H&GL Seminar - Developing Ahoy's Digital Caribbean: Navigating its Dilemmas

John Beiner from Capstan Games and an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh will showcases Ahoy, an upcoming first-person video game set in the eighteenth-century maritime Caribbean, as an example of the pedagogical promise in ultra-realistic video games. While the 'pirate' genre has long been a staple of video gaming, Ahoy deliberately stands apart from typical approaches to its subject matter for its history-led development. Our project foregrounds not simply material and technical histories of the eighteenth-century maritime world, but also social realities and the historically omnipresent spectre of Caribbean slavery. In this talk, I will showcase Ahoy in two parts. First, I will give a whistle-stop tour of Ahoy's development, highlighting some of our historical work to-date and to-come. These include forays into historical linguistics, sailors' working songs, naval ornamentation, and Caribbean spirituality. Following this, I will flag dilemmas both common to historical games and inherent to Ahoy's specific subject area. What forms of historical accuracy detract from player immersion? Do historical realities of tedium in sailing offer pedagogical promise, or do they stand in the way of player engagement? Additionally, can we include female and POC players (without forcing them to play white male characters) without skewing our imagining of problematic gender- or race-stratified histories? Finally, most controversially for Ahoy: to what extent can/should we depict historical atrocities, such as Caribbean slavery, in games?