When we started on this project, I think it’s safe to say that many of us had a rosy idea of what it would take. Sure, it would involve research, writing, and programming, but since it was inherently a game, some part of making it should be inherently fun, right?

Yes and no. Yes, in that the development of this game and accompanying website and Twitter pushed us past the domains where many of us were comfortable working. It wasn’t just a stagnant seminar paper destined to be written, read, and quickly forgotten, it seemed something distinctly tangible, alive, both effective and affective. Here, we weren’t just proving to professors that we had done a sufficient amount of thinking in a class; here, we were showing our friends, our family, our school, and the world that ideas– even intimidatingly academic historic ones– could be made into something interesting, engaging, and educational.

But as easy as it is to say this sort of project is fun, it’s just as easy to say how it’s not. The comfortable domains that we were pushed past meant new, unfamiliar territory: how does one accurately catalog the lives of 150 people? How do you depict period- and condition-correct clothing? What about creating gameplay images? Sounds? Environments? Counterfactual historical paths? For many of us, even doctoral students, this was a new ballpark. Tried and true protocols fell to the wayside, as we found ourselves digging further into the library stacks, sending more emails, and wildly crosschecking across journal articles, databases, and historical preservation sites to make sure that what we were depicting was accurate and, if beyond accuracy (like in the case of creating counterfactual history), strongly plausible.

But through all of this– the fun and the not-so-fun, the late nights and the early mornings, the “Are you seriously that dumb” and “We’re the best team ever” group messages– we’ve created something unlike anything we’ve created before. And this “something” that we created goes beyond us, historians, or gamers. It shows that the collision of that which embodies the past and that which, in many ways, embodies the future does not end in destruction or insipid novelty– it results in something that allows the past to be renewed, to be reawoken, and to assume its impactful place amidst the world of the animated, the digital, and the living.

We hope you enjoy learning with us.

— The Sea Ventures Team