I’ve had the distinct pleasure to be involved in a class this semester that talked about instructional games. It was quite enjoyable, especially the class project we did. It can be found here.
The basic premise is that we took a text that is often taught in High School, and turned it into an interactive text adventure. It was fun to work on, but even more fun was to attend our ‘release party’ (no representatives from EA Games showed up (their loss)), and see the reaction of the people playing it. They were having fun! To me it was an enjoyable project, but to see somebody really have fun while playing something you created was surprising pleasant. In fact, I just re-checked out Spoon River Analogy. I want to go back and build a few more clusters, because I know I could come up with some better ones. And now I’ve got the ‘computer hacking skills’ to do it.
