Playing with Your Research: Circulating Narratives and Cultivating Audiences Through Text-Based Games

This paper argues that interactive digital narratives (IDNs), particularly text-based games authored in Twine, offer researchers a practical means of circulating their findings to wider audiences while also deepening their own systems-level understanding of their subject matter. The author motivates this claim by pointing to the limitations of conventional scholarly channels, such as paywalled journals and expensive conferences, and situates the argument within prior work on narrative transportation, game-based learning, and user agency as drivers of persuasion and learning. Defining IDNs as narratives that include a goal, a character or role, and multiple endings, the paper positions Twine as a low-barrier and durable authoring tool suited to this purpose.

The empirical core of the study examines first-year writing and undergraduate research courses in which students converted traditional research projects, including a turtle-research project and a largemouth bass game case study, into Twine-based IDNs and then peer-reviewed one another's work. The author reports that this transformation helped students quantify qualitative data, reconsider who their audiences were, and receive peer feedback richer than that typically generated by conventional papers. The paper concludes that such projects can strengthen student engagement, foster systems thinking, and build media literacy.

These conclusions rest largely on the author's observations and anecdotal peer feedback rather than on systematic measurement, a limitation that bounds how strongly the findings can be generalized. The study's theoretical framing draws on game studies, narrative persuasion, and learning sciences scholarship, and it situates Twine-based narrative work at the intersection of research communication and pedagogy within higher education.