'Blackhaven' Postmortem: Designing Two Centuries of Difficult History in One Free Game

In this 2022 Game Narrative Summit talk, historian and lead developer Dr. James Coltrain reflects on how the Historiated team confronted challenges in historical sensitivity, representation, and narrative design to create a game emphasizing the lasting harms of American slavery. Strategies covered will include how Historiated used surviving artifacts and documents to ensure historical accuracy, wrote a main character who could provide her own historical context to players, and worked with community stakeholders to give them a voice in the game’s production.

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