Designing Interactive Storytelling Games to Teach Computational Thinking

Abstract

In the section of The Design of Everyday Things titled “Moral Obligations of Design,” Don Norman writes, “Designers need to make things that satisfy people’s needs, in terms of function, in terms of being understandable and usable, and in terms of their ability to deliver emotional satisfaction, pride, and delight,” (Norman, 293). This is equally true of doors, lessons, teapots, narratives, and games. And for some complex emerging objects, such as educational narrative games, designers must look at a synthesis of different object types to hypothesize heuristics and principles that will guide their design. Game designers rarely have extensive research on the design of their artifacts to analyze before they are asked to invent new combinations of mechanics, couple them with themes they did not create, and then test their efficacy for whatever the intended design goal of the game, be it education, entertainment, or training. Instead, designers often rely on anecdotal accounts of design of their genre of games, if they're fortunate, or on heuristics uncovered most often in other fields. In conversation with games studies and interactive storytelling scholars, I define these digital artifacts as games that use narratives generated in response to open text input from their players. For the emerging genre of interactive storytelling games the dearth of game design research and a lack of examples of fully functional games in the genre give designers little to start with. Though many in the field of interactive storytelling believe, for good reason, that these games have incredible educational potential, there are even fewer examples of such games to learn from, and practically no specific game design research on their creation. Such artifacts are the complex synthesis of generated narrative, a system open to a continuum of user input, and educational content that personalizes to the player to a high degree. Without proper design, these objects will fail to be understood, to satisfy their users’ needs, to function, and they will certainly fail to deliver pride, satisfaction, and delight. Without game design research, the proper design of such complicated artifacts will happen only by accident and will most likely be delayed, possibly indefinitely. In what seems at first like an odd coincidence, there is one field, computational thinking, where two effective prototypes of interactive storytelling educational games exist, and these, along with other case studies of mechanics and even science fiction, can guide the beginning of game design research into their creation.

How can we design interactive storytelling systems in order to be effective at teaching computational thinking? While the industry process of iteration and design will be key, the costs of developing these systems, and the costs of designing them improperly, are too high not to attempt other formal approaches to researching their design. By following a game design research methodology and pursuing specific cases with the formal methods, this paper analyzes game design principles and hypotheses to produce knowledge about how to design these complex and potentially transformational objects. As Don Norman makes clear in The Design of Everyday Things, not only can design increase our enjoyment and understanding of those things around us, but design can be a life or death matter. The stakes may seem lower in game design; however, as James Paul Gee points out in his work on games and education, games are sites of identity formation and for learning their own unique semiotic domains (Gee). We need to design the powerful educational systems that will emerge from the synthesis of deep learning and natural language processes with care, so that we do not allow for stochastic identity formation in the players of these games.

This paper is a research-based analysis of interactive storytelling systems and relevant games with relevant mechanics in order to address the question of how to design interactive storytelling games that teach computational thinking in an informal context. In addition to this analysis, this paper describes relevant research into narrative-centered learning, games-based learning, and informal learning. I will also analyze science fiction criticism alongside my game design research, and research into other fields, by adapting a methodology used in ubiquitous computing research that recognizes that, “Design-oriented research is an act of collective imagining—a way in which we work together to bring about a future that lies slightly out of our grasp,” (Dourish and Bell, 769). In this way, I will expand upon and practice game design research methods as called for by Paul Coultan and Alan Hook, game design researchers at Lancaster University.

Currently, even formal tools such as machinations.io and more formal texts on game mechanics such as Patterns In Game Design do not delve into thorough specific game design considerations around creating interactive storytelling systems as described by authors such as Chris Crawford, Brenda Laurel, and Janet Murray (Björk and Holopainen; Crawford; Laurel; Murray). Ultimately, this paper will provide insight into how game designers can design interactive storytelling systems in order to teach computational thinking in informal settings, in hopes that these lessons will apply to the emerging field of interactive storytelling design and their use in informal learning experiences.