Sailing with the Gods / Samothrace Mariner / Samothracian Networks
Title
Short Description of Project
In Samothrace Mariner, a study of ritual and mobility in the ancient world, we are building bridges between:
- academic and scientific research, integrating theory and method from anthropology, geography, Classics, religion and ancient history
- pedagogical needs, supporting instructors in primary and secondary education
- gaming applications with broad potential for public education in the most informal of settings.
These three approaches– research, pedagogy, and popular culture – are united through shared reliance on a unique database built on ancient sources. The core of the database comes from inscriptions, a form of historical data least accessible to the non-specialist. These inscriptions have provided the geospatial and chronological parameters for a QGIS platform; to this we bring data from ancient history, poets, geographers and politicians, giving access to ancient voices located in the geospaces they occupied.
This project has combined research is social network analysis and educational gaming to learn more about the ancient world.
Moving to Casual Educational Gaming
Samothrace Mariner continues to work on the development of gaming applications to address pedagogical needs, to support instructors in primary and secondary education. The project began to develop separate casual educational games, now including Kottabos VR, the Royal Game of Ur, and Petteia, as minigames. These were originally developed to be components within the Sailing with the Gods game.
Samothrace Mariner is now focused on developing, in partnership with Kennesaw State University, these games as freestanding casual educational games for independent release. The games are being developed to release freely through the Steam gaming site for use in classrooms and independently.
The above three games are all being redeveloped from minigames created by Kennesaw State game design students for Sailing with the Gods. You can find information on the students and their work on the Credits page. Find out more about these games on the Educational Gaming page.