By Andie Kim
Writing Program professor Christian Thomas developed and created UCSB’s first interactive, choose-your-own-adventure game for an undergraduate writing course.
While I was registering for my spring classes, I came across a writing course that instantly caught my attention. “Rome: The Game” is a lower-division course taught by Christian Thomas, a lecturer in UC Santa Barbara’s Writing Program as well as the associate director of the Center for Digital Games Research. The online course is presented as an adventure narrative game in which students are able to experience Rome’s rich history of art and archeology.
Spring 2023 marked only the second time in UCSB history that the course has been taught, and it was brought to fruition with the help of the Innovative Learning Technology Initiative Grant, awarded to Thomas in 2019 to support the development of the game.
“Rome: The Game” had an enrollment of 204 students in 2022 made it the largest class offered in the Writing Program, where most other courses offer only 25 spots per section.
“The game starts with a mystery involving an ancient statue, and so that's always in players' minds as they're visiting different places in the game — whether that's a museum, a well-known site like the Pantheon, or at an archaeological dig,” Thomas said.
“Rome: The Game" responds to a player’s choices in real time, and is embedded with a host of interactive images, videos, readings, podcasts, and assignments for students to engage with.
The game itself was built in Twine, an open-source tool that allows for an interactive, non-linear, playable story. The result of the game depends on a player’s choices and ensuing consequences, which enables students to explore choices and watch the results play out in real time. It’s mainly text-based but also contains a myriad of images, videos, readings, podcasts, and assignments embedded into the game. Assignments that link the game to the course mainly focus on writing, with a key emphasis on the research process.
Developing the course during the pandemic meant Thomas was mindful of relationships and emotional aspects of learning, while he devised the game.
“Players also meet other characters who they form close relationships with, and I think the character relationships are probably the main sources of emotional engagement with the course,” he said. “That emotion gets directed toward key learning goals, which involve the looting of antiquities and their sale on the mafia-run black market.”
Andie Kim is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication. She conducted this interview for her Digital Journalism class.