Teaching digital fiction: integrating experimental writing and current technologies

Today’s creative writers are immersed in a multiplicative, multimodal—digital—universe. It requires “multiliteracies”, all in a constantly and rapidly evolving technological environment, which are not yet fundamentally integrated into the basic literacy skills entrenched in school learning. How can creative writing instructors in higher education best prepare their students for the real-world contexts of their creative practice? One approach is to integrate the creative writing workshop with a focus on digital and interactive design. This paper outlines a module incorporating multiple literacies into a creative writing course, Playable Fiction, noting the affordances, limitations, and benefits of teaching workshops for writing digital fiction (“born-digital” fiction, composed for and read on digital devices). The researcher took an ethnographical approach to the question, designing a module to encourage creative writing students to experiment with digital fiction, and observing the effects on the students’ attitudes and their coursework. Included is a discussion of the benefits to students of developing multiliteracies and considerations for teaching, including issues of technical know-how and the lack of infrastructural support

Facilitating Undergraduate Experimental Game Design: A Pilot Study With Celestial Harmony

Encouraging undergraduate students and other novices to engage with game design experimentation requires the creation of a space where they can research without fear of failure. Creating a safe space requires addressing the class format for both production and grades. We conducted a pilot study with a group in a capstone game design course, seeking to create this safe space for experimentation by framing our roles not as expert instructors but partners in learning, where we offered guidance and mentorship to the groups while retaining student autonomy in much of the game design decisions. In this paper, we identify three key strategies for making students feel more comfortable in an experimental space that is also integrated into a required course. These three strategies are: modifying the grading schema, encouraging rapid prototyping, and providing frequent feedback. Though this guide is focused on experimental game design, many of the lessons we describe could be applied to courses in other fields where experimentation or loosely-defined works are the objective