‘Writing' computer games

Game literacy and new-old narratives

Abstract

This article presents a case study of the authoring of computer games by two secondary school pupils (a girl and a boy) in an English comprehensive school. The students' work is analysed as examples of multimodal literacy, in which both narrative and ludic aspects of their games are taken into account. The analysis is set in the context of recent debates about media literacy, proposing that game-literacy can be seen as a subset of media literacy; and that full realisation of it will involve game design as well as game-play. The final section of the article considers a written proposal by a 12 year-old boy for a game based on 'The Odyssey', concluding that the conceptual apparatus of game-design offers new ways to approach narrative in schools.