When Dice Were Made of Flint #14

“Edutainment” is a horrible mash-up of a word. I’ve always hated it, even when I worked as the lead designer in the edutainment division of a multimedia studio, back in the mid-90s. But I’ve always thought that the principle behind it is sound.

I wasn’t the first to think so, of course. Fantasy games and fiction have always been informed by history and mythology, and games like Bushido and Lands of Adventure impressed me with their historical settings even as a student. This was before GURPS and its long line of historical sourcebooks, and before AD&D 2^nd edition and the HR (historical reference) series, but I saw the potential and I wanted in.

At the time, I was thoroughly addicted to the Irish sagas, and I had taken a couple of courses on the Celtic Iron Age in Britain and Europe. I wanted a game that would let me recreate the adventures of Cu Chulainn and Finn McCool and the Fianna, but there wasn’t one – so I started to design my own.

Titled Fianna, it never got beyond a couple of playtest sessions to test the combat system, but I did reuse the research when I wrote HR3 Celts Campaign Sourcebook for AD&D 2^nd edition.

But all of that was in the future. In 1983, I was still a student, and looking for ways to combine my interest in games with the subjects I was studying. I had not heard of virtual tourism, but I was definitely thinking along those lines.

My other spare-time activity, apart from games, was volunteering at the small museum run by the Archaeology Department. I helped to set up a tiny souvenir shop to raise funds, and I wrote a couple of pamphlets explaining the basics of British prehistory and other simple topics. Then I had an idea.

I've already written about the gamebook phenomenon (See column 9) and in another year or so I would attempt to use it for educational purposes (column 11), but now I thought about applying the same format to engage people's interest in archaeology. I got as far as writing one short interactive story - just twenty paragraphs or so, if memory serves - in which the reader took the role of a young Mesolithic person encountering a newly-arrived Neolithic community. It was... okay, but I had to simplify things too much for the story to work, which defeated its educational purpose. I intended to revisit it, but never found the time.

Later, I got to use my degree writing various historical and historical fantasy sourcebooks, and I got to revisit Viking history, Arthurian myth, and other favourite subjects in video games, but I still think of that first, stumbling effort to use games as a way to share my interest in the past.