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Scooped by
Joe Pereira
onto Interactive Fiction and Digital Game-based Learning |
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Infocom co-founder Dave Lebling explains how he created Zork and blazed a trail for interactive fiction game development in a postmortem talk at GDC 2014
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So, I’ve discussed what IF is and suggested how to choose a game for use with students. I think it’s a good idea now to look at why we should be using IF for learning in the first place:
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Naomi Alderman: story has become something of an afterthought in the design of many games. That’s a pity because it can be the essence of a good gaming experience
Joe Pereira's insight:
This very well written article gives high praise to Emily Short's 'First Draft of the Revolution' and '80 Days', two modern text-based games using the tablet-focused Inklewriter platform. Of course, no decent article on storytelling-based gaming would forget to mention the parser-based Interactive Fiction, and this one naturally gives IF it's proper due. Recommended reading and playing.
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I am getting a website together to showcase the work the grade 6′s did with their interactive fiction stories.
Joe Pereira's insight:
This is a great little site (hosted on Google Drive!) that was made to showcase the IF games made by @gbertoia 's Grade 6 class, using Quest, in order to learn about digital literacy. The site provides some insight into the steps that students took to create the games: mapping; room, object and puzzle design; and the actual coding. Unfortunately, the 'reflections' section doesn't seem to be ready, but hearing what the students have to say about the experience would be very interesting. Links to play the games online and downloads of the game files are made available. Gary notes "Some interesting games have been built and I have learned a lot more about using Quest to create interactive fiction stories. Have seen kids do some interesting coding without knowing that they were coding!"
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Like its devotees, gaming has come a long way. And more than ever before, we understand that different students learn in different ways. Providing a multi-layered approach is essential for ensuring that everyone is learning. Via Nik Peachey
Joe Pereira's insight:
A nice little article with a few good game suggestions to use in the classroom, although it is extremely disappointing not see any paser-based IF mentioned when they've included 'Gone Home' and 'Myst', described as a 'first-person puzzle game'. Both these games are a direct graphical evolution of the standard text adventure. One thing I don't like in the article though, is the author's decision to discuss both the topics of Digital Game-based learning and Gamification. I don't think Gamification should be discussed at all with educators, when real video games can be used for learning, instead of game-like concepts.
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The enormously popular Walking Dead video game series can trace its lineage directly back to the dawn of video games - to a genre called Interactive Fiction, or IF for short.
Joe Pereira's insight:
This is a nice look at the evolution of text adventures into modern narrative-based games such as the The Walking Dead point-and-click adventure game. The article does well to mention that Interactive Fiction still lives on (plenty to play at www.ifdb.tads.org) and reminding new and younger players of how a vast number of modern games are still influenced by IF is a great way to entice them to try it out.
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Computer gaming can be traced back to the earliest experiments in computer artificial intelligence from the 1940s. While the popularity of adventure games has greatly declined in the past decade, they survive in various forms.
Joe Pereira's insight:
A nice look at how the first text-adventure game 'Adventure' and perhaps the most famous text-adventure 'Zork'. have influenced - and continue to influence video games created since the demise of commercial Interactive Fiction.
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Text adventures have been around for years. Like, 30 years. When I introduced Zork I: The Great Underground Empire to my grade I led in with “this game is older than me”. After recovering from the responses of “woah, that game is OLD” and “really? Did they have computers back then?” I loaded the game on the IWB and asked them what they thought we needed to do.
Joe Pereira's insight:
While ZORK is perhaps THE seminal Interactive Fiction game and should at some point be played by any aspiring adventurer, I wouldn't recommend playing it in the classroom for a variety of reasons (too long, too vast, difficult/obscure puzzles, too easy to die, lack of strong narrative, no background story, etc.). It amazes me then that a Grade 3/4 teacher has successfully used Zork with her students (native speakers of course, and OK - I doubt any of them will be finishing it without clues anytime soon). Nonetheless, as a way to improve Literacy, IF once again makes its mark. Lucky kids too!
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Joe Pereira's insight:
This is a really nice looking Pearltrees page by 'bouteloupjp' with links to various resources on Digital Game-based learning and virtual worlds.
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Joe Pereira's insight:
This is a nice Prezi done by Andre Bosson back in 2011 on a few of the sessions given at the Eclipsing Expectations conference at Sabanci University in Istanbul. This was possibly the first Prezi I ever saw and was surprised to see that not only were both of my sessions - "A narrative at war with a crossward" and "Playing and learning outside the box" given the Prezi treatment, but Andrew had actually created it on the fly during the Outside the Box session!
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I’ve recently been reading the work of interactive fiction writer Emily Short and discovered her story Galatea. I was happy to find that the story was powered by a chatbot engine and I wondered if this was a whole genre within interactive fiction
Joe Pereira's insight:
A quick look at Galatea and other chatbot-powered interactive stories.
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Gary Motteram, editor of Innovations in learning technologies for English language teaching, explains how the arrival of digital technologies in the classroom has helped learning. Via Ana Cristina Pratas
Joe Pereira's insight:
A useful publication edited by a true expert in the field, detailing case studies from teachers who actually walk the walk. Of particular interest is the section on Digital game-based learning, covering Kyle Mawer (of Digital Play (2011) fame)'s use of walkthroughs and of course, my own use of parser-based Interactive Fiction in the language classroom (pages 34-35). Read the PDF online here: 
Sabrina Faulkner's curator insight,
September 19, 2013 9:27 PM
Technology does help learning in the classroom because there are so many ways to go about using a device to get the material across to all the students in the class. I also think that since technology is all around us, that children are starting to learn at younger ages.
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Of course the most obvious use for IF tools and languages is for games. It's been used that way for years and years. I got to thinking about other uses of the technology. Here are just a few things to brainstorm about.
Joe Pereira's insight:
Jason Lautzenheiser muses on potential applications of parser-based IF beyond gaming - with the obligatory nod to its use in Education, amongst others.
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"School reformers are interested in game-based learning to have learners [solve] problems...In a world with interacting complex systems, we need problem-solvers, not fact-reciters and test-takers."
Joe Pereira's insight:
I have yet to to read anything by James Gee that doesn't make perfect sense! |
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Interview with Inkle Studios' Jon Ingold - on parser-based IF works and the future of IF on tablets.
To me, a good interactive story has to make the player feel complicit in creating the direction of the narrative develops (even if that direction is entirely pre-scripted), and most games work the other way around: they tell you what the direction will be, and ask you to perform it.
Joe Pereira's insight:
This is a great interview with Jon Ingold, author of the amazing parser-based IF work 'All Roads' and the awesome new breed of CYOA apps 'Sorcery!' and '80 Days'.
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A teacher in Hawaii is using interactive fiction to teach coding.
Joe Pereira's insight:
A lot is being said these days about the importance of teaching coding to students. Inform 7, a programming language created specifically for developing parser-based Interactive Fiction, stands out from most programming languages because it is based on natural English language commands. Because it is a form of English, it is an excellent way to introduce coding to students - as was done by Douglas Kiang, a computer science teacher in Hawaii. The link to the article actually includes 'Tonic', a playable IF game created by one the students (and it was a girl, too!). The game is surprisingly playable (although perhaps a little difficult for new players to IF) and is an excellent example of the creativity involved in creating/playing IF and the ease with which these stories can be created with Inform.
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PART TWO: http://youtu.be/lIz4UrIvQGQ Can interactive fiction games -- also known as text adventures -- be used in an educational setting? In this presentati...
Joe Pereira's insight:
This is an excellent two-part presentation on Youtube that explains what IF is and how to play it, then goes on to look at the affordances IF has for learning . Part 2 gives an overview of an IF game developed specifically for learning German as a foreign language (Ausflug nach München) and examines the outcomes of the research project it was part of. Highly recommended viewing!
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Infocom co-founder Dave Lebling explains how he created Zork and blazed a trail for interactive fiction game development in a postmortem talk at GDC 2014
Joe Pereira's insight:
For all the technical and narrative advances that text adventures/Interactive Fiction have seen since Adventures was released in 1976, many IF fans continue to hold a place in their hearts for the classic and ground-breaking IF works published by Infocom in the 80s. Quirky humour, engaging stories, and amazing packaging and 'feelies' make the Infocom games stand out, even decades after they topped the PC games sales charts. I am a huge fan of the Infocom oeuvre, of which of course, the Zork trilogy plays a huge part. This video from the Games Developer Conference 2014 is an absolute delight for anybody who played Zork and the Infocom games back in the day. Zork Co-creator and one of the original Infocom Implementors Dave Lebling, gives some great behind the scenes stories of how the Zork games and Infocom came to be.
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Joe Pereira's insight:
Teaching In The Connected Learning Classroom - The Digital Media + Learning Research Hub Report Series on Connected Learning is a publication sharing cases where young learners have been successfully engaged through technology. Of special interest are pages 58- 60, which include Jason Seller' s paper on getting English students to write their own IF using Playfic (browser-based Inform 7 editor).
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Joe Pereira's insight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ERL20lr1U
This is a great little video that explores why VIdeo Games are so pervasive and innovative today with commentary by vocal IF enthusiast Leigh Alexander and video game scholars Eric Zimmerman and Jesper Juul. Although IF is not mentioned in the video itself, the video was used as study material from an online Masters degree course in EFL, where my own blog on using IF in EFL was mentioned :)
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Remember the game from the late 70s/early 80s called "Adventure" or "Colossal Cave"? Did you love choose your own ending stories? This board will poke around with this concept of Interactive Fiction or "IF"
Joe Pereira's insight:
This is a fantastic Pinterest board by Melissa Hicks that brings together a large number of sites dealing with various aspects of parser-based (mostly) Interactive Fiction.
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Joe Pereira's insight:
I just came across this Prezi, the second I've come across to be based on my IATEFL Glasgow 2012 presentation "Interactive Fiction and Digital Game-based Learning". Kasia also focuses on the use and creation of Choose-Your-Adventure stories, which I believe is not as useful a learning tool as parser-based IF due to the lack of authentic text-based player input, but nonetheless, I loved those types of books when I was younger and they are a great way to get kids to read.
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Published by Delta Publishing,Digital Play - Computer games and language aims is part of the great DeltaTeacher Development series, which includes other original resource books. Via Digital Play
Joe Pereira's insight:
The first ever book on using viseo games in the language classroom - written by teachers who actually use them! A must read.
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Moreover, after hours of play, I am convinced that this mode of writing still holds incredible potential. For those of us with video-game-obsessed children who show little interest in reading, the loss of words to graphics is vexing. Although some IF includes limited graphics, most consist of a text-accepting, text-generating computer program called a parser. As such, interactive fiction may be the first and, possibly, last bastion for "pure" written language in software-generated worlds.
Joe Pereira's insight:
A nice piece that examines how text can still be important in telling a story in a video game and how puzzles can contribute to the story.
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Joe Pereira's insight:
This is a great post in a series on how parser-based IF is being used to teach English students in higher education.
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A Massively Multiplayer Text Adventure Game
and Interactive Radio Drama: Lost Pig, by Admiral Jota
Joe Pereira's insight:
One of the finest Interactive Fiction games ever made - and presented as a multi-player live event with voice actors! Amazing.
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Joe Pereira's insight:
I'm not a big fan of Choose Your Own Adventure-type 'Interactive Fiction' (which is a label being thrown around quite a lot these days). The absence of a parser in choice-based games takes away the 'comprehensible input/output' process, which is extremely important in second language acquisition. However, Seltani, the new project from master IF technician Andrew Plotkin puts a spin on traditional TWINE-based IF. Seltani is a mix between classic text-based virtual worlds (MUDs), choice-based CYOA and the Myst mythos. In Plotkins's own words: "You might consider it multiplayer choice-based IF, or the love-child of a wiki and a text MUD". Its application for language learning is obvious and goes beyond what can be offered by typical hyper-text fiction because it is a multi-player experiece and textual input is used to communicate with other players. Although it is not as linguistically interactive as traditional parser-based IF, I think it definitely deserves a look - if not only to see its very sexy user-interface. |
For all the technical and narrative advances that text adventures/Interactive Fiction have seen since Adventures was released in 1976, many IF fans continue to hold a place in their hearts for the classic and ground-breaking IF works published by Infocom in the 80s. Quirky humour, engaging stories, and amazing packaging and 'feelies' make the Infocom games stand out, even decades after they topped the PC games sales charts. I am a huge fan of the Infocom oeuvre, of which of course, the Zork trilogy plays a huge part. This video from the Games Developer Conference 2014 is an absolute delight for anybody who played Zork and the Infocom games back in the day. Zork Co-creator and one of the original Infocom Implementors Dave Lebling, gives some great behind the scenes stories of how the Zork games and Infocom came to be.