As far as unfinished projects go, Tower of Babel is perhaps the most famous one. In the corresponding and very brief section in Genesis, the story tells how people got together to build a city with a tower to reach the heavens and to make a name for themselves. But God took umbrage with this endeavor and scattered the people all over the earth, and in turn, this led to people speaking different languages.
Our game, also called Tower of Babel: HathiTrust Edition, is an educational digital game. It taps into this foundational story and celebrates the abundance of languages and works in the many languages of the world. In an interdisciplinary collaboration, it is designed and developed by a team of four senior undergraduate students at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, and a professor and a researcher from the humanities at the U-M, Ann Arbor. Under development since January 2022, it is in open beta release to University of Michigan users since Fall 2022 while active development continues. This project came out of the “Building Translation Networks in the Midwest with HathiTrust” seminars which was part of the 2021-2023 Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest.”
The game is intertwined with HathiTrust, a digital archive of scanned material from the collections of higher education institutions around the globe; it is primarily a repository of material scanned by Google Books. HathiTrust has 17.5 million total volumes in over 400 languages, and from that collection, close to 7 million volumes are open for reading. These volumes, digitized versions of analog artifacts, constitute the inventory of the game.
The game seeks to familiarize students with the wealth of this collection, especially primary sources, and for them to experience texts the way their original readers did. The game begins with the “architect,” usually a course instructor, laying down the foundation by setting constraints on rows, columns, and/or tiles on the board. Subsequently, up to three players join the game. The game board, “brick,” is an arrangement of twelve tiles comprised of four columns and three rows. The players, “builders,” are tasked with filling these empty tiles by first turning HathiTrust records into a card, verifying and editing the HathiTrust metadata, and then placing them on the board, all the while adhering to constraints first set up by the architect. Additionally, each card needs to be compatible with its adjacent cards, i.e. their metadata should have at least one element in common.
The game is developed in Unity and was exported to WebGL so that it can run on a variety of modern browsers. With low system requirements, our plan was to ensure that most students can play the game.
By gamifying the archival research process, our goal is to not only teach students about the importance of engaging with primary sources but also for them to gain practical research skills in a natural and entertaining manner. Additionally, with its collaborative gameplay mechanics, the game also leverages the increasing multilingual diversity in classrooms and aims to create meaningful encounters between works and students with backgrounds in different languages, scripts, cultures, and historical periods.
Please visit the game at: https://towerofbabel-translationnetworks-featuring-collectconnect.apps.containersprod.art2.p1.openshiftapps.com/
Please visit this folder for game instructions: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nosa5Kx1Rdr_ef2oD8tyDEonH0hGVG8W?usp=sharing
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