What it says on the tin, basically! I have a group of 9-12 year old students who are interested in IF and have been trying out building their own… but I also want to introduce them to the world of possibilities out there. So I’m looking for short, age appropriate, games on subjects that they might find interesting.
Given the age range I’m not totally comfortable just picking from IFDB based on review rating, but I’d also like to give a wider pool of recommendations than just games I’ve played personally (of which I can only think of one off hand, and it’s a bit borderline).
Can you help me out? In true fashion, I’ve procrastinated enough that I’ll be using the list tomorrow so if you have good ideas before then I’d be eternally grateful - and if you reply after the session I’ll console myself that I’ve helped create a resource thread for the future.
Inside the Facility can be made as short or long as you want. You can limit the time and they can compete in getting as far as possible – or collaborate to get as far as possible. If I remember right there isn’t anything obviously age inappropriate there.
Aotearoa. It’s a kids’ game with a kid protagonist, and it does a great job of first-time-player hand holding that tells you exactly how to play it. Plus, dinosaurs!
You could try Untold Riches, which was “developed…as part of an interdisciplinary curriculum for the middle grades on computer programming and creative writing.” (That’s from the “About” text in the game.)
I hope it isn’t gauche of me to recommend my own Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight, since it was written with this specific audience in mind (though I’ve heard from adults who enjoy it too).
Play time ranges from 30 to 50 minutes, depending on whether or not players decide to complete the report card.
look up TALP (text adventure literacy project) on itch. it’s a yearly IF comp devoted to games designed for newbies. a requirement is that the game have a tutorial.
Length: ideally, at least a couple of options that run under an hour but I’m mostly meaning short as a stand in for “single session playthrough” being feasible.
Parser or choice: Ideally some of each, although I guess choice will be more popular for this specific group.
I suggest taking the recommendations with a grain of salt, as people don’t all mean the same thing by suitable for children. E.g. a game might be easy to play, but the content might still deal with heavy topics.
I’ll be playing through the games I’m considering recommending tomorrow morning; I’ll need to be able to at least get people started without frustration, and as is often the case in these situations there’s a few specific topics I need to be careful with above and beyond “society somewhere thinks this is suitable for 9 year olds”. That said, checking out a short list of direct recommendations is a much more managable task than pulling at random from IFDB
When I originally wrote A Matter of Heist Urgency, it was specifically intended for children who had never played IF before. I still think that the most recent version holds up well in that capacity.
Thanks everybody! I’ve chosen a few options mostly based on getting a mix of styles (choice based, map based, more trad parser style) given that I’m trying to give them a view of what else exists, and I’ll certainly be revisiting several of the other suggestions with groups in the future.
Just in case people are curious: this first group are all on the younger side, and all have English as a (competent but) second language - it’s an afterschool club at an international school. So for context, although the course was in English most of this group were writing in their first language while authoring as their English reading and writing is a fair bit slower.
In this group there was a strong preference for “Inside the Facility” with it having the graphical map at the side, although one of them really got into “The Basilisk and the Banana”. One thing that took me off guard is that they expected a title screen/image, and until they got one, it didn’t seem to register that they had “started” the game and weren’t just navigating to it. This came up with “Costumes and Candy” which starts with a brief intro before showing an obvious “this is the title” screen a few clicks in; several of them were completely lost because they hadn’t even noticed that the introduction existed (despite the fact you can actually make a choice during it…). So that’s an interesting challenge in itself.
I’ll be running an other session of “experience widening” in the new year with a group of mostly 12 year old native speakers, and I’ll be curious to see how that turns out as well.
