About Joe

I have always loved video games. I played Asteroids and Pac-Man in the arcades. I played on the classic Atari, Nintendo and Sega consoles with my friends. I was there for Prince of Persia and Doom on the PC. And now I love my PS3. But the real turning point in my gaming life happened when I was 10 or 11 years old when I got my first home computer – a Commodore Vic-20. It was on sale for $80, having been made obsolete after the launch of it’s successor, the Commodore-64. Along with the Vic-20 we also brought home a game cartridge – the only one left, as nobody seemed to want it, even for $2.50. The instructions on the box explained that it was a game – something about being a character in a story with dragons and magic. It was completely text-based – it didn’t have ANY graphics. No wonder nobody wanted to buy it. But we decided to give it a chance – after all, it was the only game left. It was called Adventureland.

Adventureland would open the doors to a new world for me (as it would for thousands of others) and initiate a life-long passion for playing/reading text-adventures, already becoming known as Interactive Fiction (IF). Even in the midst of the ever-changing gaming landscape with better graphics, better sound and new and exciting game genres, I never stopped enjoying text-based Interactive Fiction – it could still tell a story better than any other kind of game and the challenges it presented – mental challenges, needing lateral thinking, knowledge of the world, and lexical prowess just couldn’t be beaten. The sense of accomplishment after finishing an Infocom game was enormous – closer to writing a book than just simply reading one. And I never felt that I was wasting time playing ANY kind of video game- especially Interactive Fiction -after all, I was reading, and thinking, and typing, and spelling, and making notes and mapping. Even at a young age I knew by playing these games I was learning something.

Fast forward 20+ years later and I’m teaching English -but more than that, I’m teaching things – knowledge and culture and language are all intertwined. I had noticed for a long time while sharing this knowledge and experience that students who were avid video game players, while not usually the ‘best’ students – were more on the ball and faster thinkers and they just seemed to know more stuff - maybe not about grammar or phrasal verbs, but they just seemed to have more general knowledge and a wider vocabulary than other students. On the surface I knew that the fact that they played video games had something to do with it, but I couldn’t really explain it. I took advantage of my interest in video games and my curiosity in knowing exactly why they are useful for learning and wrote a Masters dissertation on game-based learning and virtual worlds. Interestingly, my initial research focus was going to be on Interactive Fiction and language learning – but I thought about it and decided that virtual worlds (being closely related to video games, and therefore giving me a reason to delve deeper into digital game-based learning) would be a more useful topic given the research being done at the time. It was a smart move and I am still involved in projects related to virtual worlds and language learning. But in the time since I submitted my dissertation, DGBL has become a major field for academic research. The video game industry has become the most lucrative entertainment industry in the world. Video games are finally beginning to get respect from non-gamers and more importantly from educators. And in the midst of all the attention and praise given to the state-of-art graphics and innovative control mechanisms available in modern games, I have always thought about purely text-based Interactive Fiction games – and how their narrative-based, textual nature makes them perfect for game-based language-learning.

And so I’ve come full-circle: from playing Adventureland way back then, to gleefully researching the history and theory behind IF, to creating this blog for other language teachers to discover the joys of IF.

I hope you’ll join me in telling this story.