How do you build a 900 year-old cathedral? A new interactive video game launched this month has brought to life the construction of one of Edinburgh’s most iconic and loved landmarks to celebrate its 900^th anniversary this year.

From street to spire, St Giles’ Cathedral towers 161 feet above the world-famous Royal Mile in the capital, and many of the 1 million plus annual visitors ask how the magnificent gothic building was constructed – the short answer is “not in one go”.

Now an interactive video game showing the cathedral’s construction has been developed in collaboration with the University of Glasgow’s Games and Gaming Lab and Evolved Education Ltd. We asked the project partners more about this latest development in the centuries-old landmark’s colourful history.

Stephen Preston, Deputy Head of Heritage and Culture at St Giles’ Cathedral Cathedral:

How did the original idea or request come about and what did you want to achieve by working with academics on the interactive animation? 

Very rarely does a building tell you how it was built. Imagine the biggest building you know. Why does it look like that? Was it all built at once? These are two of the whole bag of questions we were looking to answer. We knew looking at architecture needs a model. With leaps in digital hardware and software, we hoped we could make it a digital model. Louise at Interface (who seems to know the perfect person for everything) put us in touch with Tim at the Games Lab. We knew working with an academic (or as it turns out, a whole team of creative practitioners, researchers and developers) was the right path pretty much straight away. Their research combined with their knowledge of completely new ideas means we’ve ended up with a game that probes new frontiers.

What was the most surprising benefit of working with an academic? 

Whilst producing the game was the aim of the project, for Tim and his team there is also the research and meeting development goals. Tim is constantly searching for unusual ways to employ new technologies, so this project developed in ways I could not have foreseen (the inclusion of AI for example) whilst still ending with a fantastic, finished product. But, in addition, Tim is already looking at how we can collaborate further and where the next project can take us. I’m ready to jump straight back in.

Dr Timothy Peacock, Historian and Director of University of Glasgow Games and Gaming Lab, University of Glasgow:

What drew you to working on this particular project?

We found this engagement with St Giles’, a major international cultural heritage institution of such critical importance to Scotland and the wider UK, to be intellectually enriching and an excellent opportunity to push the boundaries of knowledge in combining our research in history, gaming, and AI with practical application to address real world challenges.

You’ve worked with many partners in the tourism industry. What do you gain through these interactions?

Invaluable new perspectives. It is really inspiring to hear about the work of these partners and the ways in which they seek to communicate heritage to new audiences. We gain the feeling that our research, through engaging with and seeking co-creatively to enhance their activity, is having a positive impact on society.

There are also significant benefits to our students, who gain opportunities either to work with the projects directly in roles that develop their skills and employability, and in the new tools and experiences we help to co-create that can contribute to benefiting their learning and that of future generations.

The wider University of Glasgow greatly appreciates such connections, linking to our strong community-focus as a major civic university, seeking to enable knowledge exchange that improves the wellbeing and prosperity of our local, national and global communities.

Matthew Leeper PhD, Managing Director and Co-founder, Education Evolved Ltd:

What was the biggest challenge when designing/developing this game?

There were really two big challenges when we designed this game. The first was the 3D models of the cathedral stages. We had floorplans which showed us when each section was built, but the bigger challenge was turning those floor plans into 3D models. We knew when a wall was built, but we didn’t know what the wall looked like, so oftentimes we had to turn to artwork that either the research team had found, or that our modeler had found. In the instance of the Romanesque kirk, we had to look to other existing structures to make educated assumptions to try and keep as historically accurate as possible.

The second biggest challenge was building a game, which could be played online or in the cathedral itself, that would be an engaging and intuitive experience for people from across the globe who likely have their own way in which they intuitively engage with things on a touch screen. However, while testing in the cathedral in May, we saw that we got this absolutely right when people from all around the world played and enjoyed the game without us ever having to explain it. It was really exciting to watch the kids just immediately understand how to navigate the timeline in the game.

What can video games bring to people’s understanding of history, particularly when it is as old as St Giles’ Cathedral’s back story?

Video games can be a fantastic way to help people understand history. Video games provide the opportunity to create something based on actual history, yet still allow the player to control the story and the actions, putting them as the hero of their own experience and not just the audience watching history unfold on the screen like they would in a movie or TV show.

The challenge we faced with the St. Giles’ project was just what to include within the timeframe of the game, knowing that people will only stand at a display and engage with something for so long. So we had to pick events and aspects of the building which allowed us to expand on in a story format to really help deliver as much information within the goal of ten minutes.

Louise Arnold, Business Engagement Executive, Interface:

What was your role in the project?

I’m so pleased to have been able to help connect St Giles’ Cathedral to University of Glasgow in their quest for greater public engagement. They were keen to explore how they could engage with their visitors in a more interactive way to show how the Cathedral was constructed in the fourteenth century. After trying a couple of universities, Timothy Peacock saw the vision to undertake a cross-disciplinary research initiative exploring new potential ways of using AI to translate cultural heritage sites into research-informed historical video games.

What do you think about the resulting interactive animation?

The end result is brilliant – it really brings to life something which many people are curious about. Using video games in this way is really effective in showing something complicated – the construction of a cathedral – simply so that more people engage with history.

The interactive game was officially launched at the Advanced Research Centre at the University of Glasgow earlier this month (June).

Photo by Martin Shields shows, from left, Matthew Leeper PhD, Managing Director and Co-founder Education Evolved; Rachel Porteous, Research Assistant at the University of Glasgow’s Games and Gaming Lab; Sumeet Gurung, Co-founder and Lead Developer, Education Evolved; Louise Arnold, Business Engagement Executive, Interface; James Macivor – 3D Modeller, Education Evolved; Dr Timothy Peacock, Historian and Director of University of Glasgow Games and Gaming Lab; and Stephen Preston, Deputy Head of Heritage and Culture at St Giles’ Cathedral.