn’t a problem, but I still felt wrapped in other people’s passions.

Harry Potter, though. That’s another thing entirely.

I’ve adored the Harry Potter novels since my days working in a bookstore, when I helped referee the midnight release of Goblet of Fire, and I’ve been salivating about a Harry Potter mobile game since I first heard about Niantic using some of that sweet, sweet PoGo money to purchase the Harry Potter AR rights way back in 2016.

When Wizards Unite finally dropped, the lukewarm response surprised me. In fact, a lot of criticisms of the game reflect what I like the most.

For example…

WIZARDS UNITE IS NOT POKEMON GO

On its debut, players shorthanded Wizards Unite as, “It’s like Pokemon Go, but with Wizards”. That’s a decent elevator pitch, but it’s also an oversimplification.

Yes, both games are built on the same AR platform–the tagged worldmapping that Niantic has used since its Ingress days–and both involve hunting down iconic franchise bits, but there are critical differences.

PoGo is a collection game, as players catch ‘em all. Wizards Unite is a quest based game. The collection serves as a mechanism to advance the story, not merely as a way to amass game sprites.

The initial pushback Wizards Unite got wasn’t surprising, since it debuted in a tricky spot. If it was too much like PoGo, it’d get criticized. If it was too different, it’d get criticized. Personally, I give the developers a lot of credit for trying to push the AR gaming medium beyond, “Ooo, I don’t have that one yet.”

But all those differences were complicated by another simple truth…

WIZARDS UNITE IS COMPLICATED

As mentioned, part of PoGo’s appeal is its low entry point. There are Pokemon in your world, and you catch ‘em by swiping your finger. Off you go.

Wizards Unite is more complex. There’s potion making, collection categories, professions, seeds. There are inns, which are different than greenhouses, which are different than fortresses.

A battle in Pokemon Go means gathering fellow trainers, surrounding a sometimes worthy foe, and bashing the living ditto out of it. A Wizards Unite battle involves selecting the right opponents, timing retreats, spells, and potion use, and knowing your own strengths and weaknesses. That’s probably why there are skill trees.

Did I mention there are skill trees? There are skill trees.

This all takes time to grasp, and even longer to leverage into success. With that complexity, though, comes nuance, and an in-game world whose intricacies reward exploration. If you just want to geek over finding a Murtlap, and of knowing what that means, you’re welcome to do so. But you’re also invited to do more than that.

Which brings me to the final strength…

WIZARDS UNITE SEEMS LIKE A SINGLE PLAYER GAME

Part of the PoGo appeal is community. You gather in public places and rejoice in shared effort. In 2016, my local town square had hundreds—yes, hundreds—of trainers all summer. At one point, there were vendors. And street musicians. The game encourages that group dynamic, and there are limits to what you can do without it.

Wizards Unite, though, can be soloed just fine, thank you. Since collection advances the story, you’re essentially working through an asynchronous, open-world RPG, which balances AR mechanics with narrative dynamics.

That setup requires more user attention than a swipe and grab type game, so Wizards Unite feels more like my experience, rather than a shared experience. Even though you can team up with fellow wizards for things like fortress battles, you don’t really need to, at least as far as I am through the game.

This puts the focus on your personal growth in a much more involved way than the simple drive to be the very best. It also solves one of the biggest challenges facing Wizards Unite as an intellectual property: IP synergy.

In Pokemon Go, the IP synergy was built in. You want to be a trainer like Ash? Boom. Off you go.

Wizards Unite, though, doesn’t emulate its source material; it extends that source material. The game takes place with Harry and others as adults, and the shifts in the wizarding world are part of what you learn as you play.

Is the story considered canon? Will it collapse under its own weight as the gameplay stretches out? Who cares? I still play Pokemon Go occasionally, but the bulk of my EL platform time goes to Wizards Unite. For now, it’s several Butterbeers worth of fun.

Also, the game has convinced my son to read the books, which we now do as a family.

Here’s hoping the fun continues.

As someone who has had more than their fair share of encounters with plagiarism and academic dishonesty, this idea struck me as providing a helpful framework for managing attempted intrusions into the integrity of the academic process.

So here’s a bit about what we can learn from the IT Security folks.

Preventative Security Measures

Preventative security measures are put in place to make sure that attacks never happen in the first place. They include things like password policies, firewalls, and security of physical assets like servers.

The biggest transferable idea to the classroom, though, would probably be user training. A common security notion is that the user of a system is often its greatest point of vulnerability, so it’s critical to make sure they use the system in the way it’s intended to be used.

In a classroom setting, here’s where plagiarism education comes in. Students need to be taught how to recognize plagiarism, where they’re most likely to encounter the opportunities or temptations to plagiarize, or the risks of engaging in dishonest conduct.

Since clear protocols for managing known risks are also critical to IT Security, it’s also important to have an accessible, documented policy for how cases of academic dishonesty–whatever their form–will be handled.

Detective Security Measures

In IT Security, detective measures are in place to identify when something might be amiss, and typically include threat monitoring practices like identifying suspicious emails or network traffic, regular audits, unknown hardware showing up on a network, or other such flags.

In academic dishonesty cases, most teachers are aware of the suspicious flags, like a sudden tone or font switch or a paucity of documented sources–and if you use a plagiarism detection software, you’re also aware of threat monitoring systems.

The more helpful transferable idea from IT Security is the forensic aspect of detective security measures. Once a breach has been identified, the next step is to ask what enabled the breach. What systems, if any, broke down? What were the vulnerabilities that have now been exposed?

For that matter, what were the motivations? Was this incident caused by a malicious actor or someone who was negligent or unclear about expected protocols?

And, in any case, what could or should be changed to prevent a reoccurrence?

Corrective Security Measures

After the detective phase, you’ve got corrective security measures. In a classroom setting, these could take several forms.

If plagiarism has slipped through the cracks, it might be time to reevaluate the detective measures. If plagiarism is discovered but can’t be prosecuted, it’s time to revisit and clarify policies, perhaps making consequences explicit. If there is a swell of documentation errors, it’s time to reconsider how much time is spent on conventions and best practices.

In any case, one of the foundational ideas of IT Security is that it’s in a constant state of re-evaluation. In a classroom setting, where the methods of research and expression are constantly changing, as is the idea of what a classroom even IS, it seems like there’s a lot of value in that model.

For that matter, as someone who teaches a lot of Technical Writing, I really liked the idea of framing an academic dishonesty deterrent policy up as something with a loose analog to concepts with which my students might be familiar.

Even if you don’t teach technical writing, though, it’s always helpful to make sure that, in terms of putting students in the best position to succeed, nothing falls through the cracks.

Earlier today, though, I found cause for my first real temptation: the Smithsonian institute has made 3D plans of some of its most popular artifacts available, and these can be plugged into 3D printers and remanufactured at home.

There’s a really nice range of items too. Some of it is sculptural antiquities, some prehistoric fossils, some historic artifacts. The scaling ranges from lifesize reproductions to models that are significantly scaled down (not that you wanted a full size replica of the Wright Brothers plane, of course).

Even if you don’t own a 3D printer, the models are a blast to manipulate. You can zoom in to see the intricacies of artifacts and rotate them in space, which doesn’t require any outside software. If you’re not into the modeling, they also have explorable 3D renderings of things like the Apollo 11 command module.

If you’re a teacher in history or technology, the resource is worth bookmarking even if you never print a thing. 

This kind of library is only going to grow, of course, so if you’re into this tech keep an eye on it–especially if you’re in a school that has access to a 3D printer.