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Prof. Tanya Krzywinska, Falmouth University, UK
The Augmented Curator: Co-designing XR for Cornwall's Museums
A great deal of investment is being made in the development of expertise in the use of immersive technologies in museum and heritage contexts. There are however many lessons to learn about co-designing XR content and delivering meaningful experiences for these contexts. We have been working with seven different Cornish heritage providers over the past five years to develop various immersive, game-based experiences – from augmented escape rooms to walking apps. These partnerships have yielded a great deal of learning about the sector, its aims and desires, language and literacies, timelines and concerns, knowledge and understanding that makes a strong contribution to the future development of engaging and sustainable immersive applications. This keynote shows how an iterative constructivist approach can support a productive working relationship between researcher-developer and heritage partners. This is distilled into a set of recommended interaction blueprints and transdisciplinary working practices designed to be of help to curators, researchers, and serious game developers
Asst. Prof. Vít Šisler, Charles University, Czechia
Playing Troubled Past: Designing History in Svoboda 1945: Liberation
One of the main caveats of using videogames to convey historical topics is the tension between accuracy and engaging experience. This talk will discuss the affordances and limitations of the videogame medium in representing contested events from contemporary history. Vít Šisler, the lead game designer of the award-winning game Svoboda 1945: Liberation, will critically revisit the key challenges of the game’s development process and the collaboration with professional historians. Svoboda 1945: Liberation narrates the story of a small village in the Czech-German borderland that witnessed the Nazi occupation, post-war retributions, and the rise of communism to power. As all these topics are still subjects of discussions in Central and Eastern European public spheres, the talk will also examine the possibility of video games to serve as a tool for critical engagement with contested histories.
Dr Maria B. Garda, Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, University of Turku, Finland
Historical Turn, Yet Again: Investigating Polish board games of the 19th century
The most recent wave of historical game studies seems to have found a renewed interest in older board games. Even though the area of analog game studies has been explored before, there is a growing number of digital game scholars interested in the tabletop roots of modern play cultures, dating back a century or more. With the improvement of printing press technology in the first half of the 19th century, board games became a popular medium. Their research can contribute to a better understanding of how ludic artefacts engage with political and historical narratives of the given moment. In this talk I will reflect on an ongoing study of Polish 19th century board games, focusing on educational adaptations of the so-called “game of goose” by two authors: Klementyna Hoffmanowa (1798-1845) and Wojciech Szymanowski (1801-1861). Can contemporary game analysis methods prove useful in study of such historical titles?
Asst. Prof. Yaraslau Kot, Tallinn University, Estonia // Kozminski University, Poland
Unforgiving, Unforgetting: Games Reflecting The History of Social Trauma of Modern Belarus.
Modern culture is more and more dominated with games, yet the game development industry and game development community are not considered to have any political weight or power. The study of positive and negative effects of using this media to uphold certain agenda is extremely rare in ludology, yet the fear of its enormous ethical and educational potential has been marked by its constant use in education and constant critique of games by religious and political institutions. Social dynamics has created the most favourable environment for a conscious large-scale experimentation on game design as a method of preservation and popularisation of specific historical facts, and a reflection of specific trauma of the creator. We explored attitudes to those issues in a survey conducted by BelGameDev in 2021 on hundreds of participants and organizers of Global Game Jam. My talk will present our preliminary findings.
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