Narrative Games 3, Or Why Rescue the Princess?

As I played the Zelda Game for this quest, I realized that I'm not really interested in games in education as I am gamification.  I enjoyed the nostalgic thrill of the interactive fiction in quest 1, but both the subsequent action and the action-adventure games bored me to tears.  Okay, I enjoyed the snarky narrative of Peasant's Quest, but that was an ironic veneer laid over the original action game format.  But rescue a princess?  Please.  Not only is that a sexist reinforcement of gender roles WAY too evident in video games, but who is Zelda to me?  Why should I care about her?  And more importantly, why is the skill I need to progress the story the ability to hit the space bar at exactly the right time?  What does that have to do with being a hero?

In the Just for Fun group in 3D GameLab, I've been playing some contemporary flash games, and enjoying them quite a bit.  But I've only chosen games from the "puzzle" category.  When I completed the HexBrain gamer personality quiz, my two top types were Mastermind and Seeker, and those characterizations were spot-on.  I like to figure out puzzles, and I like to explore new places and ideas.  And I love stories.  So despite the quite primitive graphics of The Company of Myself, for example, I loved its emo narrative and the twist at the end.  I wanted to solve each level just so I could find out what happened next.  Now I'm playing Little Wheel about another lonely character trying to find out his own history.  There really isn't much different in the game play between Zelda and Little Wheel really, other than the sophistication of the storyline.  But for me, that makes all the difference.

Of course, that's my mastermind/seeker gamer personality talking, and I recognize that for other types of games, the action and action/adventure games hold a lot of interest.  But in terms of education, I believe I'm on the right track.  When people think about games in education, I think they too often envision playing Jeopardy to review class topics or little Flash games that drill vocabulary.  Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it doesn't really touch the power that can have on engagement and motivation.  For that kind of involvement, students have to invest in the effort, not just the result.  The game itself has to be the motivator, not the score or the prize.  To me, that means the game can't just be challenging.  It has to be relevant to who I am and what I want.  It has to involve me in a narrative that puts my actions in context.

This could mean writing fictions or creating scenarios that establish a compelling context for class work.  That is the basis of alternative reality games and augmented reality games that I have great promise in education.  Alternate reality games (ARGS) take elements of role playing and blend them with real-life skills and activities to overlay a narrative on the real world.  Manchester Metropolitan University, for example, uses a fictional story about a stolen viola to direct incoming students through a series of collaborative problem-solving quests that introduces them to university resources, orients them to the surrounding community and encourages socialization.  Augmented reality games use new mobile technology to add a virtual experience to a physical space.  Programs like ARIS, developed at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, allow the creation of situational documentaries and place-based games that blend digital and actual worlds in a way that encourages exploration and analysis.

But luckily, especially for those of us who do not fancy ourselves as writers, educators already have a compelling narrative to tell.  We don't have to invent a story about why what we teach is important.  We already know it's important and why.  Otherwise, why would we be teaching it?  And a game structure, especially the structure of interactive narrative games, seems ideal for shaping our telling not just the how and why of our topic but the process by which you become an expert in it.  Who needs to rescue a princess when you can level up in life?  You start as a newbie, without the skills or knowledge you'll need to succeed, but as you vanquish each monster (or equation), unlock each puzzle (or literary theme), discover each treasure (or new theory), you see the bigger picture and you get better at monster slaying, puzzle solving or treasure hunting.  Or learning.