Interactive Game Brings Ancient Syria to Life
- Nov 12, 2024
Scholars and gamers alike will soon get the chance to learn about pieces of the past buried in the Middle East, thanks to an open-world video game being developed by Professor Stephennie Mulder and her colleagues.
Mulder, an associate professor of Islamic art and architecture in the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin, received a 2024 Bold Inquiry Incubator grant from the University to develop a 3D interactive digital game based on the excavation of an early Islamic palace in Syria.
“I realized that people are learning history from the media, and whether we like it or not, that is how people are learning now,” Mulder says. “Historians have a responsibility to make sure that those stories are truthful, and that they’re portraying the past and all of its complexity and diversity.”
For 12 years, Mulder traveled back and forth to Syria with the cooperation of the Syrian antiquities authority, serving as the ceramics expert at an archaeological dig site that dates back to the Bronze Age. On that site, the rulers of Syria’s first dynasty built a small castle that was inhabited by one of the princes in the royal family. The castle Mulder encountered in real life will anchor the game’s digital landscape.
The game design will be stylized with photorealistic elements for the visual aesthetic to correspond with the time period represented in the game. Mulder said that using a popular medium to teach a historical story feels very natural, especially with the growth of virtual reality.
“The power of digital games to bring the sights, sounds, textures, and humanity of past lives immersively into the present is unparalleled,” said Mulder. "I'd love to see historians embrace gaming as part of teaching and scholarship.”
