Storytelling is a powerful instrument, often applied in educational and training situations to facilitate the construction of fictional examples or the telling of real stories to illustrate a point and effectively transfer knowledge (e.g. Weik 1995). Storytelling is used as “a medium of collective intelligence” (Frenzel et al, 2004, p.9) by promoting multi-perspective views on certain topics and thereby enriching the individual perspective. Storytelling is a process and a means for sharing, interpreting and offering knowledge and experiences to an audience. Told stories provide a context, they embed knowledge into a concrete situation, they not only comprise pure facts, but also connections and emotions. Stories are a prime vehicle for assessing and interpreting events, experiences, and concepts from minor moments of daily life to the point of a broader e.g. historical, political, work, social level. Storytelling is an intrinsic and indispensable form of human interaction.
For educational settings, stories are a valuable resource for learning, especially when applying role-based and problem-oriented learning models. They activate emotions and the possibility of identification, they deliver detailed answers to specific questions. Stories are always holistic. They do not transport just factual knowledge, but connected knowledge and support the building of ‘significant learning’. Stories give learning a meaning. Learning based on Storytelling can be even intensified if combined with Game-based Learning.The process for collecting and transforming stories to a game is a delicate and most challenging one. Depending on the game game types, e.g. role-based, exploratory, narrative and experiential gamest the applied storyboarding approach contrasts with the game factor, four dimensions are important to take into account:
•Accuracy and trueness: how well the story in its different aspects (e.g. characters, chronology of events; learning contents, lessons learnt, etc.) can be transposed into the game;
•Exactness of information: A story reflects the lived experience of an individual, depending on the knowledge of the teller, circumstantial information (e.g. historical and political time frame) can have a higher or lower degree of exactness;
•Learning output degree: how much information is inherent to a certain story and how much enrichment still needs to take place in order to tranform a story into a rich learning element?
•Game & fun elements: In a serious game, game and fun elements are of equal importance as the learning element. The gaming and learning balance is a key requirement to a serious game.
Depending on the story and game type the four dimensions are more or less emphasized and due to delicate interdepencies changes in one dimension lead to variations in the other three.
Sónia Hetzner 