E-culture can constitute a concrete support to the cultural and social life of cities and territories. The virtual world has been proved to play a crucial role also for social resilience, as experienced also during pandemic limitations. E-culture is turning toward new resilient e-formats for improving social life.

The e-culture scenario is a varied ecosystem based on a mixture of heterogeneous expertise, coming from humanities, social sciences and ICT areas. To allow such heterogeneous skills coexist and operate in synergy in an integrated framework, common languages, novel tools and suitable objectives must be studied. Designing and developing this integrated framework is currently an open and challenging research issue. At the same time, it has a great educational potential to create an impact on society and create historical to social issues such as migration.

The seminar - both in presence and in remote - recreates this mixture through the presentation and discussion of the digital serious game, Migrants’ chronicles 1892, by one of the developers. Conceived for educational purposes between veracity and playability, the game represents a valuable opportunity to discuss the open issues above and possibly find useful insights to address them.

The goal of the project Migrants’ chronicles 1892 is to create a digital educational game about the migration of Luxembourgers to the United States in the 19th century for use in schools and museums. Its aim is to pass on the memory of Luxembourg emigration to young people, ages 11-13. Young people, ages 11 and 13 years are digital natives. For some, the game will build upon knowledge previously acquired from books and school lectures. For students, who do not learn from traditional academic approaches, the immersive game will open the door to new forms of learning. If successful, the project represents more than a stand-alone effort. Rather, it may show a way to enabling school children to take charge of their own learning as an active process. Our game can serve as a template that can accept a variety of content of other historical situations.

The Migrants’ Chronicle project is a collaboration between the Faculty of Humanities Education and Social Sciences of the Luxembourg University, the Cologne Game Lab TH Köln and the Humanities Center of Carleton College, Northfield, MN (USA).

Program of the seminar:

The seminar consists of two parts: In the first part of the session professor Marie-Paule Jungblut, who is the project manager of the game, will present the demo of the game.

The second part of the seminar will be dedicated to the development process of a serious historical game and the challenges that historians and game developer face when working together on a serious game.