Ok - if you count your time to conceptualize and develop it, no game is cheap. I'm going to conceptualize one way you can build a game that's fairly cheap, however.
Have you ever heard of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games? These are mostly text based, but can include graphics, and if online, animations, movies, and sound as well. The adventure is broken into chunks of text that may each be one to several paragraphs long. At the end of the chunk you are presented with a choice or possibly several choices. The choice you make has another chunk of text you are directed to, usually in the form of a page number.
Here's a tiny example:
You wake up in a dim, damp cave. Beside you is a flashlight. You can see the cave entrance in the distance.
If you pick up the flashlight, go to page 10.
If you run for the cave entrance, go to page 15.
Simple, yes? All you have to do is write the text, place the chunks on individual pages, and use some scheme to keep track of the links from one chunk to another. You can do all this with a simple word processor. That's great if you plan on printing the adventure out and want players to play it offline. If you want to create an online experience, it's a bit more complicated, but not by much.
You can do this using HTML and a simple web site. If you know how to do that, stop reading! If you are web site challenged, read on. I'll describe another technology.
Or in the lingo du jour:
If you can create a web site with links between pages, go to THE END.
If you cannot create a web site with links between pages, go to the next paragraph.
Write the adventure in your word processor. Then, you'll need Adobe Acrobat Pro and some basic knowledge on how to set up links in an Acrobat Pro document. Acrobat Pro is expensive, so hopefully you have access to it. Learning how to do linking is beyond the scope of this article, but it's about as simple a process as it could be.
Once you have those two things under your belt, you can extend the previous example by importing the word processing file into Acrobat Pro and adding links. You can get a bit more tricky and rewrite the choices like this
Take the flashlight.
OR
Run for the cave entrance.
to make the words flow in a more natural manner. Then using Acrobat Pro links, you can set the choices to jump from one part (page) of the document to another when clicked on. As for other media such as graphics, animations, movies, or sounds, Acrobat Pro supports video, sound, and Flash, so it's possible to embed these in a document. There are some restrictions that are beyond the scope of this article, but are explained on the Adobe help site.
Now for the obvious question - "Sure it's possible to do this, but to what use educationally could I put it?" Here's some ideas.
Just about any procedural task that has right/wrong decision points is an obvious candidate here. How about a chemistry simulation, or pushing a bill through Congress?
Philosophical standpoints (yes, really) could be used here by presenting dilemmas and giving choice to solve the dilemma via different philosophical ideologies - then show the consequences for the choice.
You could use this to great effect with student orientation as an interactive guide. Plop the student in the middle of the college and let him/her work out how to get around, etc.
These are just a few ideas. I'm sure you can think of more. If you decide to try this out, let me know. I'm very interested in seeing someone develop a great adventure for higher education!
Leave a comment