Hi! And welcome to the first blog post from Sea Venture: A Digital History Survival Game‘s website. If you’re wondering where you are and what we’re doing, look no further.

Where you are is a website, designed through the University of Rochester’s Digital Scholarship Lab, intended to update our audience on game developments, research quandaries, and general wisdom (or lamentations) about what goes into making an educational, fun, and historically accurate video game.

We have five team members who you’ll be hearing from until around December: Marcie (me!), a second year English PhD student; Ben, a senior majoring in History; Elise, a senior majoring in History and Classics; Muhammed, a sophomore majoring in Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Andrew, a first-year majoring in Archaeology, Technology, and Historical Structure. In addition to our different majors, we also serve on different teams within our project, so for more information about who’s writing (and what they’re most likely to write about), check out our “Our Team” page in the menu.

As for what we’re doing, in short (and repetitiously), we’re making an educational history game as our semester-long project for Dr. Michael Jarvis‘ course, “Digital History: Historical Worlds, Virtual Worlds, Virtual Museums,” where the objective of the class is exactly that: make something fun, make something interactive, and make something educational. After a long decision process, we decided to focus our project on the plight and perils of the Sea Venture, a ship intended to resupply the struggling Jamestown Colony in 1609 that, instead, ended up crash-landing in Bermuda and living there for nine months. You can read more about this in our “Resources” and “About” pages.

As for what this blog is doing, other than keeping your posted on our game’s developments, it’s also serving as a stand-in for the course’s seminar paper. This means that instead of writing a lengthy research paper at the end of the semester discussing various theoretical underpinnings of projects like this, we get to write well-research, in-depth blog posts intended for a public (rather than private, academic) audience about what the inner workings of making a digital humanites project is like. Through this, we hope to teach you about the Sea Venture, game and web development, and research, but moreover, inspire you to tackle digital projects of your own.

With that, I leave you to explore the rest of our still-developing website. If you have any questions about what’s going on or what to expect, don’t hesitate to contact us at the email or Twitter links listed above.

– Marcie