Game for my students

[Corlindale]

Hello everyone.

In my ESL classes, we're working with digital media. At the moment we're looking at the pros and cons of social media, but I'd like to move on to gaming afterwards.

For that purpose, I need a game that would be practical to work with in class. I'm also going to give my students the chance to look at their own favourite games, of course, but I'd like to start out with something we can work with together.

However, there are practical constraints when trying to pick a game to use in class. Almost everyone has a laptop, so that's not a big problem. I just need suggestions for a good game to use. Ideally something that's free (legally, of course!) and doesn't require setting up an account. Our school internet is not great, so it shouldn't be too bulky in size either.

I had originally planned to use Iji, but I found out it doesn't run on Mac (and more than half of my students use Mac).

Does anyone have good suggestions? I would prefer if the game involves some English, of course, since it's an ESL class.

[Grif]

I'm actually unclear what sort of game you have in mind. Do you wish for a simple, multiplayer game? Or just something which everyone can install and play? What sort of game do you have in mind? Puzzle, strategy, sim, etc?

[factotum]

Well, the game he already mentioned as being unsuitable because it's not available on the Mac (Iji) is a single-player game, and as far as I can make out, it's a sort of shooter/platformer mix? It would certainly help to make recommendations if Corlindale could say what it is about that game that made him consider it suitable for the purpose, though...

[Corlindale]

Hello again.

Sorry for being vague in my intial post, I sort of wrote it in-between classes so it was a bit rushed.

Genre is not that important in itself, but I want it to be something with a narrative. Ideally something where one could apply a few of the analysis-terms we usually use for texts in class, such as setting or characterization. The more language (doesn't have to be voiced, text is also fine), the better.

I liked Iji because it has an interesting setting and a narrative that changes substantially depending on the way you play through the game, which I thought would make it interesting to talk about. Especially the narrative possibilities given when the player can make decisions - compared to the story of a book or a movie, which is static.

In a perfect world I'd use something like The Walking Dead, but it's not really realistic to get class copies of it, let alone ensure that the students' laptops will run it. Maybe I can work out something where we play through a bit of it together using the class projector, but it's not as interesting as letting them play themselves.

I realize this is hard to find in the realm of free games, which is usually littered with simple puzzlers and the like, but maybe one of you know of something.

[Grif]

Ah. Narrative. :smallamused: Not many comes to mind, and I believe some are of questionable legality.

Lessee.

Battle of Wesnoth (http://www.wesnoth.org/) is a TBS game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics, and features a pretty solid story campaign. All free, of course. You can even get it on mobile if you want.
C&C: Red Alert (http://iran.cnc-comm.com/ra/) is actually legally free now, and is a classic RTS. Probably not what you're looking for, but notable for one of the few free games I know that make uses of actual live-action cutscenes. You might find it interesting for that alone.

Also let's not forget free Flash-based games. You can find those at Kongregate (http://www.kongregate.com/).

[Triaxx]

Dwarf Fortress is free, has mountains of text and requires you tell your own narrative.

One that jumps to mind that requires a free Good Old Games account is Beneath a Steel Sky, which comes free with an account.

Said account also comes with Ultima IV, which as an RPG also has a significant narrative.

[factotum]

If we're talking freebie RPGs, you can download the full versions of Arena and Daggerfall from Bethesda's own website for free, and all you need to get them working on a modern PC is DOSBox, which is available on all platforms AFAIK. Daggerfall is here:

http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall

[Corlindale]

Thank you all, very interesting suggestions! For some reason I hadn't really considered the older titles now released as freeware, they might also be quite interesting from a historical perspective.

Browser games may not be workable, because we have some really annoying restrictions set up around our school internet to block gaming or entertainment sites. Therefore I'd generally prefer something that can be downloaded and played offline, but that luckily goes for most of your suggestions so far :-)

[GloatingSwine]

If the aim is to use it in an ESL class, you probably don't want something with an atrocious level of written english (or yet worse, ye olde bull****e) like old CRPGs.

Cave Story's free, runs on a toaster, and has an OSX port.

Not sure how well it suits for narrative examination or how good the translation is though. (It's a really good game to look at for game design though).

[Hiro Protagonest]

Cave Story's free, runs on a toaster, and has an OSX port.

Damn, beat me to it by five minutes!

If you have Steam, Cave Story+ is inexpensive and has better graphics, still in the 16-bit style.

As for something else, Chrono Trigger doesn't actually take a really long time to beat. ProJared beat it (going through the whole story and sidequests) in 17 hours, with no guide and only a few childhood memories of the game. So I'd definitely recommend that for a RPG. It's easy to find a SNES emulator if you have to run it on a computer (Chrono Trigger is available on a ton of platforms though).

Edit: And while Cave Story is good at narrative, Chrono Trigger is probably the most narratively-interesting game of all time.

[Blackhawk748]

Stronghold. Its dirt cheap could probably run on anything and has a pretty decent story. Unlike virtually every other suggestion so far, its an RTS, and a pretty significant one, as far as RTSs are concerned.

[TaRix]

Hm. Computer, narrative-heavy, probably native English.

How about Spiderweb software's stuff? It runs on lower-end stuff, was originally made on Macs, and has decent writing and story branching? Geneforge might make for a little bit of debate, since none of the factions are black-and-white. There's several Avernum titles to choose from, connected chronologically. Nethergate's a standalone game (unless there was another made sometime ago) pitting Celts and Romans against each other in a fantasy situation (Orderly empire pacifying native Celts while still dealing with the folklore beasties and fey)

They all feature dialog trees and lots of text descriptions for color, and might be good for a class if parents don't get all spooked by fantasy stuff.

Not only that, if you e-mailed Vogel, the Spiderweb guy, you could probably get a serious discount for your students.

The homepage is "spidweb.com"


Hope this helps.

[Winthur]

Bro I just want to see that class

the class full of millenials with little concept of what a DOS prompt is

all of them tackling Ultima 4 or Beneath a Steel Sky in separate sessions

especially in case of U4, figuring out the UI, reading through the manual in order to make any sort of progress

or the case of all of those people inevitably not being able to get out of the first dungeon in Daggerfall

you know what I would consider? get a 4X game and make a massive succession game for your students. have them work in groups or something, and have them pass the save game. start from 4000 BC in Civilization (get FreeCiv or FreeCol) - normal start. one group/guy/girl does the first X turns, then they move on to the next group, and next group. don't make it about competitiveness or difficulty, each group has to decide if they want to build or they want to destroy pillage and conquer. they make their own narrative, their own empire, and then you can take a look at what everyone did and whatnot blablabla something something video games are art.

[Blackhawk748]

Bro I just want to see that class

the class full of millenials with little concept of what a DOS prompt is

all of them tackling Ultima 4 or Beneath a Steel Sky in separate sessions

especially in case of U4, figuring out the UI, reading through the manual in order to make any sort of progress

or the case of all of those people inevitably not being able to get out of the first dungeon in Daggerfall

you know what I would consider? get a 4X game and make a massive succession game for your students. have them work in groups or something, and have them pass the save game. start from 4000 BC in Civilization (get FreeCiv or FreeCol) - normal start. one group/guy/girl does the first X turns, then they move on to the next group, and next group. don't make it about competitiveness or difficulty, each group has to decide if they want to build or they want to destroy pillage and conquer. they make their own narrative, their own empire, and then you can take a look at what everyone did and whatnot blablabla something something video games are art.

This reminds me. Zorc. The ultimate sandbox.

[Winthur]

Best part about my Civilization suggestion - these games are intuitive as hell, especially on easy difficulties, where it doesn't matter what you do, you will still win or at least be a competitive nation. That's because the tech trees mimic what we know from history. That means your average Joe can figure out that learning Warrior Code is viable for warmongers, whereas Map Making will be good for exploration-minded people, and for anything else there's lots of helpful prompts. That helps with any complexity issues. The game will be easy to pick up and play. Making a first turn, for most players, is literally a question of "press B, move Warrior, choose tech, end turn". Really early game, you have only a handful of units to deal with and 1 or 2 neighbours at most. You can beat a standard Civilization game with 7 civilizations on all default settings in 2 hours if you do not micromanage excessively.

You can even launch such a game on an Earth-like map with civilizations put where their historical capital cities are. Granted, being America in those games usually means you get to be fighting with swords against Aztecs and not much else, but as Romans, for example, your students will have plenty of interaction with Carthage, Greeks, Germans, French etc. But for your purposes a normal start on any map will do.

So, again, my suggestion is Freeciv. It is free and runs on MacOS or any other system.

Plus, whatever your group does, you can think and talk about it. Maybe someone in your group is actually good at Civ and when he's at the wheel, he makes all the most optimized tech choices and presses for the best solution. How your group responds to another nation will really engage them, as they decide whether their tech leader neighbor should be killed off early to prevent being a runaway or traded with to form a good partnership. Or maybe someone in the group will just go with whatever plan depending on how they feel about stuff. Someone might want to go to war, someone might want to just be peaceful, maybe you can have an in-class debate about why your virtual Rome should have The Pyramids.

EDIT: Alternately, have each person on their computer play their own game, but all from the same save game.

[Fri]

When I was a kid, on my english class we play adventure games.

To be specific, I remember playing Lucas Art's day of the tentacle.

I remember it's being quite interesting and useful in increasing my english proficiency. And since we're not exactly playing it "for the win" the teacher just handed a walkthrough for the students to check when they get stuck. Because the important part is increasing the english vocab and such, not the puzzle solving.

[Corlindale]

That's some very good suggestions. I remember playing original Civ myself when I was 9 and didn't understand most of the English. It did increase my English proficiency significantly.

It's also a good point that everyone intuitively understands the setting of the game, which might not apply for a fantasy RPG or similar.

I don't think my students would mind older games. I saw one of them playing DOOM during the break once, even though he wouldn't have been alive when it was first released.

[thorgrim29]

Isn't the first Portal free at this point? I thought I saw it was somewhere.

[Grif]

Isn't the first Portal free at this point? I thought I saw it was somewhere.

It was free to download and get a copy for a limited period of time in the past. But no, it isn't free now, unfortunately.

[Cespenar]

Wadjet Eye Games' Blackwell series or the newer Technobabylon work basically on anything by the favor of being Adventure Game Studio games, and have stronger narrative than most movies.

[Corlindale]

Thanks again. Blackwell is also a good suggestion, I forgot about that myself. Maybe the free demo would be extensive enough for classroom purposes, I will have to check it out.

Lots of good suggestions so far. Maybe enough to give them a selection of games and let each group work with a game of their choice, so we can span different genres and settings.

[Fri]

Anyway, my contribution to this thread is,

try to pick a game with simple gameplay/interface. Since the purpose of this class is to learn english, and not learn obscure dos ui or circle strafing.

Also, for example, if you're picking a point and click adventure game, provide some walkthrough so the players can see the next narative instead of getting stuck in one place and trying to click all the pixels to find the one key that fits the door. Something in that line.

[Cristo Meyers]

Anyway, my contribution to this thread is,

try to pick a game with simple gameplay/interface. Since the purpose of this class is to learn english, and not learn obscure dos ui or circle strafing.

Also, for example, if you're picking a point and click adventure game, provide some walkthrough so the players can see the next narative instead of getting stuck in one place and trying to click all the pixels to find the one key that fits the door. Something in that line.

Gone Home springs to mind. There's no real way to get lost and the entire point of the game is the narrative.

The references to 90's American youth culture might be lost on the students, though.

[Lethologica]

It's too bad you can't do this cheaply and platform-agnostic and legally with Pokemon (AFAIK).

[Corlindale]

I actually used Gone Home for this two years ago:-) Worked well, but they sometimes got a little impatient with the text amounts in the longish letters and documents. It doesn't have to be a very basic game, though. It's not just about learning English, we're also going to talk about games as a medium and how they differ from the types of media we normally work with in class (text, video, etc).

[Corlindale]

I do agree that it's preferable with a simple interface and low difficulty, though. I don't want the non-gamers to be left in the dust while the one Dark Souls-fanatic is the only one having fun.

[Oneris]

Try this site. (http://gamesnostalgia.com/en/) It seems to have a lot of really old games from the 90's for free, like the Ultima series and the Monkey Islands, and most are available for both PC and Mac.
Edit: It has the original Tomb Raider and System Shock. I know what I'm doing for the rest of the day. :smallbiggrin:

[factotum]

Try this site. (http://gamesnostalgia.com/en/) It seems to have a lot of really old games from the 90's for free, like the Ultima series and the Monkey Islands

Yeah. That's not actually legal, you realise? Abandonware has no legal basis in reality, and in fact, some of the games on that site don't even fit the traditional definition of abandonware, because they're being legally sold on GOG.com.

[Oneris]

Yeah. That's not actually legal, you realise? Abandonware has no legal basis in reality, and in fact, some of the games on that site don't even fit the traditional definition of abandonware, because they're being legally sold on GOG.com.

Yeah, I'm not going to argue with you here on legality vs artistic morality, but I concede that for public use in a school setting, it might not be a good idea. Though I will say that going through strict legal definitions, independent porting of Windows games to run on a Mac with Wineskin or Cider wrappers isn't completely squeaky clean either.

That being said, Ahriman's Prophecy (https://aveyond.com/games/ahrimans-prophecy/) is a FF6/Chrono Trigger style game that's free from its creator, and I believe a Portingkit wrapper exists for it.

[Tentreto]

If you're looking for very narrative driven games, almost any rpg will do.

I would personally suggest a game such as King of Dragon Pass which focuses on the decisions and actions of a Norse/Germanic tribe with a strong saga like feel to it.
As there is a 'clan ring' offering advice, it can work well multiplayer, and is pretty cheap on GOG, and has an IOS port.
It is also low in requirements, it ran on my chronic netbook for a few years.

[The Dark Fiddler]

It's too bad you can't do this cheaply and platform-agnostic and legally with Pokemon (AFAIK).

In going to second this. Pokémon games, especially the early ones, are excellent for building language proficiency if you can get around the difficulties in actually paying them with your confines. I still credit my Spanish copy of Red with helping me pass my AP test.

[Olinser]

Well, the 'original' classroom game was Oregon Trail (or Oregon Trail 2 at this point which was a lot better).

[Crow]

Betrayal at Krondor. Fantastic narrative and characterization. Good reading bits that aren't too difficult to handle. With a whole series of books which it was inspired by and draws from so the kids have some reading suggestions if they enjoy it. Available DRM-free on GoG.com.

[Grif]

In case you're still looking for a well-presented free game, the sequel of C&C: Red Alert has been made free for a limited time as well! (https://www.origin.com/en-sg/store/buy/c-c-the-ultimate-collection/pc-download/base-game/standard-edition)

[NichG]

I figure that the time required to get to narratively interesting parts of the game is sort of critical. An RPG will have lots of text and story content, but they tend to take a long time to get to the point where you really have enough of the narrative to start looking at things in big picture terms.

Recently though, there's a sort of story-roguelike genre, which focuses on small, modular bits of story arranged randomly and within a fairly fast-paced game (e.g. you can finish the game in an hour-long sitting). I'm thinking about things like FTL. There's a visual novel in that style (not in the sense of the story being random, but in the sense that a given playthrough is supposed to be very fast) called Long Live the Queen, which might work as well.

[Corlindale]

Once again, this is an overwhelming amount of responses, thank you very much! I haven't even had time to check out all the suggestions you've presented so far, and some of them have led me to discover even more freely available games.

FTL is a good call. It's not free, of course, but it might be fun for the class to play through a bit of it together. The emergent storytelling of roguelikes could also be quite interesting to talk about - the way that every game becomes a unique story really sets it apart from narratives in other types of media. FTL is also one of my own favourite games - so that's a plus too :-)