Game Modules
These games offer a rich complement to print literature, allowing students to interact with narrative and make choices that affect the outcome.
The selections are short by design––no more than two or three hours total playtime––and there is enough variety that a diverse range of courses can find something here to use. The teaching modules provide analytic tools to help students understand what makes narratives in games unique.
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The world of Inside resembles our own––except that something has gone terribly wrong. The player plays as a young boy pursued through abandoned farms, cities, and flooded zones by a mysterious cohort of armed men who command dogs and a horde of seemingly lobotomized stooges. The player must evade these enemies while completing puzzles presented by the game environment.
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In narrative terms, Inside's richness comes by way of suggestion. We learn bits and pieces about the game's world as we go, but these details often multiply new questions. This is true right up to the story's enigmatic conclusion.
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This "dystopian document thriller" by Lucas Pope puts players in the shoes of a border control inspector in a fictional 1980s totalitarian nation. The task? Carefully scrutinize the paperwork of the immigrants who come before you, looking for discrepancies, forgeries, and the occasional terrorist. Through the rhythm of its (seemingly) mundane, bureaucratic gameplay and the weighty moral choices it foists on unsuspecting players, Papers, Please raises difficult questions about bureaucratic systems, national borders, and the dehumanization inherent in what James C. Scott has called "seeing like a state."
​​The game pairs perfectly with Ian Bogost's concept of "procedural rhetoric": the complex ways that games can use their systems of rules and procedures to make claims about the world.
Edith Finch is a first-person exploration game that takes place in and around the long-abandoned Finch family home. What remains behind are rooms full of artifacts, by which the player enters into the death experience of lost family members. The family stories nest together as one plays through the game, eventually filling in a larger story of the family's hauntings and apparent curse.
Edith is a Gothic story; our approach to teaching it asks students to consider the game in relation the long history of Gothic narrative, from 18th-century novels to 20th-century film and television.
The Stanley Parable is an anti-adventure game set in a bland office space. Nothing much happens. So what makes it so fun (and funny)?
On one level, it's a simple contest between a voiced narrator and a poor office worker (Stanley) whose entire job involves pushing keys on command from an unknown authority.
On another level, it's a game that breaks narrative conventions in order to make them visible as conventions––the parts of any story that, despite their artificiality, we overlook in order to make the story work. This makes Stanley ideal for classes that explore metanarrative or narratives of the absurd.
Before Your Eyes uses eye-tracking technology to tell an emotionally difficult story. Players relive the protagonist's memories through their eyes (literally), advancing the narrative with each blink. The game explores themes such as the reliability of memory, free will, and the nature of life and death.