Lives at War

This is a Unity3D-based schools-level (KS2-4) history "game" that enables students to experience life during World War II in Bright Town, a coastal resort in the South of England. It was released in 2011 by Corporation Pop and I found it to be both immersive and evocative with high production values. The game can be played online in the browser or downloaded (you will probably need to install the Unity3D plugin). There is also a multi-player version though this requires you to make a special application; there is clearly some concern about potential misuse, e.g. no profanity filters.

You have the opportunity to enter the sim as a male or female avatar and to explore the centre of the town either by walking or running. It being wartime, many of the roads are blocked off so effectively you have access to the main street with the cinema at one end and a residential area with an wartime allotment at the other. Most of the houses and shops in the navigable area were inaccessible, including the pub (see sad avatar image above). I thought there was an opportunity missed here to see how commerce was conducted pre-mall, pre-supermarket but I suspect that was beyond the curriculum aims.

You can interact with objects or other avatars (NPCs) and progress through parts of the sim are conditional on successful completion of prior ones. Similarly the NPCs present on the street vary depending on the stage you have reached. The NPCs text chat with your avatar although in practice the chat on both sides is entirely pre-scripted (no AI, conversations repeated verbatim each time) although some chats end with your having to choose between two options.

At one stage you enter a house and navigation through the house involves moving between primary locations via the HUD though you can touch doors to enter rooms from the hallway. This is all fairly obvious but there are no cues as to the nature of the rooms. I was also expecting to open and walk through doors but the experience is closer to the forced teleport found in OpenSim and used by the Linden Realms game in SL. It certainly simplifies navigation in confined spaces.

The avatar camera had physics enabled and, while its motion was damped, it still seemed over-sensitive which made it difficult for this non-gaming SLer to navigate. On the other hand, in some interior scenes the camera is static which makes it much easier to locate clickable objects as these are invariably in the field of view and flagged with particles. However, the static camera position following the transition from hallway to parlour in the house felt akin to "crossing the line". This was compounded to some extent by a sudden and unexpected frontal view of my avatar.

Much of the context is conveyed by modal newsreel or personal archive video clips; there is no way to control playback other than an option to Skip. Some of the instructions issued at the end of clips are shown rather briefly although I managed to work out what was required easily enough.

Sometimes NPCs will intimate in chat that they are giving you objects to take elsewhere though there is no indication of the objects in the HUD or scene. However, recipient NPCs respond positively if you reply appropriately to their questions regarding object possession. NPCs are not animated beyond breathing and do not change location. This seems odd when some express a need to be elsewhere in short order!

The quality of the graphics was very good and contributed significantly though I have seen comparable sims in SL. In particular, I was reminded of the Kristallnacht sim. That is perhaps more oriented towards role play (the student is cast as reporter) with the nice conceit of starting out by breaking the wall between the news room (essentially the briefing area) and the city you are reporting on.

Inevitably Lives at War is somewhat "sanitised". Although some of the NPCs are clearly traumatised, only a little of the emotion comes over in the text chat (perhaps it is shock or the traditional "stiff upper lip"?). Similarly, while you see videos of casualties being evacuated from bombed-out buildings, no attempt is made to show this in the sim.

While billed as a "game" there is little in terms of puzzle-solving beyond locating particular places and NPCs. The gameplay is very straightforward (probably a good thing) and the website suggests that completing the game can take anywhere between 15 minutes and 3 hours depending on how much video you play (I played about two-thirds). The video is not integral to the game but provides essential contextual detail from a curriculum perspective.

The scene changes in the main town area are largely triggered by events that take place while you are in the few buildings you can enter. By my estimation there are 5-6 "levels". The ending, while hardly a surprise, feels somewhat abrupt although you are given the opportunity to continue exploring the sim. While the sim plays out over 1-2 days, there is no indication of time passing. The accompanying video necessarily covers a much wider timeframe.

Lives at War comes with a substantial PDF overview for teachers and the film clips (from Screen Archive South East) are also available on YouTube. It was developed in conjunction with students as well as people who had lived in the Brighton area during the period depicted.

I suspect the default sim is intended to be relatively "light touch", emphasising ease of deployment and use. While I certainly found it engaging, Corporation Pop, a well-known UK SL developer, possibly missed a trick in failing to produce a complementary OpenSim sim-on-a-stick version that students could annotate and remix. That said, I can appreciate that there might be legal restrictions on reuse of some of the material and that the priority was probably simplicity in use.

As a non-gamer, I found much of interest in terms of educational gaming, not least because the usual trappings (puzzles, scores, levels, etc) were either absent or under-stated. Given the current focus on this genre in SL and Jibe, the decisions underpinning the game's design merit close examination.