Back to School Week: The Learning Game Vol. 3

"You fail."

With the first week of school finally coming to an end, plenty of kids and teens have already experienced their first massive failures of the year and are dreading the rest of the drab experience that is American Education system. Everyone else is scraping by or overachieving as usual, but one thing is for certain: All but the most soulless of emo-brats can't wait to get home and conquer worlds on their Wiis, PS3s and Xbox 360s (if they haven't red-ringed yet, that is).

"Wouldn't it be awesome it we could play video games in school?" they ask each other. It's been a common schoolyard theme since even before the invaders from space blasted their way into arcades everywhere in the early '80s.

Little do they know, however, that it's already happening in select classrooms throughout the world. According to The Scholastic Stylus: Nintendo DS in the Classroom, a wonderfully written article by the super attractive and talented Matt, "learning games" like language and math tutors have already been put into use by schools in Ireland and Japan. There's also great potential in implementing Nintendo's hit handheld in special education classrooms worldwide. So while this generation my never get to take up the stylus themselves and knock out a few equations, maybe it'll be common place for their offspring.

What might be a little more feasible for the classrooms of today is good ol' fiction - interactive fiction, that is. Despite its name, the article Interactive Fiction: The Missing Link has nothing to do with the protagonist of the Zelda series and everything to do with old school text-based adventures like the Zork series. Popular back when computers were lucky to have more than 1 kilobyte of RAM and still prevalent to some extent today, interactive fiction games are all about reading and problem solving, but in a way that puts the player in total control of the outcome; sort of like an electronic Choose Your Own Adventure book. Games like this could be a great way to get reluctant students reading and enjoying it, and prolific readers soaking in even more wordage than before. Besides, I'd take Zork over atrocities like Jane Eyre any day.

Now if you're finished with all this educational stuff, why not take a break and read today's Extra Credit Bonus Link, Another Roadside Tragedy. It's the sad story of a small child, a Happy Meal box, and one extremely ticked off motorist.

Yes, it's who you think it is.

Enjoy the weekend, students, because Monday always comes so awfully fast.

Interactive Fiction: The Missing Link

From Ooze: Creepy Nites

While absentmindedly browsing through the content of the "abandonware" website House of Games one night before going to bed, I discovered a game called Ooze: Creepy Nites. Expecting some moderately entertaining, slime-saturated action game from the late ‘80s, I said “what the heck” and clicked the link to a description and download. There was probably slime there somewhere, judging by the screenshots, but something in the review made me forget all about cheap horror thrills: The game, they said, is an “interactive fiction” title.

For some reason, before seeing the phrase “interactive fiction” on that web page, it had never occurred to me that the genre is brimming with education possibilities – especially in the English language arts field. It was exciting moment for me, even more so than if Ooze had been the forgettable Super Mario meets The Blob experience I had anticipated.

For those of us who are late to the party, interactive fiction is a genre of video games that presents information and gameplay textually. The idea is to immerse the player in the story in the same way a novel would. Older games of the genre have no graphics, only text. Newer titles like Ooze: Creepy Nites utilize some graphics, but the words are still the most important part of the game. The player interacts with the game by typing commands such as “go west,” “take credit card” or “use hamster in microwave,” depending on what’s in his or her inventory and what's available in the surroundings. Interactive fiction games require the player to carefully read pages and pages of text, to keep track of many small details, and to creatively solve problems.

The swanky contents of The Lurking Horror game box

Games like Zork, Beyond the Titanic, The Lurking Horror and almost every other title ever made by the company Infocom belong in the interactive fiction category. I’ve always called games like these as “text-based adventures,” but that’s probably because I’m a console player at heart and these kinds of games are mainly PC/MAC affairs. I guess that before reading that Ooze: Creepy Nites review, I was sort of out of the interactive fiction loop.

You might be thinking: "Okay, so you play the games by reading text. Big deal."

But here’s where it gets really exciting for educators: According to Nick Manfort and Paulo Urbano, authors of an extensive article on interactive fiction called “A Quarta Era da Ficção Interactiva” originally printed the Portuguese magazine Nada about three years ago, interactive fiction works can be understood both as literary narratives and as video games. That’s a powerful assertion: Perhaps interactive fiction is the truest and most practical melding of education and video games to date.

I think one of the reasons that some students find the standard English fare boring is because they’ve grown up in an interactive world and the ELA cannon is about as linear as possible. In a era where entertainment comes in the form of minute-long YouTube videos and the user is basically in control of every second of his or her leisure time, the methodical pace of classic works like Dickens’ Great Expectations and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is putting off our students. Interactive fiction games might be just the thing to reverse situations like this.

I’m not suggesting that we dumb down the classics by using interactive fiction versions to further fracture the attention spans of today’s youth; it’s quite the opposite, actually. By tapping into their need for stimulation by putting them in control of interactive fiction games, our students might be motivated to read the often sizable blocks of text in between player actions. As they get used to reading and comprehending – having been reintroduced to an ancient art though a modern medium – they’ll perhaps be more willing and capable to tackle the English cannon and reading in general.

Taking it one step further by having our students create their own interactive fiction games or websites is another wonderful possibility. Not only would the students have to keep track of plot elements, grammar, word usage and a host of other critical writing techniques, they would also have to learn programming techniques and game design mechanics. By combining the old with the new, teachers might be able to tap into a third set of emerging skills that could help define the next generation of authors.

You know, I still haven’t download Ooze: Creepy Nites, due in small part to the game’s atrocious spelling of the word “nights,” but mostly because my mind has been buzzing with the possibilities of interactive fiction in the classroom. I’m sure the game won’t be that great given the silly graphics and storyline, but it just might be the missing link between gaming and education that I’ve been searching for.

Yeah, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. I’m so exited, I don’t even care.