Can games help creative writing students to collaborate on story-writing tasks?

Abstract

Story writing is a complex semantic and creative task, and the difficulty of managing it is made greater by attempting to write in collaboration with others. This complication can deter students from experimenting with collaboration before mastering their own practice in relative privacy. Such reticence is in spite of the fact that there are many clear benefits to collaboration. These include peer support and feedback for the student on their practice (Leach, 2014; Vygotsky, 1978), and the development of collaborative skills and experiences that are easily transferable to a range of creative contexts in future (Ravetz et al., 2013). Specially designed games have the potential to help to facilitate collaboration, by making the difficulty of telling a story as a group part of the game's challenge.