(Re)Playing the Past in 3D: Interactive History through Integrating GIS, Procedural Modeling, and Gaming Technologies

This presentation will explore the potential to simulate the contingencies and lived experiences of the past by integrating traditional 2D GIS mapping and procedurally modelled buildings in a 3D game engine. GIS has historically privileged Euclidean space over culturally constructed space, making the technology well suited to mapping quantitative data, but providing little sense of how spatial relations or specific places are experienced at lived, human scale. This paper will explore the significant potential of 3D game engines as deep mapping environments capable of simulating the lived experience of the inhabitants of a given time and place through a discussion of an ongoing collaborative project. 'Witness to the Revolution' is an immersive, interactive 3d experience of the 1770 Boston Massacre built as a partnership between faculty and undergraduate students at Carleton College and the Old State House museum in Boston. Based on original historical research, the game allows players to digitally experience the eighteenth-century city while exploring the “hard problems” of settling on a singular truth about the past. Players interview witnesses and collect the depositions that form the primary historical source for the events of the contested shooting, and must assess the value of the deposition based on their appraisal of the witness’ reliability, social interactions, and coherence. As the player is sent on quests throughout eighteenth century Boston to find new witnesses, he or she experiences the small scale and local nature of the colonial town. This presentation will describe our process of digitizing historic maps in GIS software, procedurally generating the colonial town in 3D using CityEngine, and integrating the whole into a playable interactive experience in the Unity 3D game engine. The result suggests the power of multidimensional approaches for exploring complex and contingent historical narratives from a situated lived perspective.