Further Development and Practical Decisions

If I had more time to work on Feeling the Past, I would have liked to develop certain ideas further to illustrate my original observations in more detail. One example is the idea behind the second task of the game, where the player has to choose which object corresponds to a data-set. The choice of the player does not affect the later stages of the game and at no point is there feedback regarding if the choice was correct or false. The aim here was to show the volatility of the work in a collection, that even the people working and creating the databases are sometimes not certain what they are looking at, as well as that the databases historians are working with will not be perfect. Based on the feedback during May, only a small amount of players understood this argument. A different approach was chosen in the Lives in Transit version. Here later in the game the collection manager mentions that he found an inventory number on one of the objects and was able to connect it to the data-set. The player now has some feedback regarding their choice but is not confronted with the uncertainty of the work in a collection. If I had more time, I would have liked to develop these ideas of uncertainty and volatility of knowledge further as I think this is an important part of historical research and can be aptly displayed using the game format.

A criticism voiced after publishing Feeling the Past was that the people in the museum do not feel like characters but more like narrative devices. The game unintentionally uncovered the insight, that even if the most important argument of the game revolves around objects, players still focus on the non-player characters to a high degree. The tasks, which I would describe as most important part of the game, received the most of my attention in the limited time frame which therefore lead to less development in the character department. If I had more time, I would have fleshed them out further, similar how Martin Dusinberre did for Plantation Lives. Here, thanks to the greater length of the game, the player can develop a relationship with the characters based on multiple decisions and interactions over the course of the two hours playtime. By using this focus on non-player characters by the players, I could connect the methodological insights to human relationships and thereby ground them more firmly in the player's mind.

While I already disregarded creating a fully-fledged 3D game, reflecting on the whole project and what for example the Smithsonian Collections offer, more development could have meant the inclusion of 3D modelling for certain parts of the game. This closer representation of the real object by using the 3D resources available on the internet, would mean an increased learning effect. The 3D collection of the Smithsonian is large enough to cover a wide range of subjects and the presentation of the objects from a visual standpoint comes close to the real experience (see for example this model of the Morse-Vail Telegraph Key). A collaboration could be mutually benefitial as Feeling the Past would profit from the improved representation of the objects, thereby communicating the key insights better, while the Smithsonian could present the game as a practical application for 3D modelled collections in historical research.

Another interesting aspect which deserves attention is the possiblity of analysing the way historians work by examining the notebook functionality of Marugoto. Especially for Feeling the Past, this could create a starting point for further research on how objects are being conceptualized by historians. Notebooks are a very telling element of academic work, they show the way scholars structure their thoughts and imagine the connections between sources and the past. Here Marugoto and Feeling the Past could not only contribute to analysing the field of History itself, but also be used in a classroom environment to illustrate the practices of other students and researchers.