Donna Eason, World Building and Immersive Storytelling, US English Department
“In this course students begin their collaborative process in world building and story development. Students will create a single civilization based on a historical, realistic, or speculative fiction format. They will create all aspects of a civilization – the environment, government, economy, society, and culture. In addition, they will create a mythology of their civilization’s genesis as well as a historical timeline of major and significant events. Some of these events will be explained in detail. After they’ve created their civilization, they will then each create a character that will exist in their world. Each student will pull from the knowledge (content and skills) that they acquire from creative writing lectures to create a well-developed, round, dynamic character.”
In this specific mini-project, students are learning the consequences of choices through “playing” The Walking Dead- X-Box and then analyzing the “play”. The project is aimed at developing the skills of group interaction- delegation, compromise, and negotiation as well as developing empathetic relationships to groups and individuals. These skills will be late used for immersive storytelling within a “World”.
Here Donna Eason (Click on the Image to See the Video) explains the project:
Student Work- Discussion Post:
“I thought actually playing the game made the experience a lot more immersive for me, personally, which I think lends credibility to games being an immersive media. I really felt like I was actually making the decisions according to what I thought – Liam (another student in the class) even saw this too, which I think was interesting. It was when I chose to apologize for not being strong enough to save Shawn (character in The Living Dead). Liam caught onto the fact that I apologize for many things that “aren’t my fault” just because I feel like I’m not good enough, which I think shows the immersion. I felt like I was really able to make decisions that represented what I wanted to say, even if the class disagreed (I don’t regret anything).
I think the choices to try to help Duck, ally yourself with Kenny with the other survivors, etc, were all really impactful. I’m sure they’ll come back later, and they were decisions that I really felt like I was making and that I might have to make in a trying situation such as theirs. I was really emotionally affected by the scene where Shawn died. He wasn’t around for very long, but he really seemed like a nice guy, and even though Herschel was kind of harsh, he wasn’t a bad guy and I felt sorry for not being able to save his son or be a better person in his mind.
I was really emotionally affected by the scene where Shawn died. He wasn’t around for very long, but he really seemed like a nice guy, and even though Herschel was kind of harsh, he wasn’t a bad guy and I felt sorry for not being able to save his son or be a better person in his mind.” – Sam
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