Computer role-playing games as a vehicle for teaching history, culture, and language

Computer role-playing games can provide a suitable vehicle for the teaching of certain subjects in a manner which can be engaging and immersive to students. In this paper, we describe our experiences developing such a game in a game design course at the University of Hawaii's Academy for Creative Media. The game in question, Ohana, was designed and developed over a number of semesters by students of the Narrative Game Design and Computer Game Production courses as well as a number of subject matter advisors who provided their talents and expertise to the project. The one-line pitch for the game was "a small, single-player World of Warcraft, set in a pre-contact Hawaiian village."