In the past I’ve shared tools and ideas for creating choose your own adventure videos. Now I’d like to introduce you to Playfic for creating choose your own adventure text-based stories.

Playfic is a tool for creating text-based, choose your own adventure stories. Playfic is based on Inform7 which use “if, then” logic to allow anyone to create their stories. When authors plan and write their stories they can include multiple paths for readers to pursue as they progress through their stories. Readers navigate through the stories by entering directional commands such as “go north” and “go south.” Click here to try a sample story and learn a bit about the logic of Playfic.

Applications for Education
Learning to navigate through existing stories on Playfic is relatively easy. Learning to formulate a story from scratch on Playfic will take some time because it does force you to not only plan your story, it also forces you to think about logic commands and how your readers will navigate through your story. For that reason I love the ideas of having students use Playfic to create and share stories with each other. Writing stories on Playfic requires creativity and logical reasoning. While writing their stories students can click on a preview. If studetns have errors in the logic when they click on the preview Playfic will point those out and explain the errors so that the errors can be corrected.