I am working my way through a wealth of quests in the 3DGameLab Teacher Camp materials for May 2013. This course is thoroughly engaging and I can see how students would love to learn this way. I have commented previously on how addictive it can be – particularly if you are always willing to try new things and figure out how they might fit into the regular classroom.

Currently I am working through a variety of Literary Game Genres and finding some of them rather frustrating in the lack of responsiveness. However, the more times you try them, the more you come to understand that it is your own lack of flexibility in approaching the task that is the issue. The Graphic Adventure Peasant’s Quest is one such game. I have come to realise that curiosity didn’t ever kill the cat (especially when you can start the game over at any stage!) – I need to have the avatar try looking and interacting with any object into which it comes with contact. In order to achieve anything, you have to have the ability to think flexibly and know where on the playing screen you have been. The problem finding and solving involved are the most important aspects of this type of adventure. I would certainly make sure I had longer than 20 minutes to spend trying out a game such as this. During the span of 20 minutes – my game was restarted 3 times when I met up with the dragon; I found a cottage and picked berries; found a trinket but found out it was the wrong one; found a well but couldn’t turn the crank to find out what was at the bottom of the well. I needed to have my avatar find his burnt cottage but I couldn’t find it, therefore I couldn’t find the map eluded to in the wiki walkthrough I discovered. A task for another day!