Here is a Word doc of the Assignment Sheet and the overall Schedule. Weekly schedules are below:

Weekly Schedule 11/3 through 11/9

 

You’ve been looking at issues important to gaming and computing. So now for Unit 3, you’re going to be using that information to write in a new genre. And that new genre is… interactive fiction, also known as text-based adventure games. They’ve been around a long time, starting as really REALLY hard parser games like Zork. Now IF includes great games like Firewatch, Kentucky Route Zero, 80 Days, the Walking Dead series, Gone Home. Even The Last of Us could be considered IF even if you are killing zombies.

For this Unit, you’re going to take the issue you dug into in Unit 2 and write an interactive text-based adventure game around it. You can address it through the storyline or the character or the world itself, but you’re creating something that shows us the issue in a new – video game – way.

For example, if your issue was representation of women in video games, you might write a story with a strong but relatable woman as the MC who’s fighting for women to be taken seriously in some way. Of if you believe your own culture has been portrayed badly, you could write a game story that teaches us about that culture in some way. You might even write a game that deals with how someone gets involved with and works within the Black Lives Matter movement.

At the heart of IF is choice. Also character. An ordinary person faces an extraordinary situation and changes (and/or changes the people around them) as they make the choices that will lead them to resolve that situation. In 80 Days, Passepartout has to decide whether he wants to help the steampunk automatons gain freedom or simply keep Phileas Fogg on schedule to win his bet with some other rich men. And every choice has consequences, either large or small, because they take the main character in different directions and onto different paths.

You won’t be able to create a visual-rich game like most of the ones I listed – you’re just being introduced to Python in CST 1101, after all. So you’ll be writing a text-based game with no graphics at all, and we’ll examine what those games look like and how they work:

  • Narrative: a way to make difficult issues personal and relatable.
  • Storytelling archetypes: Aristotle’s structure, the Hero’s Journey.
  • Character-creation: character archetypes, the character arc, building from the outside and the inside
  • Great story design: an ordinary person is faced with an extraordinary situation which forces them out of their comfort zone and sends them on a journey where they run out of easy choices and finally have to dig deep inside to decide what kind of person they want to be, and then act on it.
  • Writing and playing text-based adventure games.
  • Writing a branching narrative that gives your character choices.

This is necessarily a cut-down version of what could be a very long game since you’re going to have to program it in CST1101 using Python. But at the heart of the game should be a serious issue, one your game in one way or another is making a statement about. It’s your way to join the issue conversation by way of the video game genre.

Once you get your game story “written,” it will go to Professor Cunningham so you can learn how to program it in Python.

You’ll also write an Artist’s Statement where you think back through the process of creating your game story and writing it as the basis of a text-based adventure game. A successful Artist’s Statement reflects your understanding of the genre, and of your specific rhetorical situation (your reasons for composing, your audience), and it takes us on a journey:

  • As you began: what were you trying to accomplish? What audience were you trying to reach? How hard was it to think in terms of non-visual game-making? What were you most worried about?
  • During the process: what problems did you have? Who, what, or where did you turn to get feedback and help? What was going through your mind as you wrote it?
  • Now that it’s done: how well do you think it turned out? What would you do differently? Congratulate yourself!

What you’ll be graded on:

  • Genre: You already have your genre – interactive fiction/text-based adventure games. You’ll need to show that you understand the conventions of the genre and that what you’ve written is a good example of it.
  • Narrative Awareness: Does your game story have a beginning, middle and end? Does the main character go through some change during the story? Did you create a world that’s appropriate for the story you’re telling? If you’re using the Hero’s Journey as a model, does it fit into at least the first part of the model? Did you make us care?
  • Appropriateness for audience: You can target your game story to any audience, If you’re doing something for 4th grade students, it shouldn’t be full of graduate school words. Appropriate means word choice and approach to topic/issue – does the way you wrote your game fit what would work best for this audience?
  • Effectiveness of message: We’ll share and workshop these in class so you’ll get a chance to see if you got your point across and that your game made sense. Did it fulfill your purpose? Can we see what issue you’re addressing?
  • Length/Timeliness: This really depends on the CST instructor’s guidelines which may change as we get into the term. But the basic idea is that you end up creating a game that takes no more than 3-5 minutes to play.
  • Artist Statement: Did you thoughtfully reflect on your process, even if things didn’t turn out quite how you wanted?