Are narrative games the new e-books?

Take a look at yet another narrative game version, Gone Home, reviewed here. And for more details, take a look at it being played here.

A mystery, possibly horror story (at least by scary atmospheric look to keep your audience guessing!), it's a story line you can create on a much simpler level in Kodu employing clever use of 1st person camera, sound and world properties (lighting, background, etc). Kodu is limited by not allowing you to create your own custom objects (it does not have a graphics editor like Scratch does) nor import anything outside of Kodu to customize (sounds, characters) to add to your project, but for new learners, in five 2 hrs sessions or less, you can create an unfolding story nonetheless. Check out this file you can upload to your Kodu account hosted on my class wiki (login = acdojo/acdojo) for a starter snippet. Open "Pages and Files" and enter this file name into "search":

KODUsample[Package]Haunted!

You'll see it needs some work, but a great jumping off point if you want to build a mystery narrative game.

Since the latest Kodu upgrade in Dec 2014, opening Kodu files from a source like a wiki requires that you close your current Kodu session, then open the file directly from where you've downloaded it from your source (in this case, downloaded from the wiki into a folder I named "Kodu" on my laptop).

Like Scratch and Alice, once you have the Kodu platform itself installed, Kodu recognizes the Kodu file type (Kodu Level Package) associated to the Kodu file you've exported and want to upload to edit/play, and once you open this file, this action prompts a Kodu session to open automatically.