Here’s an early spreadsheet on the general quest sorting so far:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17tOWrYmHyTniQjmtEFvnZ68_2BwatIvZGx-X99JeMS0/edit?usp=sharing

One of the big gaming ideas I really admire and could see being exported to the classroom is the recent trend in certain (often indie) games where the difficulty is high, but the cost of failure is very nearly nil. Games like Super Meat Boy and Hotline Miami start off easy, but quickly ramp up the difficulty, demanding a fairly high standard of play in order to even finish a level, let alone do it exceptionally well. Failure, dying in these games, is a regular event. But restarting the level is instantaneous. You have the advantage of knowing how the stage works, at least as far as you got, but can immediately go about tackling it fresh. Both games also work to avoid interrupting the “flow,” the feeling of working your way through a very fast paced, high dexterity puzzle. Both games augment this with excellent soundtracks that importantly, don’t reset when the level does, preventing death from being a punishment where you end up listening to the early parts of the song over and over again.

Tying this back to education is bring the concept of retries into the classroom. The difficulty of the material can and perhaps should be high, the key is to ease them into the expectations of the course while allowing for material to be repeated as necessary in order to get the grade desired. I think this generally favors classrooms that don’t work on a lot of small assignments, but mostly on larger projects/papers.

I don’t know that these would work for Epic Start though. A game related feature I think might work is borrowing from Twine. Twine is a program meant for interactive storytelling. Mainly this is for choose your own adventure-style books; the creator can allow for branching or non-linear story choices to be easily and visually connected . Playing off the USC film school thing, I could see something like this for Epic Start as sort of the end product of what the students put together. Perhaps having story pieces as quest rewards and then allowing each team (or whatever the divisions of students are called) to construct the story the way they choose. I’m thinking these quest reward pieces won’t be an actual chunk of story but perhaps a hook or something to that effect, so that when they arrange them all together, they’re still tasked with writing the details in.

 

Randi’s example:

 

www.dailywritingstips.com/grammar-test-1/