I’ll put in a plug here for Swigian, specifically the Adventuron port. It has a lot of straightforward interaction that is suitable for less experienced players, and while it does have darker thematic elements, there is no material I would consider unsuitable for a high school setting. It is also related to literature that many high school students will have studied (though saying exactly what constitutes something of a spoiler).
I would also recommend What Fuwa Bansaku Found, which is short, accessible, and somber in tone. Again, I’m not aware of anything that would prevent it being appropriate for a high school classroom. More advanced players may be interested in Toby’s Nose.
In that case, I would go for Birdland, by Brendan Patrick Hennessy. Funny and TOP for teenagers.
From there you can follow the thread at IFDB:
Also, I made a copycat twine of the one that shows up in Adventure Time. So you can download the twine, pass it to your students, so they can import it in Twine and Create a game that feels like Adventure Time! (or at least more visually appealing than vanilla Twine
ouch, I made a recommendation only based for “teenage material”. I forgot you mean more serious tone.
In that case I would recommend the following curricula:
howling dogs, by Porpentine
For those we love alive, by Porpentine
Queers in love at the end of the world, by Anna Anthropy
My father, long, long legs.
Rat Chaos.
Even Cowgirls Bleed, by Christine Love
80 Days
Aisle, by Sam Barlow.
Galatea, by Emily Short.
Etc. There’s a lot of ground to cover, sincerely.
Also, keep an eye on the last Spring Thing, ribbons and winners could be great curricula for any course.
Thanks to Greg for recommending Swigian, which I found very enjoyable and well-crafted. Of course, you can’t go far wrong with a story by Brian Rushton, who is the author of this game.
As Greg notes, this story is available in an Adventuron port, and so it works with a two-word parser. I’m curious about what folks have found in using stories of this sort in educational settings. My own experience is mostly with Inform-style multi-word parsers, which I’ve chosen in hopes of helping students become more comfortable with writing longer English sentences.
I have no experience in educational settings so this is an ill-informed opinion, but I’ll say that as someone who hadn’t played many two-word parser games before starting to get into them in the past few years, I experienced a significant barrier to entry because it’s often challenging to think about how to communicate an action that naturally takes three or four words to express. That might not be an issue with Swigian, since it is so (intentionally!) stripped down in its language – but if one of your goals is to get students to more naturally write longer sentences, using the Adventuron port might make less sense.
(There are some Adventuron games that hack the parser to be more robust, by the way – I’m thinking especially of The Faeries of Haelstowne, which is an excellent game but is probably too long and challenging for your purposes)
Now that I’m back in the thread, I saw someone recommended my game Sting up above to @Doug_Egan for purposes of a high-school workshop highlighting stuff other than light, comic puzzlers, and I think it might be a good fit? It’s a memoir largely about my relationship with my twin sister, told in six vignettes that are largely set during my teenaged years. It doesn’t have puzzles, though there is a sailing race demonstrating non-puzzle-based gameplay (you don’t need to win to proceed, and in face aren’t expected to), and it deals with serious themes: while I don’t think the game is too much of a downer or melodramatic, it was prompted by my sister’s recent death; it’s mentioned but not described in detail in the closing vignette, to recontextualize the memories from the other five sections).
EDIT: It occurs to me to note that there is some profanity in some of the vignettes, but I calibrated it by including only like 10% of the actual amount of cursing from when I was a teenager, so I doubt there’d be anything shocking for your audience!
Adventuron is not restricted to a two-word parser. You can do nearly anything you can do with (say) Inform, but it doesn’t have a standard library, so it’s a lot more work for the author. For examples of good Adventuron games with a multi-word parser, see my own ‘Santa’s Trainee Elf’, @ChristopherMerriner’s ‘The Faeries of Haelstowne’ and any of the recent games by @dee_cooke.
Earlier in this thread, I mentioned the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It’s worth mentioning that Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2022 is now over and some of the top entries would make very good introductions to IF, as they have inbuilt tutorials. At the risk of self promotion, ‘Carpathian Vampire’ has a vampire theme based on a true story (and what kid doesn’t love a vampire story) whereas ‘Kenny Koala’s Bushfire Survival Plan’ is a bit more light-hearted and educational at the same time.
Thanks for your thoughtful suggestions. I’ve been thinkiing about “Sting” since I first read it during the IF Comp and gave it the highest score of any of the games I judged in 2021. I think it might be a good fit for my first-year university students.
