Teaching Composition with Interactive Fiction

I’m on a committee that is exploring a multimodal a revision to my school’s freshman writing program. So far I have never seriously tried introducing new media content into a freshman writing course, but this may do the trick.

After two semesters of teaching students to read, play, and write IF games, I can say that the experiment was mostly a success. While we faced a few frustrations (largely coding-related) along the way, we ended up gaining some invaluable rhetorical perspectives and practices, and producing a number of fun, thoughtful, and affecting games to boot. In this first of two posts, I’ll explain why I think IF is especially valuable in the composition classroom. In a later post, I’ll lay out some advice, resources, and recommended games for those of you thinking of experimenting with this genre in your own courses. —Teaching Composition with Interactive Fiction – TECHStyle.