Textual Adventures: Writing and Game Development in the Undergraduate Classroom

Ballentine, Brian D.

doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2015.06.003

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(5 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Those most commonly used in undergraduate classrooms to create digital fiction (and games) include Inform7 (Reed, 2015), Quest (Ballentine, 2015), and Adobe Animate/Flash; the latter is frequently used for wider purposes, including animation, games development, and interactive websites, as it is an industry standard. Its costs, however, and high level of skill required, not to mention its deprecation on most mobile operating systems and many Internet browsers, put it at the bottom of the list for most digital fiction scenarios.…”

Section: Marking Digital Fiction Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching digital fiction: integrating experimental writing and current technologies

Skains

2019

Palgrave Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Today's creative writers are immersed in a multiplicative, multimodal-digital-universe. It requires "multiliteracies", all in a constantly and rapidly evolving technological environment, which are not yet fundamentally integrated into the basic literacy skills entrenched in school learning. How can creative writing instructors in higher education best prepare their students for the real-world contexts of their creative practice? One approach is to integrate the creative writing workshop with a focus on digital and interactive design. This paper outlines a module incorporating multiple literacies into a creative writing course, Playable Fiction, noting the affordances, limitations, and benefits of teaching workshops for writing digital fiction ("born-digital" fiction, composed for and read on digital devices). The researcher took an ethnographical approach to the question, designing a module to encourage creative writing students to experiment with digital fiction, and observing the effects on the students' attitudes and their coursework. Included is a discussion of the benefits to students of developing multiliteracies and considerations for teaching, including issues of technical know-how and the lack of infrastructural support. Finally, the paper describes the model class taught to second-year and third-year undergraduates in the 'Games Design and Professional Writing' programs at Bangor University, in the UK, including marking recommendations and reading list advice.

show abstract

Section: Marking Digital Fiction Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching digital fiction: integrating experimental writing and current technologies

Skains

2019

Palgrave Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Some studies have proposed using a narratological approach to teach writing, such as script development. For example, Quest, a text‐based game development tool, allows students to create their text‐based adventure games and interactive fictional story games (Ballentine, ). Ballentine () also demonstrated how undergraduate students experience the entire software development lifecycle and its many writing challenges while developing their text‐based adventure games.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Quest, a text‐based game development tool, allows students to create their text‐based adventure games and interactive fictional story games (Ballentine, ). Ballentine () also demonstrated how undergraduate students experience the entire software development lifecycle and its many writing challenges while developing their text‐based adventure games. Additionally, some have found that computer games have the potential to help students to write (Johnson, ).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The former focus on writing performance, such as writing ideas (Cordero et al, ), writing skill (Roscoe & McNamara, ), writing quality (Erkens et al, ; Schwonke et al, ), human feedback quality (Cho & Schunn, ), and machine feedback quality (i.e., AWE). The latter emphasizes writing motivation, such as perception (Xu et al, ), participation (Ballentine, ; Johnson, ), engagement (Allen et al, ; Proske et al, ), and self‐efficacy (Squire & Jan, ).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The effects of participation, performance, and interest in a game‐based writing environment

Liao

Chang

Chan

2018

Computer Assisted Learning

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We have observed that many computer-supported writing environments based on pedagogical strategies have only been designed to incorporate the cognitive aspects, but motivational aspects should also be included. Hence, we theorize that integrating game-based learning into the writing environment may be a practical approach that can facilitate student participation, not only helping students learn how to write, but also sustaining their willingness to write. In this study, we investigate the effects of the game-based writing environment on improving students' participation, performance, and interest in writing. An experiment was conducted to compare the effectiveness of 2 approaches to writing in language arts at an elementary school. Two hundred forty-five third grade students participated in the experiment over a period of 1 year. One hundred thirty-nine students were assigned to an experimental group and learned with a game-based writing environment, and 106 students were in the contrast group and learned with an online writing environment. The empirical results show that the game-based writing environment can effectively promote students' writing participation, writing performance, interest in writing, as well as their perceptions of the use of educational self-management games. Some implications of the experimental results are also discussed.

show abstract

“…This paper seeks to fill in the other half of a gaming literacy by creating a framework for composers to create their own meaningful games. While other researchers have brought the creation of games into the classroom (Ballentine, 2015), this approach differs greatly because it focuses not on the writing tasks involved with making a game, but rather how the creation of games via an iterable heuristic allows for the subsequent discovery of new knowledge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Game of Inventing: Ludic Heuristics, Ontological Play, and Pleasurable Research

Euteneuer¹

2018

JVWR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Everyone plays games, but very few of us have experience in creating games. Children are taught simple folk-games like Tag and The Floor is Lava but rarely graduate on into creating their own unique experiences through invented games. This proposal positions games as a culturally relevant medium that often suffers from players inability to understand the motivations and purpose behind a game’s creation. Drawing on examples from diverse fields such as visual design, leisure studies, human-computer interaction, and multimodal composition, this chapter examines the potential for the development of “ludic heuristics” which allow composers and rhetors to both create and analyze games and play through the process of inventing their own games. This heuristic breaks down games into three components: their materials, limits, and goals. An ontological understanding of the objects, affordances, and motivations for playing a game can then be used to analyze existing games with the ultimate goal of having students create their own serious or persuasive games. As scholars such as Rebekah Schultz Colby (2017) have noted, there is a push to use digital and board games in the classroom, though there is very little established in terms of actual implementation, best practice, and pedagogical foundation for the inclusion of games. This chapter analyzes the possibilities for developing new invention practices for creating games that go beyond cloning and imitation. While the field of rhetoric has a long history of using innovative methods applied to grammar (Christensen, 1963), reappropriation and remix (Palmeri, 2012), and style (Lanham, 2006), there is little research on the application of heuristics to develop play both as an end and as a means in composing multimodal texts. This chapter argues that a framework of materials, limits, and goals lead to the development of a ludic heuristic which can then be used to produce games which model systems, produce arguments, and express beliefs.

show abstract

Textual Adventures: Writing and Game Development in the Undergraduate Classroom

Cited by 9 publications

References 7 publications

Teaching digital fiction: integrating experimental writing and current technologies

Teaching digital fiction: integrating experimental writing and current technologies

The effects of participation, performance, and interest in a game‐based writing environment

The Game of Inventing: Ludic Heuristics, Ontological Play, and Pleasurable Research

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About