Simulating History

(cross-posted from Electric Archaeology: Digital Media for Learning and Research)

This is a game you play while browsing the internet, going about your daily internet related tasks… think webquest with mines, treasure chests, and quests.

You play the game by adding an extension to your Firefox browser. This browser lets you ‘sense’ the game world, the activities overlaid on the plain old mundane net. Then, in the words of the game’s creators:

“This unconventional massively multiplayer online game merges your web life with an alternate, hidden reality. The mundane takes on a layer of fantastic achievement. Player behavior generates characters and alliances, triggers interactions in the environment and earns the player points to spend online beefing up their inventory. Suddenly the Internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but rather a hackable, rewarding environment!”

So what does this have to do with internet research skills? Well, it occurred to me that I can tell my students over and over again what constitutes a ‘good’ site versus a ‘bad’ site, but if I’m not there watching them, it never sinks in. Given that a lot of my teaching is done via distance, this is a problem.

But what if, as a class, we were all PMOGing? I could imagining setting a question the students would need to research in order to write an answer – maybe leaving their responses on a wiki somewhere – and then sending them out into the net with PMOGed enabled browsers. The game’s stats would instantly record how much work online the students were putting in, and if I set mines on all of the lousy sites I can find – the ones they typically go to, like the wikipedia page on Julius Caesar – and treasure chests on the good ones (like say a page from the British School at Rome, or from an online journal) they’d soon learn the difference. I could also set up quests that would take them to a number of good sites, or sites with opposing points of view, and require them to go to pages supporting or contesting the views… and of course, students could leave their own mines and treasures, and so hindering/helping their peers…

It would be quite neat, actually. Almost like laser tag in the library, capturing-the-flag…

For the past several months I have been exploring different ways to promote the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 in Niagara. To date, my research has been largely devoted to academic articles investigating hybrid and virtual reality along with historical research aimed at key people and places in Niagara during the War of 1812. The greatest challenge has been finding a way to bridge Niagara’s rich historical background to the digital world so that visitors can explore and learn about Niagara’s history in an immersive and entertaining way.

My research has led me to focus on hybrid reality, which would take key historical sites in Niagara and combine them with relevant digital content. The goal is to encourage travelers to discover Niagara’s historical sites in a traditional fashion while employing the latest virtual technologies to make it a rewarding and enjoyable experience.

The class projects from this year’s crop of students in the Interactive Arts & Science program at Brock University are now online… full details here. The theme is ‘Niagara 1812′, when the Niagara peninsula (location of Brock University, no coincidence) was the flashpoint for hostilities between the young American republic and Great Britain. Lundy’s Lane, Queenston Heights: famous battles every Canadian should know!The projects are very impressive. They come in a variety of flavours – flash, 3d, a mix of text & bird’s-eye battle… the games are aimed at the secondary school level, and each game’s website comes with suggestions for student or teacher use. Well done!

“From November 2006 to April 2007, Brock University students in Professor Kevin Kee’s IASC3F90 course (”Survey of Humanities Computing”, in the Interactive Arts and Science Program) and Professor Vladimir Wojcik’s COSC3F00 course (”Software Development”, in the Department of Computer Science) developed these computer games for elementary and secondary school history education.”

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From Emily Short, a premier writer of Interactive Fiction:

Interactive fiction is increasingly being used in junior high and high school classrooms to encourage reading and teach problem-solving skills; it is also approached critically in college and graduate courses on digital and new media studies, and used as an example project in courses on computer programming and game design [more]

* “Exploratory Learning Through
Educational Simulation & Games”, San Diego State University, 2006
* “Interactive Fiction Gaming for the Classroom”, TexasGames.net
* Voices of Spoon River, an IF game designed to instruct students in literature
* “The Pause that Distresses”, Brendan Desilets on using IF to teach literacy