Category: education

Screenshots

…from an in-progress Flash game designed to teach Greek vowel contractions. It’s a bit of a break from my usual thing, but I’m having a good time learning some Actionscript. It’s also a lot of fun designing game mechanics around an existing thing I want to teach, rather than a system invented for the game.

It has a long way to go yet in terms of polish — I wanted to get the gameplay in place before I started going crazy with the art, for instance — and I’ll need to test the levels with students to make sure that the progression makes sense.

“Interactive fiction” from the publishing side

Recently I’ve run into a few references to “interactive fiction” where the term doesn’t mean any kind of game, but something more choose-your-own-adventure-like. In the 80s we had Infocom appropriating the word “fiction” in order to lend an impression of literary depth and respectability to its brand; now we have book publishers borrowing interactivity in order to make their publications seem more appealing, particularly to young people. I’m interested in this, but not terribly heartened by the samples I’ve run into recently.

One example is this series of choose your own adventure books aimed at helping “tween” girls make Christian decisions. I assume the author has the best intentions for this project, but — leaving aside the actual content of the decisions — I get the strong impression that the reader is presented with choices each of which has only one rather blatant “right” solution:

In the Scenarios series, each main character is faced with many choices and moral dilemmas. Eventually, they find that their choices have led them into a situation that requires them to make a very difficult and potentially life-altering moral decision. When the story has fully unfolded, and the main character arrives at that moment of truth, the reader makes the big decision for her and then turns to the corresponding section in the book where the resulting circumstances unfold. This places the responsibility for those decisions squarely on the reader’s shoulders, in hopes that she will learn from her personal experience as she lives it through the eyes of the book’s character. She will learn the importance of good decisions as well as the truth about forgiveness and grace. Even when poor choices are made, the redemptive power of Christ is evident as forgiveness is sought, offered and received.

When I was in sixth grade we had a drug awareness program in school that included similar exercises, in which we were asked to pick whether we would Give In To Peer Pressure or Just Say No. Not so much roleplaying, which I can somewhat understand; just picking what was the Right Answer. I’m not sure what this was meant to accomplish other than to make sure the students knew what the teacher wanted to hear.

Though I’m very interested in interactive choice in general, I find this particular use of choice (“you get to choose, but if you choose the Morally Wrong Answer, you get preached at!”) aesthetically repellent and also ineffective as propaganda. This is not a story; it’s a quiz. I have no problem with that in the context of, say, safety training: I once had a job that involved potential exposure to chemical toxins and radioactive substances, and I had no problem being trained with multiple-choice questions about what to do when I dropped a beaker of liquid, or the role-playing scene where I needed to dispose of something safely. But there wasn’t any moral judgment involved there, just a procedure I needed to learn to follow.

I suspect the Christian Morality Storyquiz does the reader a disservice by pretending that life is simpler than it actually is. Unless the reader has some ability to share the protagonist’s temptation, it’s easy to piously do the right thing on her behalf — and for that experience to be nothing like preparation for real world situations. (Not to mention that sometimes you can do what you absolutely believe is the right thing and still hurt someone’s feelings thereby and face unhappy consequences.) So it all sounds a bit plastic. And most kids old enough to fit the “tween” category are old enough to smell the artificiality a mile off.

The second example comes in the form of a press release emailed to me:

Writers of interactive fiction for the 21st Century wanted

– mifiction calls for entries from established and aspiring authors to create modern day interactive fiction –

UK, October 13, 2009: mifiction, an innovative online publisher based in the UK, is looking to reinvigorate interactive fiction using the latest in modern technology, and your writing skills.

In an effort to encourage authors and to find a host of exciting and imaginative stories, mifiction is hosting a writing competition which is open to anyone with an interest in interactive fiction and a passion for writing.

About the competition:
Aimed at writers who are enthusiastic about teen fiction, mifiction is encouraging authors over the age of 16 to submit entries from almost any genre…

It turns out that what they’re looking for is choose your own adventure stories that can be delivered in snippets of 150 words, the better to display on a mobile phone.

This is a fairly restrictive form, I feel, and I’m not encouraged by the fact that the very first snippet of their example “interactive fiction” contains the text “You can sees it now…”.

But what bothers me about it even more is the recommended implementation structure. To avoid uncontrollable amounts of content, the guidelines suggest that story branches should reconnect to the main storyline. However, the system does not track variables and has no preserved state other than the fact of which text we’re currently looking at. So player’s past choices are forgotten and disregarded as soon as the story rejoins, which means in practical terms that none of one’s early choices will matter. (Unless — one could argue this — viewing one branch rather than another significantly affects the interpretation of later material. But that’s a bit meta.) In any case, what they’re implementing could be implemented equally well as a series of very simple HTML pages, with none of the complexities to be found in more sophisticated literary hypertext software.

That said, first prize in this competition is 300 UKP (about $490 at present exchange rates), for what I suspect is substantially less work than entering the IF Comp once. So hey, perhaps someone will find it’s worth trying to wrangle an interesting interactive experience out of this extremely bare-bones format.

Interactive Dioramas

A couple of months ago this possible IF exchange popped into my head:

> EXAMINE CLOTHES
They’re… well, I suppose that depends. Are you male or female? >> F

You’re wearing …

The original context was that I was imagining a piece of historical IF with a meticulously-rendered environment; and part of the point would be to call the player’s attention to the ways in which, in that environment and culture, a person’s surroundings would be affected by gender, social status, and other features. So it would be better to collect protagonist data during the game (to highlight where and how it matters) rather than all at once at the beginning (leaving the effects obscure afterward).

It wouldn’t be too hard to code, I don’t think: you’d probably want to start with placeholder objects, like “generic clothing”, and then swap in the specific objects as soon as the player tried to interact with the placeholder.

I doubt I’ll have time or occasion to use this idea in the near future, so I just thought I’d throw it out there, along with a question: are there other interactive styles or approaches that would be especially useful for educational interactive non-fiction (as distinct from conventional IF)? (Another possibility that comes to mind would be footnoted IN-F, with source references appearing in a separate pane whenever the player encountered something.)

The Game Design Question

I’ve used a variation of the following activity in a couple of different college classes (all of them courses in translation, pitched at a class of 30-40 students with no prior background in classics):

Divide into groups of five or six, and spend 30 minutes or so coming up with a core game design for a game based on some aspect of the Roman economy (or whatever — specific content varies). Name your game. Choose a group member to present a pitch for it to the rest of the class.

Students love this activity. They think I’m letting them play in class, practically giving them the day off. The discussions are riotous. Certain male students who tend to be otherwise pretty quiet in class actually sit up and talk. It usually starts off a little goofy, but they get interested in some specific questions about the game design, and pretty soon they’re paging back through their books to remind themselves about critical dates and data.

It takes a little care to frame the question, because there is always at least one group that will want to spend their time lovingly detailing the weapons that are going to go into their multiplayer XBox fighting extravaganza. (“Wait, who are we fighting?” “Um… there were pirates, right?” “Yeah, okay, let’s have pirates! And we’ll blow up their ships!”)

So I make sure that they understand I’m going to be asking certain kinds of things during the final pitch. For the Roman economy exercise, it was: What does the player have to do in this game? What does winning look like? How do the game challenges reflect (for example) the realities of Roman trade? What sources of information would you use to make the simulation more accurate? What aspects of the game would you have to make guesses about?

After the individual pitches, I let the class say which game ideas they liked best and why. Then we move into a full-class discussion of some issues that the process inevitably raises. In the course on Roman civilization and culture, we used the game project to talk about the problems of reconstructing processes and systems — how can we understand the Roman economy when we have such diverse and fragmentary evidence? What can we know or guess about the challenges of being successful under those long-past conditions? In a mythology class, where the challenge was to recast a classic myth of their choice, we used this as a segue into a discussion of how genre expectations, changing cultural norms, and changes of media affect what we value and emphasize in a story. (“Why did you choose to keep this in your story and leave that out? Which things did you drop because they don’t work in the modern era? Which did you leave out because they don’t work in a game? What did you add? Why? Now can you compare that process back to what Ovid was doing with the myths that had come down to him?” …and so on.)

The point of this exercise is not to come up with a good game. Most of the time the pitches sound unbalanced, broken, or deeply derivative of the gameplay of some existing franchise — a fact that students themselves admit, proposing board games like “Romanopoly”. It’s the process that counts: first getting them to engage in a more active form of review of facts and figures, and second giving them something concrete around which to start a discussion on, say, transmedial narratology. (I’m sure it would also be very interesting to expand this into a whole substantial workshop in which students carried through on the design of their game and actually refined and implemented something that did work — but I haven’t yet had a class where I wanted to devote that much time to the project. So for right now it is just a discussion trick.)

* Actually, the first time I did this, in a mythology class, I allowed them to think up an alternative presentation for any of the myths that we’d studied that day, in any medium. But almost all the groups, in both sections, went for some kind of gaming presentation, which reinforces my sense that the video game is the medium this age group is most critically involved with. The question of imagining a movie, novel, poem, or play around a given myth didn’t appeal nearly as much.