Puzzle, World, Trust: Interactive Fiction Heuristics for Lesson Design

This conceptual paper argues that principles from interactive fiction (IF) design can inform lesson and task design, positioning IF as a heuristic resource for teachers rather than merely a classroom medium. The author maps recurring IF design principles, including puzzle fairness, world-model consistency, narrative framing, graduated hinting, and player trust, onto didactic constructs such as the zone of proximal development, flow, scaffolding, situated learning, and cognitively activating tasks. From this comparison, five structural convergences are identified: challenge calibration, inferability, scaffolded support, legible and trustworthy problem spaces, and meaningful narrative context. The paper is explicit that these are design-theoretical correspondences rather than empirically validated equivalences.

A central claim is that the educational value of IF-derived thinking lies in making the anticipated learner pathway visible before enactment. IF-inspired playtesting is presented as a planning method for revealing where learners are likely to hesitate, misread cues, or stall, and where sub-goals, hints, or prior-knowledge reactivation must be built in advance. The paper highlights an asymmetry: teachers can adapt to learners in real time, whereas IF authors must anticipate breakdowns through iterative testing, a difference the author argues sharpens rather than weakens the analogy. The paper also critiques superficial gamification that adds reward mechanics without attention to the underlying quality of the problem space.

The contribution is a conceptual framework with three guiding planning questions, implications for teacher professionalisation in games-based learning contexts, and a call for empirical testing. The author acknowledges limits, including the social and collaborative character of classrooms, the absence of empirical validation, and the framework's narrower applicability to open-ended discursive learning.