Video Game: Northeye

Purpose

Our team is creating an educational video game to teach elementary school children about the relationship between societies and their environments. The first version of this game is intended for use as part of the Grade 4 curriculum.

The game uses augmented reality to immerse students in an historical setting that allows them to deal with issues of flood risk and management through collaborative problem-solving. It is set in a thirteenth-century village – Northeye – in the Pevensey Levels in southeastern England. As a low-lying settlement, Northeye was vulnerable to flooding and, by the fifteenth century, had been abandoned. The narrative of the game is structured around flood defense in the region. Players, whose characters are based on archetypes of medieval villagers, use collaborative strategy to protect their fields against an incursion of floodwaters by diverting watercourses or altering their flow through the construction of sluices and other infrastructure. By asking the players to make choices about where to spend their time and energy, students learn about collaboration, resource management, and risk mitigation strategies, and allows them to understand, through an immersive and interactive experience, the complex relationship between communities and their environments.

Methodology

Game designers are employing an interdisciplinary methodology to recreate an historically accurate environment and climate in the game. We rely on content derived from and developed by diverse sources, including virtual archaeology, LiDAR, ArcGIS, and archival records to develop the contours of the landscape and to simulate flood patterns in the region. Design relies on Houdini and Unity, and play will transpire on iPads.

Process

People

Steven Bednarski, Project Director and Primary Investigator
Zack MacDonald, Co-Investigator
Nicholas Graham, Co-Investigator
Robin Harrap, Co-Investigator
Alison Bullock, Collaborator
Andrew Moore, Research Fellow

Support of many graduate students.