Bill MacKenty

Text based games in an after school program

I’ll be running an after-school class in text-based games next year (starting September 2008).  I’m quite excited about it, and there seems to be interest from many in the school community.

I’ve developed a tentative outline, and I have begun reaching out to others in the text-based gaming community to get some ideas and feedback. I’ll keep track of my progress here on my blog, and I’m really looking forward to running this class.

The class would last an entire school year (September through June), meeting once a week. So we would be looking at about 30 class meeting times (probably more like 20 with interruptions and field trips).

I have thought about this a bit, and here’s my basic outline:

The classics:

play part of Adventure
play part of zork I
play a multiplayer text based game (but this is tricky as they will
all be minors)

MUDS

Talk about different code bases
Play some muds:
fantasy
science fiction
popular fiction
building
build a mud using (mud code base 1)
build a mud using (mud code base 2)
interviewing a mud builder
interviewing a mud creator

MUSHES

Talk about different mushes
Play some MUSHES:
fantasy
science fiction
popular fiction
building
Build a mush using the pennmush server

MUXes

playing muxes
playing a Battle tech mux

Interactive fiction

The big difference in interactive fiction and MU*‘s
playing IF: play some games
designing IF using Inform 7
Puzzles: what makes a puzzle fun?

Good writing

How to write a good story
How to write a good bad guy
General game skills
How to run a TP (tiny plot, from the mu* world)
Coded systems versus free form RP