Week 8: Interactive Stories in Education

When I started to think about technology that I could incorporate into my teaching, I was really drawn to the idea of choose your own adventure style stories. Be it through games or other mediums like Twine, I’ve always loved the concept behind interactive stories. They make you think about your choices, and how they affect the outcome.

My original knowledge of interactive games comes from games like Until Dawn, and the super fun horror genre that has been made popular by a company called Supermassive Games. Recently, they released their newest game in their series. The Dark Pictures: Little Hope. The concept of these games that I love so much, as I’ve mentioned above, is that everything you do has a consequence in the game. In these ones, in particular. They dictate character relationships, personalities, and can even affect whether the character lives or dies. This game, I believe, has something like four different endings that can be achieved through these series of decisions and quick time events. Down below, I’ve included the trailer for the game in this post, and if it really intrigues you, I suggest watching Jacksepticeye’s playthrough. His humor really makes the experience enjoyable.

Video by IGN on YouTube.

For our topic of video games in education this week, these games are super topical. They create these really tough choices in which these characters’ lives are in the players’ hands. You literally dictate whether the characters live and die, and I’ve seen people get pretty invested in these games. There’s a sort of exploratory process for some people, having them play the game repeatedly to find all of the possible endings – driven by the need to know what could happen in any scenario. Some play the game once and accept the outcome they’ve received, whether it upsets them or not. They create some pretty interesting moral conflicts, I think, and I think there’s this untapped niche in the gaming industry to create school-friendly interactive video games that can have students confront ethical situations or experience historical events, or a variety of other things.

Another thread of this genre is interactive stories that are more novel-like than game-like. The game Guilt Free on Steam is one that comes to mind that focuses on the topic of depression and mental health issues. Another that I found was Hien Pham’s interactive story I’m Shirtless in This One. It’s a wonderful, beautiful, simple interactive story focused on body positivity and acceptance. The outcome is not changed by the readers choices, instead the interactivity comes in by having choices create a deeper or shallower depth of personal reflection. The application of these in teaching is endless, from health classes, to Art, to English, even Social Studies and Sciences.