The Power Of Games: The Future Of Learning

July 27, 2024

The Power Of Games: The Future Of Learning

Sunken Tower is a company who dives deep into both the past and the future!

They collaborate with other game creators to develop fantastic digital experiences, while also designing and publishing historical board games. This means they wear many hats: historians, writers, and even funding partners! On the history side of things, they delve into real-world events to create accurate content for our games. They also love crafting alternate history scenarios, letting players explore “what if” situations. And to bring these projects to life, they sometimes assist developers with securing funding.

An example is the Anjou Bible, a magnificent bible of 1340 as the basis of an historical card game. Games can be a powerful way to learn! By playing and exploring these digital worlds, players can gain knowledge about history in a fun and interactive way. It’s like stepping into a time machine and living history firsthand!

Let’s explore more by asking the following questions:

1) Could you explain more about the on-demand app services mentioned on your website, and how they might be used to create personalized historical gaming experiences?

Today, most games are played and sold on mobile phones. Because nearly everyone always carries their phone with them, that also means that they have always access to those games. I think that’s a powerful tool for many historians and heritage institutions to tell stories about the past. In fact, we already see museums and organisations creating their own gaming apps. A lot of these games also play into the possibilities of Virtual Reality or Extend Reality.

Hence, we help these institutions, or anyone with an interest in developing a game with historical elements, to make the most of history in a gaming environment. In some cases we are asked to help build a game from scratch, for which we usually team up with regular game developers working with (VR or XR) apps. But in other cases we just help with the historical content, as this is the speciality of Sunken Tower. For example, we were asked by a large Jewish heritage institution to explore options for building a city walking game. In another case, a solo game developer was already working on his VR game, but decided he needed a help with reinforcing the narrative of the game by putting in more historical elements. And in yet another example, we actually teamed up with an existing game studio to propose our own game to a heritage partner.

2) What other historical themes or manuscripts have you considered for developing card games or app?

Too many to be comfortable :). It is actually not difficult to think of historical theme’s that might one day become a game. So on top of our own ideas for games, we actually get a lot of pitches from other historians. We’ve gotten proposals for a game on cathedral building, medieval city governance, queerness in history, inquisition trials,… .

However, we have clear line that we want to keep with Sunken Tower, at least in terms of the games that we publish under our own label. In our on-demand services we are very flexible, but if the game is properly ours we mainly look for three things. The theme’s need to be visually attractive; allow for gameplay that is related to an existing historical reality; and should make people wonder a little bit more about the past.

In practice, that means that our next card game will explore Japanese ukiyo-e production, using the actual 18th and 19th century woodblock prints. In this game the players will take up the role of an ukiyo-e publishing house, aiming to bring the best set of cards on ‘the market’. Other publishing houses will try to thwart them, and the government (or Bakufu) might issue annoying censorship decrees.

Other topics that we are currently looking at for our own games are renaissance fortification building, court culture in 17th century Brussels, 19th century botanical treatises and the medieval knights of the Golden Fleece, and Belgian political history. We struggle a bit with moving to earlier periods given the lack of consistent visual sources, but we hope to have at least on roman game as well.

3) What inspired you to develop the card game "Anjou" and what’s the link to your work at KU Leuven?

The inspiration actually came from Twitter. During a slightly boring evening in front of the television, I encountered some digitized images from the Anjou Bible. They immediately appealed to me, given the sheer visual power of the medieval illuminations. The knights, birds, musicians, fabel creatures and other figures simply jump of the pages.

Moreover, they make you instantly wonder why a medieval person would like to see them in a religious bible. So that was a perfect match with what we like to develop at Sunken Tower.

In terms of links with my work at KU Leuven, there were actually very few. The bible is kept at the Faculty of Theology, not at ‘my’ Faculty of Arts, and I’m a specialist of 16th and 17th century political history, not of medieval religious art. But to a certain extent it’s better to lack a bit of background, because then you’re looking at a historical topic with the eyes of other non-specialists. So I went to the same process as the players of Anjou, that is to see something strange about the past and start exploring what it all meant. But of course, in practical terms in helped that the real experts I consulted on the Bible were colleagues. Moreover, given my affiliation, KU Leuven marketing was quickly convinced to contribute to the project.

4) Can you explain or describe the role players take on in the game "Anjou” and how the gameplay reflects the process of creating a medieval manuscript?

The players take up the role of assistants in the illumination atelier of master Cristophore Orimina. Orimina whas the master-illuminator responsible for the images in the Bible, but the game stresses that a lot of work was done by anonymous assistants. So that is where the game and historical practice touch one another. The players are each given a section of a manuscript page to decorate, whereby they try to follow the master’s instructions as well as they can. Moreover, by choosing for more complex images, they are awarded more points and thus rise in standing with master Orimina. Ultimately that is the goal of the game: the manuscript the players are decorating is technically a collaborative effort, but you still try to outdo your fellow-assistants. That dynamic fits very well with the historical realities of creating such a rich manuscript.

5) What importance does the Anjou Bible hold at KU Leuven, and why was it chosen as the theme for the card game?

The Anjou Bible is one of the foremost heritage possessions of the KU Leuven, which says something at a university founded in 1425. It counts as one of the best and most beautiful examples of medieval illumination art, and is therefore incredibly well-studied and well-preserved. Importantly, the teams of KU Leuven libraries have also taken the effort to digitize the entire bible, so everyone can marvel at it online. The actual manuscript is only rarely taken out of the vaults at the Faculty of theology, but whenever that happens, it attracts a lot of attention. The Bible is also recognized as a ‘topstuk’ by the Flemish government.

However, and somewhat ironically, the Bible itself has no historical background in Leuven or even in Flanders. It was created at the behest of the Neapolitan branch of the French Anjou dynasty, as a wedding gift to a royal princess and her Hungarian fiancée. Only by sheer coincidence (and it is not even clear through which steps) it ended up in Leuven, where it luckily survived the French Revolution and the two World Wars

6) How does Professor Lieve Watteeuw contribute to the game "Anjou," and what perspective does she offers on the medieval period through the game?

Professor Watteeuw and the KU Leuven marketing team were very kind and helpful, but I brought them fairly late into the process. The reason for that was simple: I needed a good game first. Only when I was certain that Anjou was strong enough as an actual game, I wanted to reach out to potential partners and specialists. Luckily professor Watteeuw was immediately enthusiastic about the game and its potential. She immediately helped me out with the ‘historical background’ section that is added to the rulebook. It helped a lot that I had her backing.

7) In what ways does the card game "Anjou" aim to change perceptions about the Middle Ages, according to you and Professor Lieve Watteeuw.

I can’t speak for professor Watteeuw, but for me it is important that the game offers an accessible introduction to the wonders of medieval art. People still associate the medieval period with filth, greyness, and prudishness. The Bible, and by extension the game, show that this was not the case. Even a religious item as a bible offers surprisingly wonderous and funny art, and that’s a lesson I hope players can take with them. In this sense I was very pleased that several of my friends thought that I had created the images myself. They couldn’t believe that all of these crazy figures were actually medieval, so they thought that I had come up with them! That’s exactly the type of historical surprise Sunken Tower is looking for in its games.

July 27, 2024