Using Games Pedagogically

Why games?

Games are fun and engaging, they can provide avenues for simulation, empathy, and more

There are many reasons why games–video games, board games, role-playing games, etc.–can be useful for pedagogy:

• They can activate emotional and cognitive rewards through play
• They offer avenues for creativity, simulation, and deeper engagement with material
• They offer an alternative mode of engagement
• They may provide complex and rich forms of context for new information
• They can provide a fun and low-stakes way to test knowledge or practice skills

Why Twine?

While there are many types of games that can be used in a research or teaching context and many tools that can be useful for building games, this workshop will focus on creating interactive fiction and text-based games as a case study.

About Twine

Twine is an open-source tool for creating hypertext narratives, interactive fiction, text-based games and more. Twine’s aesthetic and functionality echo 1990s-era “hypertext” fiction and early web experimentation: each site (called a “Story”) is a network with interconnected nodes. While all websites are hypertext, Twine is designed to highlight choices, so instead of an open navigation system, each bit of context in Twine is built intentionally by hyperlinks that can be followed backwards and forwards and read in any order.