Adolescents Composing Fiction in Digital Game and Written Formats: Tacit, Explicit and Metacognitive Strategies

Abstract

This article reports on a study of 23 tenth-grade students who created fiction in digital game and written formats. The researchers observed them at work, analysed their stories in both formats, and interviewed selected students to learn what affordances and constraints they demonstrate and/or articulate in such authoring. The students used ScriptEase, a software tool that supports the creation of digital stories, based on the game engine of Neverwinter Nights (Bioware). The authors consider the theoretical literature about narrative and games, focusing especially on indicators of verbal tense and mood. They discuss the overlaps and differences between digital and written stories, drawing in particular on the work of two students, and they conclude with implications for theoretical understandings of contemporary narratives in multiple formats and implications for literacy education.

Video Games in the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom: A State‐of‐the‐Art Review of the Literature

“…Finally, two studies described ways that teachers incorporated game design through multiple formats in the same unit (Gerber et al, 2014; McClay, MacKey, Carbonaro, Szafron, & Schaeffer, 2007). Tenth grade students in McClay et al’s (2007) study composed original stories in two versions: one in prose and another as a game using ScriptEase software. Students considered the affordances of different mediums and how game stories differed from those presented in alphabetic print.…”

“…One way video games fostered analytical thinking was to help students improve their abilities to analyze genre or narrative in ways that resembled literary analysis with printed texts (Apperley & Beavis, 2011;Bacalja, 2018aBacalja, , 2018bBerger & McDougall, 2013;McClay et al, 2007;Oldaker, 2010;Ostenson, 2013). Here, the inclusion of video games facilitated opportunities related to interactivity and multimodality.…”

Exploring multimodal writing in secondary English classrooms: a literature review

“…McLean and Rowsell (2015) flipped this structure, asking students to generate ideas in print to support their thinking as they created their own photographs. Two studies (McClay et al , 2007; Oldaker, 2010) made comparisons between storytelling in video games and in print, with authors of both pointing to differences between these forms and raising questions about the degree to which the forms supported each other.…”

“…In these studies, students’ engagement with a variety of tools and semiotic resources helped them think in new ways about how meaning could be communicated. Both McClay et al (2007) and Oldaker (2010), looking at video game composition, found that video game authoring allowed for powerful emotional experiences as students “changed the abstract into real” (Oldaker, 2010, p. 24). Similarly, as they considered the design elements of poems, students in Hughes and John’s (2009) study began to experience poems less as texts built with words and more as multimodal objects.…”

“…As they created digital stories created using PowerPoint and iMovie, students in Jocius’s (2013) study developed more sophisticated conceptions of how available tools influenced composition processes and the meanings communicated by texts. Students creating video games also reflected on their thinking across modes, noting that video game composition more easily supported branching story pathways and action, while their print stories delved into characterization and internal experiences at greater length (McClay et al , 2007). Similarly, two studies looked at comparisons between multimodal and print-based argumentative essays.…”