Textadventures.co.uk

Text adventure games are like "choose your own adventure" stories navigated by clicking on highlighted text or, more commonly, entering text commands. Players read parts of a story and must use simple commands (look, search, talk, etc.) to progress. For example, a game might begin by saying: "You are standing in an empty room with white walls. There is a dragon sleeping on the floor in front of you. A set of stairs descends behind you, and there is a locked gate to the north." The player would then type commands to walk down the stairs, or inspect the dragon closer to see if there's anything strange. Each action -- if the game understands it -- is then met with a new block of text letting the player know what has transpired. Most text adventure games focus on puzzles and mazes where players must explore an area, collect items, and complete puzzles to progress. Textadventures.co.uk is a browsable database of these games but also features a tool -- Quest -- that allows students (and teachers!) the opportunity to design their own text adventure games.

At their core, text adventure games build reading comprehension and problem-solving skills, but there's also subject-specific learning content available for students to play since the community -- including many teachers -- have designed games with learning outcomes in mind. For example, some games get players to answer math questions to proceed. Some students will love the challenge of text adventures, but some students might find them a bit boring or frustratingly counterintuitive due to their unique grammar. For example, typing "unlock gate with key" might not yield results, but typing "use key on gate" might. Teachers might want to direct these students to the games that involve clicking on links rather than typing in commands. All students, however, are likely to be enthusiastic about designing their own games, which fuses creative writing and coding. However, the Quest tool can be challenging to use, and although there are tutorials to help beginners, they're a work-in-progress with a few mistakes and glitches.