Whether to play or preserve the past?: Creating The Forgotten Worker Quest

In this paper, we describe some of the challenges associated with creating a locative game based on historical content. The Forgotten Worker Quest presents the history of the Rideau Canal as the winning of space while aligned with an avatar; however, the web exhibit from which the game draws its assets does not exhibit the same ludic qualities, which presented serious design challenges. The lack of compelling, navigable, and playable spaces in the web exhibit came back to haunt us in the game design stage as we tried to harvest any relevant, potentially playable content from the site. All too often, mundane artifacts ended up standing in for more dramatic gameplay elements. Ultimately, the inherent difficulties of accurately reconstructing the past encouraged us to take a more postmodern historical approach to our game development, by developing algorithms of play that allegorize the process of archival research, and foreground the roles that selection and narrativization play in historiography.