Student Post: Charis Vollmar

 Integrating Gaming Into Lesson Delivery - The Promising Potential of Discovery Tours

It's always been of interest to me as a gamer and an education major to combine the two in an instructional way. Whenever I play video games I'm always struck by the immersion involved with open-world maps, and in particular, I'm fond of the Ubisoft game series Assassin's Creed for its ability to incorporate a historical setting into its storyline. 

One of the best examples of how authentic the renditions of these virtual recreations are is the Notre Dame fire in April of 2019. Game company Ubisoft pledged funds and technology to help rebuild the cathedral, even going so far as to make Assassin's Creed: Unity available for free to promote awareness. Unity was created in 2014 and is set in the French Revolution, dropping players into a virtual reconstruction of 1789 Paris. One of the famous landmarks you can visit is Notre Dame, and to accurately recreate the building the game company took extensive measurements and even went as far as to take note of the variation in brick coloring for accuracy. They then adapted this information to fit specifications as accurately as possible for 1789. That information had been turned into a virtual map of the cathedral, and it was released to help with the rebuilding. 

(Ubisoft pledges monetary, tech assistance for Notre Dame Cathedral restoration - USA Today) (Links to an external site.) 

Due to the attention to detail in this game series, which includes Renaissance Florence, Venice, Rome, and Constantinople, as well as Boston and New York during the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution, along with countless other locations and time periods, my interest in applying these virtual environments into historical teaching was naturally piqued. Apparently, Ubisoft felt the same, because in the release of their 2017 game Assassin's Creed: Origins, players were allowed to immerse themselves in Ptolemaic Egypt less than fifty years before the birth of Christ, even going so far as to incorporate the carrying of Cleopatra into the palace hidden in a rug and participating in the fated Ides of March. 

Ubisoft took this open-world concept a step further by adding an element to the game called a "Discovery Tour," which allowed players to roam the open world map in a conflict-free environment purely for the purpose of exploration. Tours were added with professional narration, facts, and details of the locations - such as the Library of Alexandra and Thebes to scratch the surface - contributed by professional historians and scholars. Historical architects were particularly impressed with the virtual reconstruction of Alexandria's Library and Lighthouse. These tours provided a wealth of information geared specifically toward education, with the added benefit of a plausibly-accurate world to interact in. Origins totals the extent of this content at roughly eight hours' worth of data to absorb, from daily life to architecture to Egyptian religious ceremony. 

 

In 2019, Ubisoft went a step further by releasing a second Discovery Tour for their latest series installment Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, which provides a massive open map of the Greek world during the Peloponnesian War, or around 450 BCE. Using the concepts they had for Origins, the team improved the feature by encouraging players to explore the map looking for the tours scattered from Ithaca to Lesbos, dropping them into a rich environment filled with history on Leonidas' stand against the Persians and the conflict between Athens and Sparta. Interacting with notable persons such as Hippocrates, Socrates, and even Herodotus, players learn art and war alongside daily living. Aside from incorporating a more explorative concept to the game in the form of in-game rewards, these tours now end in small multiple-choice quizzes three questions long to check for comprehension. 

 

Both Discovery Tours were quickly released as separate installments from the major games they were associated with due to their popularity and the potential they had in a professional education environment. And, as of 2021, Ubisoft plans to release yet another Discovery Tour for their newest game which follows the Viking conquest of England in 873 AD. 

The potential for these Discovery Tours fascinates me. In addition to hearing the narration of historical events, a player can walk through the very city the narrator is describing. Interactive objects in the environment lead to pauses in the narration to explain pottery with pictures of the very shards described courtesy of whatever museum they have found residence in, connecting the virtual past to the solid modern reality in a subtle way that doesn't ruin the immersion of the Tour. 

Having planned to use this for a Practicum Lesson before COVID-19 shut down schools last March, both my professor and my host teacher were fascinated by the various applications these Discovery Tours could be used for in the classroom from direct, hands-on small group interactions to use as supplementary material in a lecture format. As Ubisoft continues to improve the Discovery Tours, It is my hope that more companies will consider branching out into this field of application for open-world gaming. It certainly proves to be a hit with the teachers, so why not with the students?