At the university where I work these days, one of the classes I teach every semester is Screen English. For the last three semesters, I’ve included the silent, text-based role-playing game Alice is Missing (from Hunter’s Entertainment) as one of our activities. Usually we play it toward the end of semester, when students are eager for something to break away from the familiarity of student-led discussion group exercises.
Despite a few challenges, it goes surprisingly well. The challenges include:
- Making Stuff Up. Some students struggle to manufacture the kinds of details that the game prompts them to make up. (For example, they will be prompted to explain what sound they hear in the background that reveals a location during a phone call, or something like that, and will struggle to make up a detail.)
- Role-Playing. This is a more intensive type of role-playing than most of my students are used to doing.
- Vocabulary. The exercise requires a little vocabulary pre-teaching, so that they can understand the card text. (“What does ‘culprit’ mean?”
- Culture. Alice is Missing is set in a small American town. Students are familiar with the setting from American TV shows, but inserting their character smoothly into the setting can be a challenge… and sometimes things get a bit soap-opera depending on their assumptions about teen drug use, the availability of guns to teenagers, and so on.
- Technical Problems. My classes are only 110 minutes long, and Alice is Missing is 90 minutes plus prep time. Add in a technical glitch—like the broken permissions on the #group-chat channel in class Discord I experienced this morning—and you’re going to have to get creative with the timeline of events. (I had to shave 15 minutes off the game, so the early revelations came a little more fast and furious than they normally would.)
Despite those challenges, I’ve had a lot of success using the game with EFL students. One reason, I think, is that since my classes are larger than just 5 students, I partner or group them so that 2-3 students are playing each character. This lets them collaborate and brainstorm together, which makes it a lot easier for them to come up with the ideas they need to make up on a relatively tight deadline.
I also handle the card distrbution myself, carrying over the timer-based and related cards to each group about five to ten minutes before their turn comes. This ensures they have adequate time to read the cards, understand them, and quietly discuss their ideas for how to fill out the missing information.
One more thing that helps is that I’ve de-randomized character generation and development. Instead of players drawing cards to reveal rtheir character, I hand out character sheets with the character’s Background, Relationships, Secret, and the character’s Attitude or Style. Each group of players gets one shared character sheet. This makes it much easier for them to slip into character, especially since it gives them a few minutes to study the sheet.
I’m happy to report that while they start out unsure of themselves, it rarely takes students long to catch on to the game, and there’s always a moment where they “get it” and really get into character. Today, most of the class reacted in shock at the revelation of a secret romantic relationship, and gasped audibly when Alice’s body was found at the train station. They freaked out about Charlie when David (the popular kid) chased him from Alice’s body, threatening to kill him, and a number of students gasped again when, after the game, I explained that Charlie had gone silent because David had killed him.
(This was the first time I left the “Alice is Dead” card as a possible outcome. In previous games, I’d left it out. I’d recommend doing that, for very sensitive classes.)
Anyway, we didn’t have time to talk about the experience today, but in past semesters I’ve had students comment that it was the most interesting activity in the class. A few have give it even higher praise, telling me it was their most interesting classroom experience in all their time at university. Some might just have been blowing smoke, but I am inclined to believe it was true for some people, just gauging by their obvious enthusiasm. It’s a strange, captivating experience to watch them get into it and spin a story together. I have a few ideas for how to refine the character sheets to make them easier for EFL students to use, and I’d like the iron out some of the problems with prep in future semesters, but overall, this exercise is a keeper.