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

Abstract

Games-based learning (GBL) research has shown that well-designed games can support motivation and learning
across educational contexts. Less attention, however, has been paid to the design principles that make problem spaces fair,
worlds coherent, and participation trustworthy. This conceptual paper asks how core principles of interactive fiction (IF)
design can inform lesson planning and instructional design. The paper develops a theoretical framework that maps central
IF design principles—puzzle fairness, world-model consistency, narrative framing, graduated hinting, and player trust—
onto constructs from didactic theory and learning psychology, including scaffolding, flow, situated learning, selfdetermination,
and cognitively activating tasks. On this basis, it identifies recurring structural convergences between good
IF design and good teaching. These convergences include difficulty calibration, inferability, contextual coherence, learner
autonomy, and the design of problem spaces that make insight possible. A central claim of the paper is that the
educational value of IF design lies not primarily in turning lessons into teacher-independent artefacts, but in making the
anticipated learner pathway through a task visible. From this perspective, IF-inspired playtesting offers a productive model
for instructional planning. It helps reveal where learners are likely to hesitate, misread a situation, pursue unproductive
interpretations, or stall, and where prior-knowledge reactivation, sub-goals, hints, or contextual cues must therefore be
designed in advance. The paper also addresses a key asymmetry between the two domains. Teachers can respond
adaptively to learners in real time, whereas IF authors must anticipate breakdowns in advance and compensate through
iterative testing. Rather than weakening the analogy, this difference sharpens it by making the anticipatory design work
embedded in lesson planning more explicit. The paper contributes a design-oriented heuristic framework for lesson and
task design, a playtesting-informed account of the learner pathway as an object of instructional planning, and a principled
critique of superficial gamification approaches that add reward mechanics without corresponding design rigour. It
concludes by outlining implications for teacher professionalisation and future empirical research.