Hypertext and Gaming: Digital Storytelling
David Diedriech & Harry BrownDePauw University
Professor Harry Brown teaches in the English department at DePauw University, a liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana. In the spring of 2005, he taught a new, experimental course entitled "Narrative, Hypertext, and Games". In his syllabus he described the course this way:
Cultural history documents that new technologies lead to new ways of telling stories. This course investigates the impact of digital technology on narrative forms during the last three decades, specifically in the ways that interactivity has transformed the reader into a co-creator, one who actively collaborates with the writer to tell a story. We will survey a variety of interactive genres, including hypertext fiction, interactive film, text games, and graphic immersive video games, considering them both independently and in their relation to established genres such as fiction and film. We will also consider the unique aesthetic, social, and ethical questions posed by interactive or collaborative storytelling. After a look at the origins of interactive narrative, we will focus more intensively on hypertext fiction and video games, the two digital genres that have established themselves most firmly in the era of the personal computer and the internet. In the final project we will construct our own interactive stories using the knowledge and experience gained throughout the semester.
Students playing computer games? In class?? As an instructional technologist, I was certainly intrigued. As we discussed this course, I discovered that Professor Brown and I share an enjoyment for the genre of adventure games created originally on mainframe computers and played on PCs today. We realized that there were a number of tools and experiences that could be shared from the class. In addition, Professor Brown had the opportunity to attend a workshop through the National Institute for Technology & Liberal Education (NITLE) on Digital Gaming last summer.
Our objectives for this presentation will be to discuss the pedagogical aspects of this course, look at some of the outcomes of using games in class, and to share insights from the NITLE workshop.