ARGs in Education

It seems that Jamie Kane’s chatbot is broken so analysis of the game is stalled for a while, I’m afraid. Hopefully not for good. This is one of the highlights of the game.

However, it does raise an interesting point about supporting materials for an Educational ARG. While a standard ARG wouldn’t need to have these, I think an EARG would need to have some to ensure its use, especially if the game was closely aligned to the curriculum.

Jamie Kane offers help and supporting advice from the viewpoint on the main supporting character, Jess. Here is the help file on the Jamierules blog. It’s quite technical, but written in quite an accessible way. In an EARG I do think this file would actually be of more use to the teacher – I’m sure most of the TA (who are often more technically advanced than their teachers) would know exactly how to stop pop-ups being blocked.

Jess is also used when you email the actual site (by that I mean the rabbit hole) for help, which is not technically correct. By emailing help, you have already broken the magic circle – is communication from a character the best way to mend it, or does that further subvert the ‘realness’ of the game. I’m not sure, but here is the correspondance I received anyway.

Subj: Chat problems

Hey Sharna,

Sorry about all those problems with the chat. Did it go weird for you as well? I think my messenger software was playing up. It’d be good to finish the chat, do you want to try again:

Click here: http://www.jamierules.co.uk/mb/index.html?iJi47D9vsXGzXifW4ym7iQ

and then launch the messenger as before.

Thanx and speak soon.

Jess
x

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Educational ARGs, Jamie Kane. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.