For hundreds of years, college classrooms have been sanctuaries for the written word as professors have led generations of students through the tragedies, sonnets and novels that make up the canon.
But stories no longer live only on the page. At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, they live on screens, in code and in the choices players make inside digital worlds.
That’s the premise of UTC’s new minor in Narrative Design – Writing for Video Games, where creative writing professor Sarah Einstein and her colleagues are treating video games as the newest form of literature – and teaching students to write them.
In these classes, Shakespeare shares space on the syllabus with “God of War Ragnarök,” and the mythic journeys penned by author J.R.R. Tolkien are reimagined through avatars and quests. Students analyze the stories that shape contemporary games, create their own interactive narratives and learn how story structure and character development work when the reader is also a player.
Einstein, whose own career has spanned early internet marketing and freelance writing for the classic game “EverQuest,” says the new minor blends the English department’s tradition of literary study with the technologies transforming how people tell stories today.
“We treat video games as literature,” she says. “But we also teach how to design for interaction and to use AI responsibly.”
That blend of artistry and technical skill, she adds, is what the video industry needs.
“This minor will get you hired.”
Storytelling shaped by technology
Einstein arrived at UTC by way of a lifelong fascination with computers as creative tools. Before earning her doctorate in creative writing, she worked in interactive marketing during the internet’s infancy, helping to build the first banner ads and online shopping carts. Later, as a freelance writer for “EverQuest,” she penned the quest text that guided early players through digital landscapes that now feel primitive by today’s standards.
“I’ve always loved computers,” she says. “What’s dismaying to me is how we’ve moved from using them to create to using them mostly to consume. I want students to experience what it means to take control of the media they use – to make things other people can read or play.”
That conviction led Einstein to develop an experimental course called Interactive Narrative several years ago. It evolved into the foundation of the new minor, which now weaves together literary analysis, creative writing and user-centered design.
The result, she says, is a program that “combines the skills you gain in an English department – critical thinking, clear writing, creativity – with the skills you gain when you learn how to build interactive content.”
Games as texts
The curriculum begins with ENGL 2550, “Read, Write, Respawn,” a course that asks students to read games the way they’d read a novel. In one section, Einstein’s husband and fellow English professor Dominic Heinrici pairs Sony Interactive Entertainment’s “God of War Ragnarök” (2022) with the Norse and Greek myths that inspired it, inviting students to see how ancient epics shape modern digital storytelling.
In another version of the class, Einstein uses Electronic Arts’ “The Sims 4” (2014) to explore coming-of-age stories and the emotional challenges of college life. Her students write personal essays, then turn them into short machinima – videos built from in-game footage – and record voiceovers drawn from their own writing. The final project is a text-based video game built in Twine, a free interactive-fiction platform that teaches basic coding through narrative logic.
The approach, Einstein says, lets students combine literary studies, rhetorical studies and creative writing in a single project. By the end of the semester, they’ve produced work that’s analytical, creative and technical – a rare combination in the humanities.
From Tolkien to tablet
Next spring, Einstein will teach a version of “Read, Write, Respawn” called “From Tolkien to Gygax,” named for Tolkien and game designer Gary Gygax, the creator of “Dungeons & Dragons.” Students will read “The Lord of the Rings,” play both “Lord of the Rings Online” and “Dungeons & Dragons Online,” and examine how world-building, myth and reader participation shape storytelling.
“We’ll be looking at what it means to be a witness to history versus an actor in history,” Einstein explains. “In Tolkien, we follow the heroes. But in the game, you’re an ordinary hobbit watching events unfold. That’s a different kind of story – and it’s how we experience history ourselves.”
For the final project, students will create a text-based game or a “Dungeons & Dragons” module rooted in any world mythology. The goal is to learn how to work with existing intellectual property – what Einstein calls “learning to be creative inside someone else’s universe” – while still crafting an original narrative.
Learning to build AI
Although the minor focuses on video games, Einstein insists its reach is broader. For example, students in every course she teaches engage with artificial intelligence – not to offload their work to it but to understand how it functions and how to use it ethically.
Her first-year students recently built their own AI academic coaches by compiling UTC resources, syllabi and personal journals. The system can answer practical questions – such as, “What should I work on Monday?” – by scanning due dates and self-reported habits and then suggesting tasks or self-care breaks. But its responses are constrained by an ethical framework Einstein wrote into the prompt.
“If a student asks for personal or medical advice, it redirects to campus services,” she says. “We’ve worked hard to make sure it can’t do harm. The idea is to teach them both how to use AI and how to build it.”
Einstein believes such fluency will be essential no matter where students go.
“We’re already seeing companies replace staff with big AI programs, then realize they need people who understand how those systems actually work,” she says. “Graduates who know how to interact with and design for AI will be invaluable.”
Careers and creativity
Despite its title, the minor isn’t just for gamers. While many students enroll because they love games, Einstein sees the curriculum as preparing them for any field where communication is interactive – from corporate training and marketing to education and user-experience design.
“More public communication is becoming two-way,” she says. “Our students learn to see that and to design for it.”
That perspective, she adds, has deep roots. Before the age of AI chatbots, she worked on an early e-commerce project that let customers customize Dell computers online – an interactive tool that transformed sales from six computers a day to $16 million in daily revenue.
“It was the first time I saw how communication could be both human and machine-mediated,” she says. “Now we’re training students to understand that kind of exchange as storytellers.”
When literature meets code
The overlap between literature and game design becomes clear in the classroom. Students study character arcs and pacing, then translate those concepts into branching dialogue and player choice. A narrative designer, Einstein tells them, is both writer and architect – the person who ensures that game mechanics serve the story.
“If you’re making a game about a little girl gathering Easter eggs in a field,” she says, “you shouldn’t have her shooting monsters with a machine gun. The mechanics have to support the narrative.”
That attention to cohesion mirrors the discipline of dramaturgy that once guided stage plays – a connection the minor acknowledges by including “Shakespeare” among its required courses.
“Writing for video games is really just 21st century dramaturgy,” Einstein says. “Who better to learn that from than the Bard?”
New tools
Einstein’s students come from a broad range of majors – English, computer science, communication and more. What unites them, she says, is curiosity about how stories work when audiences participate.
She sees the program as extending the habits of reading and interpretation that define the humanities.
“Gaming communities have always been reading communities,” she says. “People who play narrative games read novels set in those universes. People who play ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ read fantasy. People who play science-fiction games read science-fiction books. These things have always gone together.”
That cross-pollination, she believes, is the future of storytelling. Comic books become movies, which become games, which inspire new novels. Learning to navigate that ecosystem – and to write across its formats – is one of the skills the minor aims to develop.
Turning passion into profession
Einstein has heard the skepticism from parents who wonder why their child should major or minor in something that sounds like play. And she has a ready reply.
“If your kid loves video games, and this is the largest entertainment industry in the world – one that’s always hiring – why wouldn’t you want to give them a leg up into a lucrative field?” she asks. “If they can wake up every morning and love what they do, they’re going to be successful. If they hate it, they won’t.”
The gaming industry, she notes, has out-earned movies, sports and music combined for five consecutive years – and it shows no sign of slowing down.
“It’s a huge industry,” she says. “We want to help you find work within it.”
Writing the future
As enrollment grows, Einstein hopes to expand the program into a full major or a concentration within UTC’s proposed Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. She’s already developing an intermediate workshop on writing for video games – a bridge between introductory analysis and advanced studio production.
“The narrative designer runs the writing team,” she says. “But you start by being a production writer – someone who takes the outline and builds the text. We want to teach students every step of that process.”
Beyond course development, Einstein is also connecting students with working professionals. She organizes game-jam events where participants create playable prototypes over a weekend and invites writers from the industry to speak about their careers.
“It’s important for creative-writing students to meet people who are making their living as writers,” she says. “And game writing is a kind of creative writing.”
To Einstein, the new minor is not a break from tradition but its natural continuation. The same curiosity that once sent scholars into libraries now drives students into digital worlds – searching for meaning, connection and narrative form.
“Most of what we teach in college isn’t art,” she says. “But I do believe video games can be art. They’re just another way to tell the stories people have always told – about who we are and what we long for.”