So the situation is this: I am a junior high ELA teacher and I want to bring some videogames into the classroom. What I have to work with are the students Chromebooks. At first glance, I figured I’d throw some short, playable without install games on some flash drives and we could play through whatever game it is, and then talk about it like any other short story. Bring in the relevant terms, connect it to the course outcomes, easy. Then I began to learn the limitations of Chromebooks and how challenging it can be to run Windows .exe’s on them, or find games that run natively on a Chromebook without installing.
Getting the rights to install anything on these devices is functionally out of the question. The request would have to go through the school board. Even if they agree that it’s a good idea, the practicality of giving me the rights to install things without opening it up so the students can install things and without consuming an inordinate amount of class time in just setting up is unlikely. Ideally, I need games that can run on a Chromebook without running an install, or games that run in browser.
I’m googling around and considering emulator options. If anyone has experience in playing games in these circumstances, I’d love some options and insights. Additionally if people have recommendations for games that would be particularly good (narrative focused), I’d love to hear them. It’s 2023; these kids don’t need to learn what conflict is through short stories written by white men in the 1920s. With all the push towards student-focused learning and differentiated education, I want to start giving them choice and breadth in how they take in these concepts.
Thanks in advance for anyone who gives me their time and expertise on this.
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itch.io has regular browser games here: https://itch.io/games/platform-web
itch.io also has PICO-8 games that can be played in the browser here: https://itch.io/games/tag-pico-8
Many of the top PICO-8 games are de-makes of popular titles, so that might help. Here’s a list for de-makes: https://github.com/pixelbath/pico8demakes.
Celeste seems like your best option, but there are a handful of games with the “Narrative” tag here: https://itch.io/games/tag-narrative/tag-pico-8
To add to this, I’d also like to recommend https://dos.zone - tons of cool, old school DOS games, playable right in your browser - and some of them even have mobile/touch controls, and even multiplayer support (like Doom, Warcraft etc)!
I would say anything that can’t be played in a browser isn’t going to work. The reason you can’t run Windows .exes is because Chromebooks are Linux based. I’m not sure how locked down Chromebooks are since I’ve never personally tinkered with one.
For the most part, Linux can run Windows games. The problem is that you need Proton, which may not be available on the Chromebooks.
For the emulation route, you could try Eclipse.
Since we’re talking about your job here, only use games that are public domain or that you’ve gotten permission for use in a school setting (don’t bother trying with any of the big publishers). No abandonware or anything like that. There are some homebrew games out there that may work, but I don’t know how many of them have the kind of story you’re looking for.
If you had to make a case for purchase and install any game, I would suggest This War of Mine.
If you can get the Chromebooks to install Linux software, then you can install Lutris. Then you can pop in a USB drive with a Windows game install and run it from there. To make the USB drive you can set the game up on one Chromebook using a folder on the drive as the Wine prefix, then clone it.
(I’m an idiot but this is probably good info for people who can better advise)
What level of game do you have in mind? I’m wondering if something browser playable is in order. Have you considered the story of the chrome browser dinosaur game?
Conclave sounds like it might work. Good story played in chapters. Runs in a browser. I bought a license when they first came out of beta and played through in an afternoon.
