Prof. Chris Fee (center), Sarah Doherty, and Joseph Zoller (both Class of 2001) photograph an ancient site on the Isle of Man

From tombs to treasure, Gettysburg College students are bringing the Viking Age back to life by creating computer games and surfing virtual versions of important archaeological sites and artifacts.

English Prof. Christopher Fee has spent a decade gathering digital resources for "The Secret of Otter's Ransom," a sprawling multimedia website named after a Norse myth and based on Fee's research at some of Britain's most spectacular cultural sites.

To serve varying learning styles, the site takes two widely divergent approaches to presenting the medieval North Atlantic world: 

• A map-driven encyclopedic portal connects students to what Fee called "a vast fund of information and objects" for in-depth study of key places, objects, and scholarly commentary. It continues to grow as students in several of Fee's courses add their own research, videos, photographs and more.

• Students create text-based "interactive fiction" games that are rigorously derived from archaeological data and filled with references to Viking and other cultures. The games describe a scene or object in detail, then ask players to make a choice, such as "go east" or "take sword." Each decision leads to a new set of possibilities. "From an English professor's point of view, this is really creative writing," said Fee.

Though it remains a work in progress, anyone is invited to visit the site.

Posted Feb. 8, 2008

By Jim Hale 

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