Looking to team up for Int.Fiction game for Public Health

For almost 2 decades, our European Training Programme has used classical paper based training scenarios, that required adult learners to sit around a table in small groups (6-8) with 2 facilitators, to go through a 4 hour scenario of a challenging outbreak of infectious diseases. The aim is always to learn applying concepts and principles of public health to a real situation.

For a long time I considered that I wanted to bring in more RPG elements to this type of teaching, which occasionally happened.

Now, with so much more authoring tools for interactive games, I want to try out creating a fully stand alone, interactive educational game, using one of our paper based scenarios. Preferably in Inform7, as that is one of the free tools available, and our group aims to use public domain software, so that our network partners could also join the activities.

Our team has only educational experts, and some creative gamers, yet no programmers or game designers. Which creative game designer is interested to join our initiative? The final product should be available under CreativeCommons.

Thanks for considering !

Arnold

I don’t want this thread to go totally unanswered – but I can’t volunteer to help, either. Sigh.

It sounds like a nifty project. There have been some experiments with “didactic” or informative IF, but usually by presenting an explorable, mostly-static world. (E.g. 1893: A World’s Fair.) Training scenarios are a different thing.

Hi Arnold,

This sounds like a pretty interesting project, though I’m not so sure IF is really suited to model a scenario like this.

Do you plan on having a “multi-player mode” where each participant has their own terminal, or is the team supposed to come to a decision and only one operator will actually handle the input? Will it have to deal with events in real-time?

What developments are supposed to take place, and what actions can the players take? (Quarantine? Vaccinations? Refugee camps?)

I’d love to hear more details about this project, though I can’t promise I will have the time and skills to actually participate. (I don’t do I7, but know a little of I6 and am currently teaching myself TADS.)

Cheers,

syzygy

If you have a specific scenario with a checklist of actions which must be executed (or events that might occur) that could be made into an interactive fiction.
If you make a script of (two-word) commands and the responses the game should print, it would be feasible for a programmer to implement that. But relying on external experts could cause delays for updates. You might consider an interactive fiction system which doesn’t require programming expertise - which you and your team could use directly. One example is Twine.