Teaching and Learning With Interactive Fiction

508 Pages·2015·7.12 MB·English

Computers + Storytelling  Teaching + Learning

Teaching and Learning With Interactive Fiction

Brendan Desilets

Second Edition
May 2015

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License.

Copyright 2015 by Brendan Desilets
Preface

Are you one of those fed-up English teachers who
can't wait for the standardized testing boom to go bust?
While you're waiting, would you like to try a highly-
motivational literary form that can help students to think
more clearly, build their reading skills, and even enable
them to write better? And, with all those improved skills,
might you even hope to see those nasty test scores go
up a bit?

Or are you a university instructor, looking for a way
to integrate science and the humanities, without
abandoning either one? Meanwhile, would you like to
explore a medium that comes with a broad array of
sophisticated writing-process tools?

Or are you simply interested in teaching and
learning in the Information Age, without any social-
media hype?

If you're in any of these categories, this book may
be for you. It introduces a form of computer-based
literature called interactive fiction, and shows you how
this form dovetails with the goals of most students,
teachers, and parents. It shows you how to get started
with this challenging form, and it provides lots of
instances of the form, most of them free of charge.
2
What is Interactive Fiction?

Interactive fiction, sometimes called text-adventure
gaming or IF, is a form of narrative literature in which the
reader plays the part of a character in a story. In
interactive fiction, as it was originally defined in the
1980’s, the reader indicates what she wants the
character to do by typing ordinary sentences at a
computer keyboard.

By far, the most difficult aspect of interactive fiction,
both for educators and for students, is learning the form
itself. Applying interactive fiction to teaching and
learning is relatively easy. As a result, this book will offer
lots of guidance on getting started with interactive
fiction. It will include a getting-started section for adults
and another such section for younger people.

IF and Thinking Skills

Perhaps the most obvious way in which interactive
fiction, also known as IF, promotes learning is that it
stimulates and demands critical and creative thinking.
This book will offer some ideas about improving thinking
and will show how IF promotes problem-solving skills in
uniquely effective ways.
3
Elements of Literature

Though interactive fiction always requires some
level of gamelike problem-solving, it is also a true form
of literature. Works of IF, or “interactive fictions,” feature
plots, characters, setting, points of view, themes, tones,
and all manner of stylistic variation. And, because of the
unusual way in which IF readers make their way
through stories, interactive fiction offers, and even
enforces, a natural way to pause and consider these
literary elements. This book will offer practical
suggestions for using interactive fiction to study
important literary concepts, the kinds that build better
readers and even (sometimes) enhance test scores.

Fluency

Reading and literature teachers sometimes fight
about the precise role of oral fluency in building good
reading skills. It's clearly possible to overstress the
importance of fluency, especially in the classroom
teaching of students who have gone beyond early
reading. Still, it's important for students to read with a
reasonable level of quickness and fluidity, and there are
ways to improve fluency in readers of all ages. As it
happens, interactive fiction works extremely well for
reading aloud. And this book will offer a specific
technique that uses IF to build fluency in a way that few
4
other literary forms can match.

Interactive Fiction and the Writing Process

Most young readers like interactive fiction a lot,
especially when they have mentors to help them with
the genre. Often, these readers want to start writing IF,
even before they've achieved much skill in reading it.
Fortunately, it's possible for people of almost all ages to
write interactive fiction to write interactive fiction, using a
number of “authoring systems,” which take some of the
sting out of creating computer-based literature. In this
volume, we’ll offer introductions and tutorials to three
authoring systems. Two of these, Adrift and Quest, use
menus and forms to make IF writing easier. A third
system, known as Inform 7, allows students to work on
their expository writing skills as they craft interactive
narratives. This book will have suggestions about using
Inform 7 with students aged eleven to eighty (more or
less).

Teaching and Learning Content with Interactive
Fiction

Interactive fiction, then, is a great way to build a
variety of reading, writing, and thinking skills. But it can
present content, too. This book will focus mostly on skill
building, but it will also look at several stories that
present worthwhile content, ranging from the 1893
5
World's Fair, to the early days of nuclear weaponry, to
the delivery of candy grams in a middle school.

Some Ground Rules

Mostly because this book has separate sections for
kids and adults, some of the material seems, and is,
repetitious. However, some of the redundancies are
adapted for their particular purposes. For instance, the
example stories used to illustrate tutorials are often very
similar to each other, but the versions for young people
are actually somewhat different.

This book is offered under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License. In other words, you’re more than welcome to
use whatever you find here. However, you must
attribute what you use to its author, and you must use it
in a non-commercial way. Also, if you build material of
you own from what you find you here, you must share
what you build freely.

Updates of This Book

This book, in a frequently-updated form is available
at the website “Teaching and Learning with Interactive
Fiction” (http://bdesilets.com/if). Like the website, the
current volume has two large sections. The longer first
section, “Teaching with Interactive Fiction,” is for adults.
6
The second section, “Fun and Learning with Interactive
Fiction,” is for younger people. The author is glad to
respond to queries, at [email protected].

“Teaching With Interactive Fiction” deals with
reading interactive fiction in a way that will probably
appeal most to teachers of younger students, aged ten
to sixteen, or so. Some of its sections on writing IF
focus on younger kids, too. The sections about writing
interactive fiction with a system called Inform 7 are a bit
different, though. These chapters are more relevant to
university teaching.

This book offers tutorials on three different systems
for writing interactive fiction. Readers have often praised
the usefulness of such tutorials, but they do have at
least one clear disadvantage. Since the authors of
systems for writing IF often refine and change their
systems, it is impossible to guarantee that each tutorial
will work as well tomorrow as it does today. Still, the
systems are stable enough to make the tutorials
potentially helpful, if not perfect.
7
Table of Contents

Teaching With Interactive Fiction
(Mainly for Adults)

Chapter 1 – What is Interactive Fiction?......................10
Chapter 2 – The Pain and Promise of the Parser…….14
Chapter 3 – Interactive Fiction and Critical Thinking…38
Chapter 4 – Interactive Fiction and the Reading
Process………………………………………………54
Chapter 5 – Building Fluency with Interactive Fiction ..64
Chapter 6 – Creating Interactive Fiction with Adrift…..77
Chapter 7 – Creating Interactive Fiction with Quest on
the Web……………………………………………..109
Chapter 8 – Inform 7 and the Writing Process………135
Chapter 9 – Why Inform 7?........................................200
Chapter 10 – The Writer's Self in Interactive Fiction..243
Chapter 11 – Recommended Works of Interactive
Fiction……………………………………………….262
Chapter 12 – An Interactive Classic from the
Commercial Era: Arthur, the Quest for
Excalibur…………………………………………….281
Chapter 13 – An Interactive Classic from the Modern
Era: The Firebird…………………………………...291
Chapter 14 – An Interactive Fiction Competition Winner:
Winter Wonderland………………………………...318
Chapter 15 – An Interactive Tragedy: Photopia……..320
Chapter 16 – An Interactive Fiction About Middle School
Students: The Enterprise Incidents………………324
8
Chapter 17 – Acquiring Interactive Fiction…………338

Fun and Learning With Interactive Fiction
(Mostly for Kids)

Chapter 18 – What is IF?........................................348
Chapter 19 – Why Kids Like Interactive Fiction…...358
Chapter 20 – Top IF Stories for Kids………………..363
Chapter 21 – A Classic Interactive Fiction: Arthur: the
Quest for Excalibur……………………………….375
Chapter 22 – A Funny Tale of Adventure:
The Firebird………………………………………..381
Chapter 23 – A Middle-School Story: The Enterprise
Incidents……………………………………………386
Chapter 24 – IF at Its Comic Best: Lost Pig and Place
Under Ground………………………………………392
Chapter 25 – Writing Interactive Fiction With Adrift…417
Chapter 26 – Writing Interactive Fiction With Quest on
the Web……………………………………………..436
Chapter 27 – Writing Interactive Fiction With
Inform 7……………………………………………456
Chapter 28 – Getting Interactive Fiction……………484

Notes and References………………………………..493

9
10