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Cartouche
Cartouche LMS
Milestones
The LMS Where Writing
Becomes Everything
by Michael W. Merriam
v3.1 · One HTML file
Zero dependencies
Michael's Website →
"Creative writing" for games also means coding, art direction, creative direction, project management. Game writing sits at the intersection of more simultaneous creative disciplines than any other medium. Once you can write for games, you can write anything into being.
Features of the New Version
Building Now
Escape Velocity Apr 27
The Students' World Goes Rogue
All semester, every student built a world. Now they discover their worlds were always one planet. The instructor's controls go dark. The system picks the archetypal game shape their collective output most closely resembles. All they have to do is say yes. Every time someone does, something gets closer to finished. The story they'll tell won't be "our instructor taught us." It'll be "things went sideways, and I had to get in there and fix it."
Quiz Traversal Maps Apr 7
Every Question Is a Node
Every question is a node. Every answer is an edge. The quiz is a directed graph — where you go next depends on what you just did, and what you do next can reach back and change what your previous answer was worth. Instructors gate the next question based on the WAY the previous one was wrong. A student taken aside, inside the quiz, can recover the point. No two students take the same walk through the same quiz, but every walk looks sequential from inside. Includes a node editor for building quiz graphs and a player that shows students the map of their walk afterward.
Midterm Bossfight Mar
"Choose the Form of the Destructor"
Activities group into eight color-coded categories. Whichever category received the least student attention determines the form the midterm takes. The confrontation was written in stone before the course began, the way genre demands its own conventions. They chose the shape of the thing — without knowing they were choosing.
Live
Save the Sloth Live
Assessment Misdirection
Students adopt an adorable, helpful NPC teaching assistant. Behind the curtain, analytics compute whether more than half the class completed a required five-minute video. If they didn't, Simon dies. Visible to everyone, traceable to no one. The diligent know they contributed. The rest know too. Nobody's named, nobody's emailed.1
Skill Trees > Grades Live
Let Them All Get 100
Every deliverable fulfills a named industry skill. If it works for the team, it's 100 — the grade increments by the badge value. First badges in each row are worth 15 points; specializations are worth 1. Big leaps early. A student who submits Lore instead of Narrative Design gets credit for Lore and a path to finish Narrative Design for those points too. It is possible for every single person to get 100. Nobody competes for limited resources.2
NPCs Disguised as Students Live
Three Rules, One NPC, One Turing Test
Once students grasp the difference between a description of a personality and a rule about behavior, the NPC they described appears in the course as a student — AI-puppeted, disclosed. Simon Sloth never says "I." That's one rule. It fixes everything. The question: can you, with but three rules, make it pass for human? The if/then tracks that generate student behavior are simple enough that the API load is trivial — and the constraint paradoxically produces more believable characters, because responses adhere to traits instead of improvising past them.
The Nemesis Live
Student Engagement Recovery
The most disengaged student becomes a narrative role, not a disciplinary case. Procedurally generated — not always the same character, not always the same arc. The system treats resistance as a game state to design around. Evaluators testing the instructor experience will encounter simulated students with challenging dispositions. One of them will not listen to reason.3

1 Risk and Re-Word: Game Elements to Reconfigure Subjectivity (Merriam, 2024).

2 Branch vs. Root: Skill Trees and Merit Badges in Assessment (Merriam, 2023).

3 Metattendance: Student Antagonists in a Post-Attendance World (Merriam, 2024).

This milestone page was designed collaboratively by Michael W. Merriam and Claude (Anthropic).

Cartouche

In Egyptian hieroglyphics, most glyphs mean exactly what they depict. A bird means bird. A sun means sun. But inside a cartouche — the oval enclosure reserved for royal names — some of those same glyphs stop meaning what they normally mean and start functioning as sounds, like a rebus. The owl stops meaning "owl" and starts carrying the sound m. The system doesn't mark the switch. You just have to feel when the rules change.

This LMS works the same way. Some of its elements are exactly what they appear to be — a syllabus, a grade book, a discussion board. Others are student-created innovations, instructor interventions, or allusions to mechanics borrowed from game design. Rather than cause confusion, the coexistence of both modes is precisely what makes the whole legible — just as in a cartouche, where the ideographic and the phonetic sit side by side, and the reader who knows the system reads both fluently.

The cartouche is the marker that says: read differently now.