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Walk the Streets of Williamsburg on the Eve of Revolution
It is the evening of April 19th, 1775. You are Nathaniel Blake, a Richmond merchant newly arrived in Williamsburg to settle a matter of cargo. You expect a quiet night at the tavern and a quiet morning’s business. Within hours, the most consequential act in the colony’s recent history will unfold in the dark, and you may be the only man placed to do something about it.
After years of work, I am proud to share that Historical Williamsburg: A Living Narrative is finished and available to play. This is Version 1.50, the most complete and polished version the game has ever been, and I think it is the truest realization yet of what I set out to build: a colonial capital you can actually walk through, populated by people who live their own lives, on the one night that turned a quiet Virginia town into a flashpoint of the American Revolution.
A living town, not a backdrop
This is a work of interactive fiction. You explore by typing where you go and what you do, and Williamsburg answers in prose. There are no arbitrary puzzles and no single correct path. There is only the town, its people, and the night of April 20th.
What that means in practice:
- More than three hundred locations, from the Governor’s Palace at the head of the Palace Green to the taverns and shops along Duke of Gloucester Street, each furnished with period-accurate detail you can examine and explore.
- Twenty-two people who go about their lives on their own schedules. George Wythe and Peyton Randolph receive callers by day and retire at night. Tavern keepers fill and empty their rooms. Shops open and close by the clock. The mood of the town shifts as the hours pass.
- A night that really happened. Meals are bought in shillings and pence. Letters can be carried, read, and delivered, or carried too far. Where you happen to be standing when something happens determines what you witness, and the game remembers what you witnessed, not merely what you did.
I wanted history at the scale of one observant traveler: not a lecture, but a place you inhabit, where the consequences of the night reveal themselves through the people you talk to and the choices you make.
Why this year matters
The events you move through in this game are real, and they are part of the story of how American independence began. This year marks the 250th anniversary of that independence, the Semiquincentennial, and there is no better moment to step back into the streets where so much of it started. If you have ever wanted to stand in colonial Williamsburg on the eve of revolution and feel the weight of what was coming, this is your chance to do exactly that.
What you get
The download includes the Windows game, a Quick Start guide that has you walking the streets within a minute or two, and a complete Command and Argument Reference for when you want to know everything the game understands. It runs as a standalone program in its own window, with nothing to install.
Play it now
Historical Williamsburg: A Living Narrative is available now on itch.io. Visit the program page, download your copy, and see the Revolution begin from the ground where it happened.
Get Historical Williamsburg: A Living Narrative on itch.io
I hope you enjoy walking the streets of Williamsburg as much as I have enjoyed building them.
Hap Aziz, Ed.D.
Fun with Maps
Maps are essential to many Interactive Fiction games, especially those that involve activity in various locations. Interactive Fiction game maps that deal with real locations, however, are challenging to implement, as there is a trade-off to be had between realism and playability. If the design is meant to represent the physical layout with utmost fidelity, the details of the map can potentially slow down and frustrate game play as the player is forced to move from one seemingly meaningless location to another in order to get to the desired destination. It’s similar to the counterpoint between a flight simulator and a flight game–the realism of a true simulator can be very boring, unless it’s the simulation itself that interests you.
Likewise, the conflicting visions of the HWLN: is it a simulation of the physical layout of Williamsburg as it was in the months leading up the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or is it a game about the events taking place during that time? That conflict plays itself out everytime I return to the map and struggle with the appropriate level of detail to include. I’ve been wanting the game to be both, but that may not be the wisest choice for the HWLN as a game.
Part of the challenge was addressed in part by the new daily maps published by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for visitors. The new map (show in the picture above) is actually a streamlined version of an earlier visitor map which you can view here. The older map is much more detailed, and perhaps in the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s thinking, it was not as user friendly. Whatever the case, the new map gives me a good template for a more streamlined game map, on which I am currently working and will implement at least initially in Inform 7.
So for the sake of playability, I’ll work with a less detailed map. But at some point, as an exercise in modeling an accurate picture of history, I’ll return to the “high resolution” version in order to satisfy my inner purist.
Historical Williamsburg Living Narrative 