Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction
Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
Game Development Essentials: An Introduction
Game Development Essentials: An Introduction
Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
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In this paper, I discuss a way to teach game design in the undergraduate literature classroom by having students transform literary narratives into interpretative quests. This argument contributes to a recent theoretical and practical discussion of quests by scholars of games studies such as Aarseth [2004], Juul [2005], Tosca [2003], and Tronstad [2001]. According to these theorists, a "quest" in a game is a goal-oriented activity in which players overcome challenges to enact a series of events and their meanings. I apply and extend this theoretical discussion to create an assignment with two parts. The first part is a six page design document that describes the components of a game, with emphasis on how the player will act out an interpretation of a theme in a novel. In this design document, students design the rules, puzzles, objects, and spaces of the quest and analyze the meanings that the player will be enacting in each part. In the prototype, students construct a small multimedia demonstration of their game concepts using technologies such the Aurora Toolset, Dreamweaver, and Flash. By adapting works of literature into quests, students learn to create meaning actively rather than absorbing it passively. This paper contributes to the field of game design in education by describing a theoretically sophisticated and practical way to teach literary interpretation using game design.