On Tuesday (12/10/19), our team held the highly-anticipated public launch of Sea Ventures: A Digital History Survival Game and, I think a bit to our surprise, everything went well… for the most part.

I say “for the most part” because everything very nearly did not go to plan. As I walked to the lab after seminar on Tuesday, the room was in a state of disarray. Ben and Muhammed, our programming team, were on edge: the game was crashing. This was news. Muhammed had just spent nearly the entire day consulting with an expert on Unity, and everything and then some had seemed to be fixed. We had celebrated in our group messages multiple times, rejoicing that so many problems that had plagued development were quickly solved. So, how was the game crashing?

To be entirely honest, I’m still not sure what happened (stay tuned for Muhammed’s upcoming blog post). At 6:00, thirty minutes before our presentation, I wished the two good luck and set off towards our presentation space to set up. As I made the trek, I was fully aware that we could be preparing for a presentation that ultimately culminated in nothing. Regardless, I queued up the PowerPoint, set out the notes, and cast a weary gaze at the audience slowly gathering and at the film crew setting up their equipment, their lenses pointed at the screen.

But at 6:15, in what I’ve learned over the semester is typical fashion for them, Ben and Muhammed strolled in, laughing. “It’s fixed,” Muhammed told me. I didn’t ask any questions.

So, fifteen minutes later, we began telling our audience what this site has otherwise kept well-recorded. How unique a class like this is– one that sets aside the expectations of fledgling academics and instead puts them to work researching, coding, and launching a digital project. How unexpected, and unexpectedly unknown, a story like the that of the Sea Venture is. How much (oh, how very much) work is required to make a working game in a three month-span. And, of course, what a game made under those constraints would look like.

Finishing up my conclusion, I held my breath as I looked to Muhammed standing in front of the computer. The four of us, on the opposite side of the presentation space, looked towards the screen expectantly as he clicked through his computer. But, before we could exchange a nervous glance towards each other, towards Dr. Jarvis, the sound of waves filled the space, and our game’s title screen filled the page.

Muhammed leaned into the microphone: “Would anyone from the audience like to try the game?”

And, just like that, our game was up and was being played. We provided commentary as students tried and failed to make it to Jamestown. One aspect that we liked to emphasize was the ability to see and select different choices. As we know, singular and fateful decisions made up the Sea Venture and its crew surviving a shipwreck, Bermuda, and a return to Jamestown– but now, there were multiple options displayed, many seemingly equal or benign. Should the ship follow St. Elmo’s fire? What’s the best tactic for repairing a leak on open seas? Should sailors be punished for following mariner code? For the players, there was no clear answer to these choices, and they quickly realized how disastrous making a seemingly innocuous decision could be.

Also something equally entertaining and significant was the fact that none of the players progressed particularly far through the game. The furthest one got, I believe, was the first uprising, the John Want mutiny– still in the first quarter of the game. Otherwise, they died making the wrong choices. We gleefully informed the players and the audience that, though frustrating, these frequent deaths illustrated just how much the odds were against everyone on the Sea Venture and, more broadly, how tragically difficult Anglo-American settlement often was as a whole.

After the last player died on Bermuda, we concluded our presentation, largely still in awe that the game played without collapsing in on itself. It had seemed for so long that the odds were against us and that we wouldn’t survive the semester or the project, but as we all now well know, often that which seems the most unlikely to happen has an odd way of finding a way to happen.

Stay tuned for Muhammed’s blog post about the Tuesday Crisis, as well as a collection of wisdom we’d like to pass along to future aspiring digital history game creators.