Our work developing educational media has, over the past decade, focused on the purposeful design of immersive contexts to situate curricula for K–12 schools. Making use of a design-based research approach, we have discovered, refined, and applied instructional theories with increasing intentionality such that our interventions demonstrate their viability. Specifically, most recently we have implemented structures to afford what we term conceptual play (Barab, Dodge, & Ingram-Goble, 2008). Conceptual play is a state of engagement involving one’s (a) projection into a character role, (b) set in a partially fictional dilemma, and (c) applying conceptual understandings to remedy the problematic context. Further, a context for conceptual play aimed at supporting learning should (d) scaffold reflection on one’s choices and their consequences on the narrative context. This worked example illuminates what conceptual play looks like in practice.
This unit is designed to help young people understand the role that ethics play in science and technology,
There is a hierarchy of concerns here from wider to more narrow: being human, companionship, and ethics in science and technology. Clearly how they are connected is and should be crucial. Is this something that the learners will discover? “Companionship” is a rather odd term in an interesting way—how does it relate to collaboration, friendship, sociality, community? How does it relate to the ever-present tensions between our social ties to individuals and to groups (a common ethical tension in Japanese anime books, movies, and games)? I have a sense that when Frankenstein was written (1818), people saw dilemmas about technology and human social existence (thanks, for example, to the relatively recent industrial revolution) in deeper and wider terms than we often do today when we discuss “ethics” in science and technology in relatively narrow terms. However, it is clear that with pressing issues like global warming, the wider and deeper issues of the fate of society and what it means to be human must again become focal to our attention when we think about science and technology.
begin to consider whether "the ends justify the means" in a particular situation, begin to think about the importance of companionship, and about what it means to be "human."
One of the things that excites me about this project is the idea that students are being invited to "play" a classic novel. So often, when we teach literature, we tend to treat these books as self-contained works, which owe nothing to the culture around them and which are not open to appropriation by the reader. We are just supposed to sit back and read them with awe and admiration. But this project invites young players to get inside the world of Frankenstein, to think about the issues which the characters confront and to imagine many other ways that those events might have played out. This is what happens when fans engage with television programs and produce original fiction.
They focus on key turning points in the plot and on the psychological issues that faced the characters; they offer alternative ways of working through those ethical and emotional issues and in the process, they generate their own versions of the stories. This is also very much what happens when gamers play
-- they enter into the space of possibilities offered by the game, they make choices and see what happens, and in the process, they learn about themselves and about the worlds they are traveling through. This is very much in the spirit of the teacher's strategy guide we are developing for teaching Moby Dick, which also encourages students to remix, rewrite, and re-enact a classic narrative. It's fun to see that we are working along parallel paths.
In contrast to the Hollywood advancement and mistaken interpretation of Shelley's story as being about a scary monster named Frankenstein, the original work addressed themes of companionship, bio-ethics, childbirth, the hubris of modern man, and the menace of the industrial revolution.
Designing Plague World, we sought to produce an interactive narrative that engaged the player as first-person protagonist in a game-based version similar to the story. We interviewed experts in philosophy (bioethics) and literature and revisited the original work before designing the world. We then identified several tensions that were central to the story and that would lend themselves to the design of a virtual world.
The final version was designed for children to understand the role that ethics play in science and technology, to consider whether "the ends justify the means" in a particular situation, and to think about the importance of companionship. Given our desire to demonstrate actual use in schools, a further goal entailed connecting with national standards for persuasive writing and decision making.
It is interesting to see how the intrusion of school moves ethical issues as large as how to save our world from collapse (e.g., in modern terms: global warming, desertification, drought, disease, starvation, etc.) by thinking about the connections between technology and what it means to be a social human to “persuasive writing”. Too often what this means in school is kids learning how to “argue” for a point of view (like little Sophists), rather than actually committing to a point of view and acting on it in terms of civic and now global participation as a citizen.
One reason this unit was so interesting to us is that it truly illuminated our theory around conceptual play and its importance. Many people had trouble envisioning what we meant by conceptual play so this created an opportunity to help people get a feel for what it looked like without having to play the entire game. Also, it was taking a classic piece of literature and attempting to place it with a gaming context. Also, we found it interesting that this story had become more of a monster story for most of the public, with a relatively few people appreciating the other significant issues that the original work raised, including: (1) an appreciation of role that ethics play in science and technology, (2) a consideration for whether “the ends justify the means” in a particular situation, (3) insight into the importance of companionship and control, and (4) important questions regarding what it means to be “human.” For Quest Atlantis, the idea of creating a more gothic and dark storyline was an exciting departure for us, and we were curious to see how children would respond to and take up the experience. 
