“There’s always an option”

Abstract

In the digital wilds, storytelling practices are thriving (often in transcultural and multilingual contexts) that share with maker culture a belief in learning through doing, bricolage, collaboration, and playfulness. Key examples are fanfiction, a form of creative writing that transforms popular media in some way, and interactive fiction, a form of nonlinear narrative that verges on the world of gaming. This paper documents a pedagogical intervention carried out within the FanTALES project, which leverages creative writing and meaning-making practices from the digital wilds to develop teaching and learning activities that engage secondary school learners in the writing of multilingual interactive fanfiction. Adolescent learners of English as a foreign language (N = 21) wrote multilingual interactive fanfiction based on the digital game series Assassin's Creed. Qualitative content analysis of focus groups with these learners suggests that they experienced intrinsic motivation and developed skills in language and storytelling as well as transversal competences. They also dealt with a lowered sense of autonomy due to the open-endedness of the tasks, and struggled with a lack of sufficient knowledge about storytelling practices and the source text, as well as with project management. Potential improvements for the pedagogical implementation include more scaffolding of the tasks, and better integration with curriculum and assessment.

Current attitudes on digital interactive fiction and text adventure games within learning contexts: A systematic literature review

“…The presence of online IF devotees, authors, and readers goes back to the infancy of the internet and, by all apparent measures, persists well into the present. Literature which describes online IF communities either references them anecdotally (Cornillie et al, 2021;Gomez, 2019), or provides substantial digital ethnographic analyses (Allington, 2015;van Dijk, 2014), however research into the authoring practices and general perceptions of its members on IFrelated topics are lacking from scholarly examination. Membership in one of these communities grants opportunities to learn collectively and improve upon one's craft, conferring a great many benefits beyond simply working at it alone.…”

“…One article describes the development of specific IF writing prompts for multilingual students to utilize as part of their foreign language curriculum (Sauro et al, 2020). Another study provides a real-world account of this pedagogical intervention in a secondary English class in Belgium, concluding that there were many challenges with the open-ended aspects of the project and students lacking prior storytelling knowledge-but ultimately students benefitted in terms of developing domain-specific skills in language (Cornillie et al, 2021). Implementing IF within foreign language curricula allows authors to toggle between languages and is yet another sorely unexplored area of practice that may be worth further investigating.…”

“…The members of the international IF network (discussion list rec.arts.int-fiction), provides a substantial open archive of technical and poetic theory for the benefit of IF developers, appearing disinterested in serving an economical aim (van Dijk, 2014) and suggesting that the desire to create is at the forefront of the community. The growth of the network was also due in large part to the release of freely distributed IF authorship tools such as Inform, inklewriter, and Twine, alongside the emergence of Usenet groups, and eventually social media (Cornillie et al, 2021). The democratization of IF authorship shifted the industry from commercially viable companies producing it into a vibrant hobbyist culture of individuals and groups with a shared interest in the genre.…”

“…The hobbyist culture that emerged from the ashes of IF's commercial decline revealed a thriving independent (indie) developer scene (Cornillie et al, 2021) to push the medium along through the ensuing decades. A case study detailing the development of an IF game with artificial intelligence dungeon-building capabilities demonstrated the power of indie game networks, as a teaser released by college student Nick Walton resulted in major journalist interest and 1,000,000 players lending support virtually overnight (Hua & Raley, 2020).…”