Digital Narrative Games - The Henry Stickimin Collection

Henry Stickmin Collection  is a 2D Game. In order to play this game, you need to create a user on an online game platform called Steam. The game costs 103,00 kr per user. The garphics are relatively simple so a learner should be able to play it easily on a school pc. 

For the purpose of teaching, and if your school has a limtied budget, multiple pupils can play the game on a pc that the borrow from the IT department at your school. That means that they cannot all play the game at once, but have to wait for their turn. 

You can use this game to teach the competence aim: discuss and reflect on the form, content and devices used in English-language cultural expressions from various media, including music, film and games.

                                      

This game is played as a collection of six episodes where the prologue “Break the bank» is considered as one episode. The other five episodes are:

Episode 1: Escaping the prison

Episode 2: Stealing the diamond

Episode 3: Infiltrating the Airship

Episode 4: Completing the mission

Episode 5: Fleeing the complex

The idea is to help Henry move forward in the story by making the right choice for him. You have many options to choose from like using a laser or a teleporter or calling in your buddy Charles to help you out. Every time you make a wrong choice, the story move forward just a little bit, but then it ends in a «Fail» and you are back to where you could make other choices. The game is peppered with funny comments when you fail.

Here is a teaching assignment for this game. I have made questions that can be used to ensure that the learner has understood eacg episode.There are also questions that might hopefully evoke reflection on the learner's part, and there are questions that are directly related to the competence aims i.e. questions related to analysis of the form, content and literary devices used. Teaching asignment.

Digital Narrative Games: A Fisherman's Tale for VR / Dataspill i undervisning i engelskfaget

A Fisherman's Tale is a narrative-driven puzzle game created by Vertigo Games. 

You can use this game to teach the competence aim: discuss and reflect on the form, content and devices used in English-language cultural expressions from various media, including music, film and games.

The game is available on Oculus Rift, Vive, Windows Mixed Reality, PlayStation VR  and Oculus Quest. It can be bought for 130 kr on Steam. 

A Fisherman's Tale is the story of Bob, a tiny fisherman puppet who lives alone in a lighthouse without any connection to the world outside. The reason for his self-inflicted isolation is revealed later in the game. One morning Bob wakes up to the radio blasting warnings of a storm outside and information that a lone boat is out struggling and needs help. He also finds that his windows have been boarded up. He is given a task to climb to the top of the lighthouse and turn on the light before the big storm. But as the story unfolds, you find out that the storm is a metaphor for an inner storm.

For teaching purposes, I suggest that you as teacher:

1) Know the gameplay. You can watch the game being played at game walkthrough on You Tube. Just search for the name of the game and add "walkthrough" in the search box.

2) It can take a long time to play through an entire game. Many role-playing games take from 3-5 hours to play if you are an experienced player. You do not have to use the game in its entirety. A good alternative can be to play  only a few chapters and watch the rest of the game on walkthroughs on YouTube.  When it comes to A Fisherman’s Tale, I suggest that you skip chapter 2 if necessary.

Spoiler Alert: Click here to get the plot of the game. 

Here is a teaching assignment for this game. I have made questions that can be used to understand each chapter. There are also questions that might hopefully evoke reflection on the learner's part, and there are questions that are directly related to the competence aims i.e. questions related to analysis of the form, content and literary devices used. Teaching asignment.