ABSTRACT
At the time of writing, game design courses and programs were relatively rare, and those that existed in an early stage of development. Transforming stories into game-based quests forces designers to think about how the events of a story and its underlying themes can be expressed within the multimedia, rule-based format of games. Offer as much freedom as possible by allowing students to build quests around a group game design project from another module or class, a personal project for their portfolios, or an existing story from another medium. The assignment to design an interpretative quest has two components: a six-page written paper combining features of a game design document and a traditional interpretative essay, as well as a small multimedia prototype of one part of the game. The prototypes that students made combined aspects of their individual design documents to form playable games through which players would enact the students’ interpretations of a portion of the novel.
