Alternate Reality Games in the Classroom. A few years ago I attended my first conference with an alternate reality game implemented as a way of engaging participants as a learning community, and ever since I’ve been hooked. Amanda Visconti and I ran several conference games at THATCamps involving escaped video game characters and invading aliens. Alternate Reality Games (or ARGs) are built on the idea of a shared story invading the physical world, and can include scenarios of invading aliens, impending apocalypse, or mysteries waiting to be solved. While some incorporate technology or social media, many ARGs are built by transforming objects and spaces in the learners’ physical environment. Players collaborate and react to those ongoing stories through the mediation of the game designer, and in so doing, build new skills towards the intended learning objectives.
It can be hard to get a clear picture of ARGs without participating in one directly. Step One: Planning the Educational / Training Objectives [Photo by author] Health Games Research. 100 GBL Resources. GlassLab. Today we launched an exciting new research and development initiative in partnership with Electronic Arts that aims to transform learning and assessment practices through digital games. Named GlassLab, the effort will explore the potential for digital games to serve both as potent learning environments and as real-time assessments of student learning. The Lab’s work is focused initially on assessments that track learning gains in middle school students against the Common Core State Standards and key twenty-first-century skills, like systems thinking, perseverance and creative problem solving.
Located on the Redwood Shores campus of Electronic Arts near Redwood City, California, the Lab will draw on top Silicon Valley talent to produce innovative digital games, both modifications of existing commercially successful titles as well as original mini-games designed and developed at the Lab. Check out this video interview about GlassLab. Read more about the work of GlassLab. Classroom Games with Inform 7. Remember playing text-based computer games? Depending on your generation (and your fondness for nostalgia-inducing computer games), the words “You are likely to be eaten by a grue” may or may not resonate, but for players of Zork and other classic games they are hauntingly familiar.
Text-based games haven’t gone away, and they can be an accessible starting point for bringing games into your classroom in an unexpected way. Text-based games, or interactive fiction, have continued to evolve since the days of Zork. Many works can be powerful for play in the classroom: Emily Short’s “interactive epistolary” First Draft of the Revolution, Andrew Plotkin’s physics-grounded Dual Transform, Peter Nepstad’s historically grounded 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, and Aaron’s Reed’s interactive novel Blue Lacuna are only a few examples among a vast archive of varied works. One of the great appeals of text-based games is the relative ease with which you can make them.
The Classroom is a room. Inform. It would be impossible in this small space to give a full or even a representative picture of what people have done with IF in the last thirty years. The Interactive Fiction Data Base (IFDB) is IF's answer to the more famous Internet Movie Data Base, but with the advantage that it offers most of the works in question for free and rapid download. Just as a taste of the medium, and for something to test interpreters with, here is a short selection of works by the makers of Inform. Each download here is a Blorbed Z-machine story file.
Welcome booklet. Adventure (1976-77). Curses (1993). Jigsaw (1995). Spider and Web (1998). Shade (2000). Dreamhold (2004). Galatea (2000). Savoir-Faire (2002).