Digital Storyworlds: Transformative Ways to Play

Introduction

Within a twenty first century higher education environment increasingly focused on student-centred learning principles and digital literacies (Coleman and Money, 2020), the platforms for games and simulations, digital scenarios and virtual worlds provide exciting digital learning environments. This chapter outlines a transformative digital narrative for learning, the digital storyworld model, which takes the principles of game-based learning or virtual worlds into a storytelling meaning-making. Transformative learning, a deep learning which can be applied or transferred to other situations, is the aim of the digital storyworld model. The educational philosopher John Dewey (1934) defined a transformative learning environment as entering ‘through imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationships and participation than [their] own’ (p. 336). In this sense of an immersive (and transformative) learning environment this chapter explores an extended or augmented reality which parallels or mirrors the real and the virtual, where the learner moves imaginatively between the two. The real-world experience is the point of view the learner brings to the digital storyworld; and the virtual or digital storylines of character, plot and setting are provided as non-sequential, non-linear scenarios to stimulate the imagination and engage the minds of learners. The playability of this storytelling centres on learners immersing themselves in the story that they synthesise for themselves as active agents. They engage for the purpose of developing their real-world skills through story.

Games and simulations are being adopted into educational resources and courses to support achievement of learning outcomes (Connolly, 2012). There is also a strong existing body of research examining the role of games within education (Yang, Chen, & Jeng, 2010; Vlachopoulos & Makri, 2017). Vlachopoulos and Makri have concerns in their review of the literature about the mixed effects in areas such as ‘student performance, engagement, and learning motivation’ (Vlachopoulos & Makri, 2017) as well as a gap in consideration of the framework of use across different disciplines. This chapter positions the digital storyworld (DSW) as a more niche narrative model of digital worlds and scenarios, to apply to discipline areas in arts and humanities in general, and professional writing and communication in particular. This model is infinitely flexible in terms of applications across different discipline areas, as it is low cost, easily accessible and based on tutor/learner engagement in the story ‘game’ or imaginative playful rendering of digitally based narrative worlds.

The DSW model is centred on the traditional role of storytelling as learning, indicated through Skain’s (2021) belief that ‘humans store (and use) knowledge implicit in stories’ (p. 4). This model is an interactive digital narrative that scopes scenario-based experience within a 2D website as alternate ‘real’ world, not a separate fully functioning virtual world (Koenitz et al., 2015). The representations of a city office block, or a country town, or a Pacific island, are rendered through transmedia approaches such as video interviews, photographic slideshows, audio/podcasting and text to engage students’ imaginations in a playful ‘reality’.

Scenario-based learning works through approximating a real-life or situational experience, which will involve an emotional engagement or response. That response is strongly indicated by both individual and collective interactivity, where learners are immersed in both the tasks they are completing and the context or scenario for those tasks. Learners can be more motivated by the near-real world, work settings and situations as they get actively engaged and perceive relevance for their own life experience, while also acknowledging that this is not actually real, it is a narrative or story. The students are able to opt out at any level and in fact travel easily between their own real world and the storyworld, creating an exploratory liminal space. This is gamification of the imaginative narrative world rather than a game set apart as a separate world of set rules, levels and player roles.