Learning Games and Game Building
Workshop Description
Games can be powerful tools to enhance your teaching and research. In this session we will explore the hows and whys of game-based learning, guided by real-world examples. We will introduce core principles of game design and best practices to craft meaningful game experiences for students, showcasing a variety of game-building tools. Our hands-on component will focus on building and publishing games with Twine, a free, open-source tool for creating text-based games and hypertext narratives: you will learn how to approach a game project from concept to creation.
Learning objectives
At the end of this workshop, you will be able to
- Understand why and how games can enhance your teaching and research
- Identify a few key principles of game design
- Storyboard and plan a game
- Use the Twine editor to build interactive content
- Publish your own text-based game in Twine
Readings
- James Coltrain and Stephen Ramsay’s “Can Video Games Be Humanities Scholarship” offers an overview of how to think about games as research outputs.
- In Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic: Pivoting to Game-Based Learning, Emily K. Johnson and Anastasia Salter explore game-based learning as a mode that has new relevance and potential in the post-pandemic landscape.
Projects
- 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, a video game about the Iranian revolution
- Bot or Not: A Slow AI Game, a text-based Twine game designed to teach AI literacy
- Never Alone, an Inupiaq storytelling game
Workshop overview
- Introduction
- Principles of game design
- Planning your interactive narrative
- The Twine editor
- Supported work time
Resources
Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities includes useful teaching resources on both Gaming (curated by Amanda Phillips) and Play (curated by Mark Sample)
The CUNY Games Network’s essential readings in game scholarship - a bibliography on game-based learning.
Tools and resources for making games - a crowd-sourced list of game building platforms and software.
Workshop authors: Cameron Boucher, Liz Hogrefe, Alice McGrath
Editor: Roberto Vargas
Tri-Co DSRI, 2026. This lesson is based on the DHRI Curriculum.