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Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Game Makes Creative Writing Fun

A new video game that teaches the fundamentals of composition and creative writing is attracting attention and awards. Students playing Elegy for a Dead World explore and write about past civilizations that are based on the works of British Romantic poets.

The mission of the game is for students to compose firsthand accounts of new worlds they explore. The game prompts the players to complete sentences on what they’ve seen and then fashion those into short stories.

Challenges become more advanced as students move through the game, sending them on different paths that force them to come up with different conclusions and still finish with logical endings. The game is meant to be fun and thought-provoking, but also provides fill-in-the-blank questions that help students learn proper grammar usage.

“What we’re trying to do is motivate people so they get into a mindset where they have something they want to put out and write,” Ziba Scott, game co-creator, told Eurogamer.net. “We found just dropping them in a blank slate is too much. It’s intimidating. The roles are about giving them something to play as to set the stage for their writing.”