Month: June 2008

Time Management, meet Tower Defense

At least six months ago, lured in by the Chocolatier and Tradewinds games, I joined Big Fish Games’ Game Club, and now I get a game credit every month. The last few months, I’ve been at a loss for how to spend it. That’s partly thanks to the relative dearth of material for the Mac, partly to the grinding uninventiveness of some segments of the casual game industry. I don’t like hidden object games or platformers or shooters very much; despise match-3 and mahjong. I enjoyed Diner Dash and the first few of its clones I played, but now there are so many that I wince at the sight of any two-word-title ending in Dash, Frenzy, Fever, Mania, or Madness.

This despite the fact that I’ve played a whole bunch of tower defense games, and enjoyed them all. Some game mechanics are inherently more resilient than others, and the resilience has to do with the strategic richness of play. It’s easy to introduce new strategic problems to tower defense games. Continue reading “Time Management, meet Tower Defense”

Language-teaching with interactive fiction

Among the interesting things turned up by my investigation into IF for teaching is a German-teaching module (by Brett Shelton, David Neville, and Brian McInnis at Utah State University) designed for students who natively speak English.

I haven’t gotten very far into the game itself, but I was really intrigued to see this. It starts off with an English-language tutorial voice who steps the player through making commands in German, and I found this very successful (though, obviously, I am not a member of the target audience). In fact, I thought it was better than the average IF tutorial because of the two-language aspect: I had to type back the commands for looking, taking things, dropping things, and so on, but because this parroting was in German, it was more interesting and didn’t feel so zombie-like.

It’s intriguing stuff, I thought. It’s meant for students who have already had a little introductory German, but the first portion at least is playable even if you don’t know very much vocabulary.

Russian Metamorphoses release

Thanks to Vsevolod Zoubarev, there is now a Russian translation of Metamorphoses. I find this very exciting, though I cannot actually read a word of it myself…

To pass along the links from his email, in case anyone wants to try it:

Link to the archive with the game, short manual and the options.txt file
Link to the entry on the translator’s blog (in Russian)
Discussion on the local IF forum (which I can sort of make out with Google Translate…)

Soliciting suggestions about IF for education

I posted this to RAIF, but since I know there are readers here who don’t follow RAIF closely:

Graham and I have been talking about a revamp of the Inform website, and one of the things we’d especially like to add is some support for teaching with Inform and/or interactive fiction in general. But since neither of us has any actual experience of presenting Inform in a classroom, we’d love some feedback about what it would be most useful for us to offer. Particulars follow the cut.

Continue reading “Soliciting suggestions about IF for education”