I Made Some Weird Games to Learn How AI Works

Adding AI citations to my curriculum is one thing. But I had trouble finding the right words. I had no experience to describe in front of my students when it came to my own use of AI in my writing and in my meaning-making process.

The first game was an RPG about an adjunct professor walking around campus trying to teach. It played like a dungeon crawler: you walked the campus, fought turn-based battles with students, graded papers, kept office hours, and advanced to the next day.

Then I got curious whether it could be useful as a tool, and it morphed into WPA Desk. It lost its RPG side and became a simulator: three years at the desk of a fictional first-year writing program, where a lot of what you do is write the memo that makes your case. I wanted to see if I could make it useful to graduate students learning about writing program administration, so I made sure writing was part of it, and that it would be useful in the classroom in some way.

Not long after that, I wanted to play a game. I wanted a dungeon crawler-simulation game that I could play or watch. After about three days of recursive planning and playing, along with a few different attempts at titles, Charterbound was born.

I didn’t do much of the actual writing of the story of this game. Through the recursive writing process, as I played the game, I decided what went, what to change, and what direction to go next.

I loved dungeon crawlers and RPGs when I was younger; I played the heck out of Zelda growing up. I also enjoyed simulation games like The Sims and Civilization when I was a teenager. Between college, two terminal degrees, and teaching, I haven’t had time to play many since. So at first, I didn’t care what the game looked like, or even what its story was. I wanted the loop: go out, gather, come home, and make something.

Some nights I don’t have the energy to fight something, though, so you can also sit back and watch. Rex makes camp, and the camera roams the kingdom on its own, looking for what’s worth seeing: a raid at a town’s gate, a wedding, a night at the Tavern. A day in the game takes ten minutes, and nothing is waiting on me. If I put it down for a week, the towns are where I left them.

I’ve started a couple more since, and neither is out yet. One is a spinoff of Charterbound that’s more modern and different: The Bindery Window, a bookbinder’s workshop generations after Rex, mostly watched through its windows, with the world going on outside.

The other is Thursdays at Nine, a TV network game drawn like a PlayStation game from 1998. You run Campus Safety Alert, an over-the-top crime drama about a university’s campus security department, for the network that airs it on Thursdays at nine. You don’t play the officers; you run the show. Each week the writers draft an episode, and you can read it with the cast, cutting scenes and deciding how each one plays, or let it run as they wrote it. Then it airs, and you watch it. Between episodes, there are the ratings, the sponsors, and the actors and their contracts.

I can also teach the recursive writing process itself better now. Making these games put me through it again and again, with the AI on the other side. And I can model the process much more quickly in the classroom with AI if I need to. We can do quicker exercises on parts of it, which I hope increases students’ confidence in understanding the process, at the very least.