About Our Team

At a video games seminar last month at MIT sponsored by the Knight Foundation, several of the MIT folks talked about lessons learned from games they developed that resonated with our Remembering 7th Street jazz and blues clubs project. One of the games MIT produced is Revolution, a video game recreation of historic events in colonial Williamsburg. You can read more about it on the blog of Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. There were a number of parallels with our game: - While the Revolution game is designed to be educational, the designers believe "much of the learning takes place outside the box as the experience of gaming gets reflected upon by teachers and learners in the context of their everyday lives," to quote from the blog posting. We similarly decided to limit the amount of historical information presented in text form in our game because it bogged down game play. Instead we hope young people will be intrigued by their exploration of the 7th Street virtual world and seek out more information about the area on a companion website or from other sources online or in the community. - The MIT game allowed two levels of play - players who actively tried to shape events or those who wanted to simply observe. In our game we also built two levels of participation. A player could just explore 7th Street and learn about its clubs and musicians through simple encounters with non-player characters and objects. Or a player could engage in active game play, pursuing multi-step quests with the ultimate goal of performing a piece of music at one of the 7th Street jazz and blues clubs.