Together with colleges at Birmingham and Nottingham I have spent a good many years exploring the earthworks of Laxton's fine medieval motte and bailey castle. For those who are interested many of the details of our work are available on a dedicated website and in fact some of my early game-based visualisation experiments, using the Medieval Total War engine, were focused on Laxton.While that was altogether an unsatisfactory experience it did force me to consider more sophisticated technology, and so to CryEngine.
Our fieldwork at Laxton has always been an ad-hoc affair, student and community focused, and one of the outcomes I would still very much like to achieve is to return a version of that work to community ownership. I've ruminated on whether game-based visualisation is one was to achieve that. A game provides an elegant, accessible portal into the technicalities of survey, and one that can seamlessly move from real and now to then and maybe (back to that five-dimensional space). However, recent reading is causing me to reflect on the whole game experience. What draws us in to the game world? Dan Pinchbeck's work reminds us that it is narrative and particularly elements of narrative beyond the ludic, that capture attention.
So, while our present game-based visualisation of Laxton attempts to recreate the now and real of the monument and landscape, and entice users into exploration and discovery, rather than passive reception, this is on one level a sterile vision, the roving eye of the avatar moves over the landscape without motive or intent. Perhaps what is needed is a narrative to motivate and inform. Co-opting not just the technology of game engines, but the ludic and the narrative, now there is a challenge...
