[One of the most
consistent
through-lines in my life as an AmericanStudier, from my own childhood
through my experiences with my sons, has been games, both board/card and video.
So this week I’ll analyze a handful of games that offer complex lessons about
our past, leading up to a Guest Post on the wonderful Reacting to the Past pedagogical
games!]
On the
interactive digital book series that extends one of my favorite genres to new
audiences, media, and identities.
While I’ve
written a great deal over the years about books that defined my childhood, I’ve
somehow never had the chance to talk about Choose
Your Own Adventure books. Over my many years of reading CYOA books I must
have checked out (literally, from the Cville
public libraries) most of the original series, and over my years as a
parent I’ve had the chance to share many of those classics (along with the new Choose
Your Own Adventure card games) with the boys. We’ve also discovered and
enjoyed a couple newer CYOA book series that engage more directly with American
history: the You
Choose Interactive History Adventure books, which include this truly
thoughtful Salem
Witch Trials text (one of the best representations of the Salem Witch
Trials I’ve seen in any medium); and, to extend the focus of an earlier post in
the series, the Oregon
Trail Interactive History Adventure books, which are based at least as much
on the video game as on that historical topic. Those new, overtly historical
CYOAs really exemplify the power of this form of interactive storytelling for
drawing readers into seemingly distant settings and histories.
21st
century interactive storytelling has of course gone far beyond books and card
games (to take nothing whatsoever away from those two wonderful forms), and a
new digital book series, History
Adventures, World of Characters, utilizes the technologies of digital media
to extend and amplify those CYOA elements and effects. (Full disclosure: I first
learned about History Adventures when one of its team, Zack Gutin, reached out
to me to see if I was interested in writing about them—the boys and I
subsequently had a chance to read and play some of the series, and we found
them very well done; I’m not receiving any compensation for writing about them,
and the books themselves are free.) Created by Spencer
Striker, a Digital Media Design professor at Northwestern University in
Qatar, History Adventures is a free, open-access series that combines text and animated storytelling
and uses branching paths to bring the CYOA format to a series of representative
characters (five in the initial, April
2020 version 1.1, with more to come) and stories across 150 years of world history
(1750-1900, with again more eras to come).
We had a chance
to try out all five initial characters and stories, and were particularly struck
and engaged by the story of Agent
355, a Revolutionary War spy who works with the famous Culper
Spy Ring against the British. My younger son created an extensive project
on the Culper Ring for a 5th grade Revolutionary War unit a couple
years back, and he both testified to the authenticity of the History Adventures
portrayal and felt that he continued to learn through the experience of playing
as a figure within those histories. My older son is a born storyteller and
artist, and was particularly drawn in by the interplay between the animations
and graphics and the text and story choices. I liked all those things too, but
what I liked most was the diversity of all five initial characters, including
Agent 355 (a Muslim and African American young woman). While of course the “You”
that is the protagonist of Choose Your Own Adventure books could always be as
diverse as the audience, I do have to say that in many (if not all) of the
illustrations (at least in the original series), those unnamed main characters were
depicted as white. That’s no more representative of the world and our histories
than it is of 20th and 21st century readers, and it’s very
nice to see an interactive storytelling form depict our histories and world in
all their foundational, compelling diversity.
Guest Post this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other historical games you’d highlight?
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