It is very dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue

Over the past few years, there has been a growing interest in using games as tools in higher education in a variety of topics. Much of the hype has gone either to virtual worlds built in Second life or massive simulations such as Mike Wesch's world simulation project for his introductory sociology courses. But these both have the same problem- the student is playing a game that someone else designed- it's either structured into the course itself with rules created by the professor or has a barrier to entry so high that only specialists can create content within the system.

So why not go back to the future? For any of us old farts who grew up typing "Go north" or "Oil door" into a text adventure, a couple of lines of text followed by a > prompt doesn't seem unusual, and for the digital natives of today it has a retro feel, much like seeing an old Caddie with shark-like tail fins. It turns out that you can create a text adventure without a huge investment in programming time using the latest version of the Inform programming environment.

Inform uses a very natural language-like syntax, so a typical set of instructions might look like

The Office is a room. The description is "An office, complete with peppy motivational posters on the walls, a couple of family photos and an aging PC."
The hallway is east of the Office. The description is "A Hallway. What more do you need to know?"
The computer is in the Office. It is fixed in place. Instead of using the computer, say "You need to know the password first"

You've now created two rooms that you move between and an object that you can (sort of) interact with. While you can get a lot more complicated if you want (making a fully functional computer takes some work) the base syntax for creating a world, adding descriptions and simple triggers shouldn't be beyond anyone, even non-programmers. This means that ordinary students can build a world of their own and let people play in it without the overhead (and expense- Inform is free) that you would need for more "sophisticated" tools.

Here at GBurg, Chris Fee in the English department is using Inform in his courses on medieval literature to have students build areas that other students can explore. In many ways, it's similar to an essay- they have to build a fictional narrative, characters and then flesh them out, but they have the additional capability to lead people to try various actions within the story to see what happens, all the while the author has to better their own understanding of the area they are developing to cover strange or unusual actions by their players. The project is ongoing - the first class to develop these is just now finishing up and the adventures will be passed down to a 200-level course next year for them to explore, so we'll see how this goes, but as an educational tool I think it shows a great deal of possibility- cheap to use, easy to learn and able to leverage the "play" aspect that is so effective in using games to teach people.