Game Design Across the Curriculum: Interactive Fiction-ing (Part 2)

Interactive fiction (IF) is a genre of games in which the player makes choices to determine the outcome of a threaded narrative. Because it is text-driven, interactive fiction has a low barrier to adoption for classroom use. In “Game Design Across the Curriculum: Interactive Fiction-ing,” Matthew Farber discusses his use of IF to teach systems thinking and empathy to his middle school social studies students. He co-designed Time Society Chronicles: Independence! with GlassLab’s Erin Hoffman, and his students created stories using inkleWriter, a free, browser-based authoring tool. Sherry Jones speaks about her use of interactive fiction to teach complex philosophical concepts in college settings. Her students are currently experimenting with creating IFs (using Twine, one of the more popular IF authoring tools) to demonstrate the logic and reasoning of a concept through structural semiotics. We were also joined by Chris Klimas, the founder of Twine, and Kae Novak who discusses ISTE’s Metagame Book Club.

Part 1, Students as Designers, was held on May 11, 2015.

Guests for this webinar include:

• Matthew Farber, Teacher, Valleyview Middle School
• Chris Klimas, founder of Twine
• Kae Novak, Front Range Community College, ISTE Games and Simulation Network President
• Sherry Jones, instructor of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Game Studies, and the facilitator of Game Studies for The Metagame Book Club of ISTE GSN

Resources for this webinar include:

• Interactive and Explorable: Learning with Text-Based Games
• Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-based Learning 
• Interactive Fiction in the Classroom
• Gone Home: A Video Game as a Tool for Teaching Critical Thinking Skills
• Writings by Matt Farber’s Students
• Metagame Book Club
• Interactive Fiction at ISTE
• Metagame Book Club Looks at Games 4 Change
• Games 4 Change session on Twine: A Tool for Changing Games
• Sherry Jones’ review of G4C session on Twine
• Gone Home
• Jon Spike’s Review of Gone Home YouTube
• Spike’s Tech Playground
• [Sherry’s Slides] “Interpreting and Writing Interactive Fiction for Philosophy, English Composition, and Game Design Courses”
• Twine
• Inklewriter
• Digital Compass
• Interactive Fiction Game Design by Jason Sellers (February 2013)
• “Interactive Fiction Game Design: Text Based Video Games” by Jason Sellers
• Interactive Fiction Game Design by Kevin Hodgson (February 2013)
• Student Created Interactive Fiction by Kevin Hodgson (April 2013)
• Walk My World: Interactive Text by Kevin Hodgson (February 2014)