The graphic adventure as an instrument to assist comprehensive reading

Video games are interactive applications aimed at entertainment that, practically since its inception, has been tested in order to exploit their properties in other areas. In this line, the educational extrapolation has revealed a collection of benefits of the video games as pedagogical tools [1, 2], including: the potential to assist students who lack motivation, the possibility of performing a multi-modal learning process or the promotion of autonomous learning. The particular case of adventure video games offers an artificial environment in which the player has to interact to solve problems [3]. This means that the game provides a model of the world where the active participation of the player configures the interactive fiction as he/she performs actions in the game and interacts with the characters. Within this process, reading is a key process. As a result, this paper defines a basic model to represent educational graphic adventures, based in three structural elements: narrative, reading process and acquisition of competences. Narrative wraps the game to tell the story, to describe the scenarios and objects and to allow communication with the characters. Thus, the reading of the discontinuous texts narrated in the adventure is the main mechanism of interaction and the catalyst for the rest of interactions (movements, actions, etc.) to achieve the educational competences.

Fig. 1 shows how these three elements constitute the axis of the main components of this genre of video games: context, plot, characters, interactive objects, rules, movement of the avatar, handling of the inventory, and the dialogues and actions that support the decision-making. Those decisions will guide the story until an outcome, which will be promoted by the resolution of different challenges in which the global puzzle is split.

Since the ergodic literature [4] of the graphic adventure includes narrative elements into the game to give an argument to its challenges, this is a suitable genre to practice and encourage reading comprehension. For this reason, the proposed model has been instantiated in a graphic adventure ("Uranus": invaders of the time) that supports five types of reading comprehension (literal, inferential, critical, global and meta-comprehension) through a series of puzzles designed by a multidisciplinary team to fit the cognitive level of the children of the second and third cycle of primary education in Spain. These challenges are organized according to a skeleton commonly found in adventure games: "the search". Thus, in "Uranus", the avatar performs the so-called "journey of the hero", visiting our historic past to rescue the Earth of evil beings (coming from Uranus) who were willing to destroy it to steal its essence.

Interaction with objects and characters is the mechanism to guide the play and the educational activity. Specifically, the interaction with the adventure is the means which enables the reading of the discontinuous texts integrated into the game, which will be presented in an emerging or embedded form [5]. This process is performed through a point & click interface which is implemented by selecting options, mainly in three cases: (a) in dialogues, where the player can choose between several possible answers in each point of the conversation (Fig.2); (b) by collecting and using objects to solve local and global puzzles; and (c) during the avatar's movement within a scenario or between scenarios. In addition, "Uranus" relates the progress of the game and the educational advances [6] in such a way that when a playful challenge is reached, a score for each involved educational competence is calculated and assigned. This score can be checked by educators and is used to customize players' learning processes, but remains hidden to them in order to avoid becoming it in a handicap for the recreational processes of the game.

Currently, an evaluation experience is underway to valid the conceptual, ludic and educational effectiveness of the proposal. Some previous results obtained from an experience with 39 children (of 10.6 years in average) who played "Uranus" for 40 minutes, indicated that they were not aware that were practicing reading comprehension (only two subjects identified reading as the serious purpose of the game) and that "Uranus" liked them (average of 3.9 points out of 5), although they stated that the interaction (especially the movement of the avatar) can be improved (average of 3.2 points out of 5). After the experience, we expect to identify improvements in the proposed model and educational adventure game.