Unpacking narrative in a hypermedia ‘artedventure’ for children

Many online games for children adopt elements of narrative to encourage users to embark on and complete learning activities. One such game, described by its designers as an ‘artedventure’, is Leonardo’s Workshop (Sanford Ink Corporation 1998–2009a). In it users travel back in time to Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop guided by Carmine Chameleon, a fictional character knowledgeable in art history and theory, in order to discover who has destroyed the artist’s legacy by leaving objects that do not belong to the Renaissance in his workshop.Adopting Systemic Functional Theory as the analytical framework, this chapter examines how the features that define narrative as a type of western-culture story genre (Martin and Plum 1997) are distributed multimodally and hypertextually in this hypermedia game. Specifically, by applying to the analysis of the game the systemic functional notions of ‘genre’ and ‘macro-genre’ (Martin, 1986, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2001, 2002; Martin and Rose, 2008), Djonov’s (2005, in press) framework for analysing logico-semantic relations in hypermedia, Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) and Stenglin’s (2004, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2009a, 2009b, in press a, in press b) concepts of Binding and Bonding as resources for creating security and fostering affiliation in 3D and hypermedia spaces, we aim to evaluate the potential of narrative to encourage and support players’ learning in Leonardo’s Workshop.