Category: Games

I was the interviewee for the 10th Anniversary Episode of History Respawned! I had a great chat with host Bob Whitaker about working with Ubisoft on Assassin’s Creed Mirage‘s History of Baghdad Codex feature.

Bob does a walkthrough of the Mirage game environment (no violence, so handy for classrooms and showing to general audiences) and the educational feature with the museum objects we chose for the Codex.

Check it out!

The news is officially out!

If you’ve been following me or the Digital Lab you’ll know about this project, thanks to the announcement earlier this year by The Barakat Trust.

The official announcement, released this week by Ubisoft, has all the details on the feature I and my Digital Lab research assistants, Sarah Slingluff and Deniz Vural, helped to create: The History of Baghdad, a historical codex similar to the Database that appeared in earlier games.

This project means a lot to me, personally as well as professionally (as you’ll no doubt notice from the way it’s being reported in the UK news! )

Anyway, I’m very happy to finally be able to share information about the project, and I hope it will fulfill its aim, of making information about the art, architecture, and history of the caliphal period available to a wide global audience.

Check it out!

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Can you spot the connection to Digital Munya?

This one is my collaboration with game development team Luminous Sheep, at Abertay University, this game introduces players of all ages to the archaeology, visual culture, and history of caliphal Cordoba, capital of Islamic Iberia (Arabic al-Andalus).

Available for download (Windows) here.

Curious to explore a Córdoban munya (villa) in an immersive Unity game environment, complete with period artefacts and Arabic primary source texts?

After a year of development I’m happy to say the Digital Munya 2 app is now available for download.

Please do let me know if you play it – I welcome feedback that will help us improve future versions.

A big thank you to our funders the Barakat Trust, UK ESRC, Creative Informatics, Edinburgh College of Art, and University of Edinburgh History of Art for generous support for my work to make Islamic art and history accessible to all through video games and digital immersive experiences.

Digital Munya 2 was developed by the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture & Collections (DLIVCC) at the University of Edinburgh:

Glaire Anderson

Dara Etefaghi

Sarah Slingluff

Deniz Vural

Many thanks to Professor Anna Contadini of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London for the invitation to share my work in the Research Seminar for Islamic Art. Thanks too to all who joined, for the insightful comments and questions.

I’m very happy to acknowledge the generous support of the Barakat Trust for my project with leading global video game publisher Ubisoft, to make Islamic art and history accessible to a wide public audience in the UK and around the globe.

You can read the full announcement here.

This year I’ve been busy in the Digital Lab, going back to my old experiment with using the Unity video game engine to visualize a medieval Islamic villa.

Why am I going back to research I started way back in 2010 or so??

Because video games are one of the most popular ways that people engage with the past today. That’s what makes them potentially a wonderful place to introduce people to times and places that may be unfamiliar, like 10th c. Cordoba.

I’m curious about how immersive game technologies can be used not only as a research tool for visualising the past, but also as a way to make historical research accessible to non-academic audiences.

I spoke about the new project in March at the Medieval Academy of America, and wrote about it on the Creative Informatics Research Blog, which you can read here.

Let me know what you think!