The winners from the previous Jam in the Archives events, Dundee’s Team Coda from Abertay and Team Aberdeen, travelled with the organisers to the National Library of Scotland for the final jam last month. Jam in the Archives is all about helping shape the wider alignments of universities, archives, libraries, galleries & games in making a shared case for creative innovation.
Teams consult medieval manuscripts at the NLS
The challenge was to make games inspired by the historical collections held in the NLS. The student teams from Dundee and Aberdeen were judged on a playable game loop or a game concept with a robust plan for development. As in the preceding jams, they worked over two days, and they pitched their games to a panel of judges drawn from different areas of expertise.
Detail from Scone Abbey ChartularyDetail from Blackadder Prayer Book (St Luke & Ox)Detail from Herdmanstoun AntiphonalA charter of King William the Lion (1173 × 1182)Detail from Culross PsalterDetail from Herdmanstoun AntiphonalDetail from Blackadder Prayer Book (Christ as toddler in walker)Detail from the Culross PsalterDetail from Melrose Abbey ChartularyDetail from Herdmanstoun Anthiphonal (showing stitched repair to folio)Detail from Dunfermline Abbey Chartulary
On the second day the teams pitched their game concepts, to judges Jamie McIntosh (NLS) and Neil Gregory (Historic Environment Scotland).
The runners-up were Team Aberdeen (Caitlin Thaeler, Fariha Ibnat, Rebekah Leslie & Oliver Rowan), with their game ‘Marginalised’.
Marginalised (Team Aberdeen) The pun in this game’s title refers to its focus on the marginal decorations of medieval prayer books as well as the theme of how historical records marginalise women, drawing on the items presented at the NLS as well as the team’s engagement with scholarly reading on women and medieval manuscripts. Players work through a puzzle which represents in abstract form the illumination of manuscript margins, drawing on academic research about how prayer books could reflect women’s devotional practices and interests. Trust points accumulated as the player progresses are used to unlock entries on historical topics underpinning the game, weaving findings from historical research into the game’s reward structure.
The winners were Team Coda from Abertay (Emily Wilkins, Rebecca Taylor, Connor Adamson), with their game ‘Maintenance Monk’.
Maintenance Monk (Team Coda) This game takes its inspiration from medieval cartularies, particularly that of Dunfermline Abbey, casting the player as a monk responsible for both repairing existing manuscripts and adding new records to a growing cartulary. Progression is built around a reputation system, with a stronger standing attracting customers of higher social status to have their muniments copied. The work of manuscript maintenance and registration of new charters is represented by minigames such as stitching damaged pages or adding new charters in a mini-game inspired by Operation which captures the precision and care demanded by the work.
Teams, organisers and judges group photo
Jam in the Archives was funded by Impact & Engagement Accelerator Funding from the University of Aberdeen. It was led by Jackson Armstrong, William Hepburn and Miles Everett (Aberdeen), alongside Kayleigh MacLeod (Abertay), with coordination by Melissa Tan as IEAF Postdoctoral researcher at Aberdeen.
Warmest thanks are due to all the participants, judges, and to Chris Cassells, Jamie McIntosh, and Ulrike Hogg of the NLS.
The winning games from Jam in the Archives will be demonstrated at the upcoming ‘Drop in and Play’ showcase at the DCA, Dundee, in September 2026.
At the first pair of game jams in the series this month, Jam in the Archives teams gathered for competitions in Aberdeen and Dundee. Building on the original Jam in the Archives (2025), these jams returned in 2026 on a bigger scale, aiming to help shape the wider alignments of universities, archives, libraries, galleries & games in making a shared case for creative innovation.
Detail of a historical map of Utrecht, part of the materials for the jam (Aberdeen edition)
The challenge was to make games inspired by historical collections – student teams were judged on a playable game loop demo or a game concept with a robust plan for development. They worked over two days, and they pitched their games to a panel of judges drawn from different areas of expertise.
Teams working with University Collections items and staff (Aberdeen edition)
In ABERDEEN on 11 & 12 June, six teams (twenty-one participants altogether) engaged with remarkable historical maps and atlases from University Collections. These included a seventeenth-century map of Utrecht, a John Seller’s pocket atlas of the world (1680), Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum(1577-81), an original print of James Gordon of Rothiemay’s map of Aberdeen (Abredoniae Novae et Veteris Descriptio, 1661), drawings for the unrealised plans for James Byres of Tonley’s remodelling of King’s College about 1767, and a surveyor’s plan of the Fetteresso estate (near Stonehaven), showing the ‘Home Farm And Grounds’ drawn in 1862.
Five brilliant game pitches resulted (see summaries below). Congratulations to the runners-up ‘What Could Have Been’ and to the winners ‘Surveyor-Fetteresso’.
Teams visit the The McManus and meet with curators (Dundee edition)
In DUNDEE on 18 & 19 June, established student team Cosmic Coda split into two groups, Team Cosmic and Team Coda. They encountered digitised historical collections fromAbertay University’s archive. The teams then visited The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum, where the collections team showcased a range of historical records and objects from Dundee’s rich history of industry, from jute and whaling to technology and games. Items the groups considered were themed on ‘The Making of Modern Dundee’, and ‘Dundee and the World’. Objects included and a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (c. 1981-2); images from Joseph McKenzie’s photographic essay on Dundee: City in Transition, People in Jute, from 1964-6; an architectural model of Dundee as it was about 1850, and many more fascinating artefacts which captured the story of the working city, changing dynamically over time.
Two wonderful game pitches resulted (see summaries below). Congratulations to the runners-up ‘Sorting Slug’ and to the winners ‘Spirits of the City’.
Summaries of the game projects pitched to the judges in each event follow below:
ABERDEEN EDITION:
The Mystery of Cologne (Team F) This game uses George Braun’s sixteenth-century Civitates Orbis Terrarum as its chief inspiration, focussing on its map of Cologne. Built in Twine, the game offers a branching narrative inspired by visual novels and presents several vivid characters including Braun himself. The game aims to put players in a situation where they have to work like historians and interpret the guidance of a narrator whose reliability is left in question, subverting expectations by playing on tropes of wise old mentors such as Gandalf. The game impressed with charming hand-painted art and original guitar music which played with expectations of historical authenticity.
What Could Have Been (Team E) James Byres of Tonley drew up plans for a new King’s College, Aberdeen in 1767 that were never realised. This stealth game imagines a timeline in which they were, dropping players into a 3D-modelled version of the building. This alternative timelines offers a nightmare vision in which players have to avoid demonic professors to collect plans which allow them to access a time travel machine that operates laterally across timelines rather than backward and forward so they can escape. The game offers a compelling sense of tension, built by musical cues and a mechanic whereby threat level increases as players entered into view of more professors. Alongside the game, the players produced an impressive standalone architectural model of the alternate building based on the original plans.
What Could Have Been
Damnatio Memoriae (Team D) Named after the Roman practice of erasing individuals from the historical record, this game casts the player as a member of a dystopian society thrust into the role of novice archivist. The team was especially inspired by Gordon of Rothiemay’s famous 1661 map of Aberdeen and annotations on a later copy of it but more broadly reflected on the theme of how records shape our view of the past and how they might be tampered with to alter this view. Players carry out cataloguing work and are ordered to erase notes and other elements of maps to mould perceptions of the past according to the desires of their ominous rulers. Players have significant autonomy over how events unfold and work under deadline pressure throughout. The tone is dark, drawing on Papers, Please as a reference point.
Damnatio Memoriae
Beneath the Quad (Team C) This game also drew on James Byres plans for King’s College but took that inspiration in a radically different direction. Reminiscent of games such as It Takes Two and Split Fiction, this was a two-player co-op experience, a design the team were keen to tackle because it was something they had not tried before. The core game mechanic was built around the clever conceit that puts the two players in different roles: one as a living person and one as a ghost. These characters inhabit different versions of the same building and must navigate puzzles whereby if an object if blocked in one layout it may be possible to move it in the other layout. The narrative framing for this central mechanic was the ghost of Byres aimed to change the future by having his plans realised after death.
Beneath the Quad
Surveyor: Fetteresso (Team B)
This game was inspired by Fetteresso estate plans from the 19th century. This elegant game is built around a simple ‘spot the difference’ central mechanic framed by a story in which the player takes on the role of an experienced surveyor who is hiring an assistant and needs to choose between three candidates by comparing their estate maps against his own. These in-game maps are closely based on the Fetteresso source material and inspiration was also drawn from one team member’s studies of surveying. On top of this, the game offers dialogue choices that shape the story and there are three different endings. This package is presented with charming pixel art visuals and original music.
Surveyor: Fetteresso
DUNDEE EDITION:
Sorting Slug (Team Cosmic) Sorting Slug takes the categorisation of archival objects as its central mechanic, tasking players with sorting items by dragging them into the correct categories. The examples used in the demo were from the collections of The McManus but the team focussed on this simple, engaging and tactile core loop with the intention that it would provide a solid foundation which could be adjusted to suit different audiences and age demographics and rapidly expanded with new content. In this way the game could be adapted for use by different heritage institutions and used for a range of purposes such as crowdsourcing exercises involving the collective interpretation of ambiguous or contested objects. The result is a clean, adaptable design that gestures toward real applications in archival and heritage work.
Spirits of the City (Team Coda) Inspired by the concept of the genius loci — the protective spirit of a place — this cooperative board game for 1-3 puts players in charge of three of Dundee’s economic sectors, drawing on inspirations from The McManus and from Abertay University’s archives. Players must build up their own sectors but the game emphasises their interconnectedness, so players must stay aware of the effects of their actions on the city more broadly. Buildings in each sector share the same mechanical function but carry distinct flavour, grounding the gameplay in a sense of place while making the system adaptable to different cities. The strong sense of character provided by the Dundee setting was also seen in the game’s imaginative event cards based on real historical events, including the arrival of the famous Tay whale and the competing pressures of wartime, which drove demand for jute while depleting the workforce.
Spirits of the City
Jam in the Archives was funded by Impact & Engagement Accelerator Funding from the University of Aberdeen. It was led by Jackson Armstrong, William Hepburn and Miles Everett (Aberdeen), alongside Kayleigh MacLeod (Abertay), with coordination by Melissa Tan as IEAF Postdoctoral researcher at Aberdeen. These events were judged by Miles Everett and Jane Pirie (Aberdeen), and by William Kavanagh (Abertay) and Lili Bartholomew (The McManus).
A great many thanks are due to all the participants, and to Lisa Collinson, Jane Pirie, and Andrew MacGregor of the Aberdeen University Collections Team, to Ruaraidh Wishart of the Abertay Archives, and to Lili Bartholomew & Julie McCombie of The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum.
On 18 February Jackson Armstrong gave a lunchtime talk for Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums, at the Maritime Museum.
The talk explored how the people of medieval Aberdeen made their imprints on the world. They set down in written records aspects of their lives, work, possessions and identities. The more prominent among them affixed personal wax seals to documents to prove their authenticity. Some left memorials to themselves and their relatives carved in stone. Through these and other types of sources – some clear and some more mysterious, and some now held far away from Aberdeen – we can trace fragments of stories of the people who made the burgh their home.
William Hepburn and Jackson Armstrong are co-authors of a new journal article entitled ‘Source Material and the Problem of Authenticity in Historical Game Development’.
This article examines the ways in which history can feature in games, or the ways in which a game can be historical. In particular it engages with the debate around ‘authenticity’ in historical games. Reflecting especially on their experience with Strange Sickness, the authors argue that the apparent gulf in objectives between game developers and historians can be bridged to their mutual benefit by embracing the authored, contingent nature of historical interpretation of primary sources, which reflects historical practice while offering a form of authenticity with appeal to game playing audiences.
The article is part of a special issue of the journal edited by Eduardo Luersen and James Wilson, entitled ‘Digital Games through Muddles Pasts and Modded History’. This collection arises from a workshop hosted by the editors in April 2024 held at the University of Konstanz. The special issue was published online on 24 December 2025.
FLAG team members Wim Peters and William Hepburn are co-authors of a new journal article entitled ‘Digital Hermeneutics, Medieval Texts, and Urban History: A Case Study from Aberdeen, Scotland’.
This open access article examines the use of natural language processing (NLP) methods to enrich, rather than replace, interpretative workflows in historical research. It showcases some of the key digital humanities methods applied in the FLAG project. Combining existing digital tools and custom computational processing, it advocates an approach to deep text interpretation by historical scholars.
The authors describe what the identify as a ‘digital hermeneutical method’ and show that this work provides relevant results for the example of the late medieval concept of ‘good account’ which they investigate in the Aberdeen Registers Online: 1398-1511. They argue that a combination of tailored quantitative and qualitative text analysis methods can be integrated into a flexible research workflow, which empowers the interpretative work of humanities researchers. The model of inquiry described in this case study from the FLAG project can be applied to other textual data sets.
Congratulations to Team Lima who were finalists at the Inform Prize 2025! Third-year Computing Science students in 2024-25 at Aberdeen took on a project to develop the successor platform for Search Aberdeen Registers (sar.abdn.ac.uk). The team included: Haziel Osunde, Rebekah Leslie, Fariha Ibnat, Holly Sinclair, Caitlin Thaeler, Andreas Maita, and Piotr Smialek.
The work of Team Lima has been fundamental to exploring what the future will look like for Search Aberdeen Registers, working towards key criteria for functionality, accessibility, maintenance, and durability.
Since 2014 the Inform Prize has grown into rewarding showcase of some amazing student group projects, developing digital solutions to real life problems. Find out more: https://www.intelligentplant.com/inform-prize
Last week was Jam in Archives: a medieval game jam inspired by manuscripts and books. Participants met on 22 January at the University of Aberdeen. This short, one-day jam focused on three examples of fifteenth-century cartularies, or books of charters, one from Scone Abbey (held by the NLS), one from Glasgow Cathedral, and one from Aberdeen’s St Machar’s Cathedral (both held in Aberdeen’s University Collections). They were introduced by Julia Vallius, a PhD student at Glasgow who has recently completed SGSAH-funded internship with the National Library of Scotland.
Jackson Armstrong introduced the day and William Hepburn gave an introduction to the variety of forms games can take, and to set out the theme and rules. The theme for the day was revealed to be “recording for the future” and the group formed into three teams. The icebreaker included some name badge making with various medieval images .
The teams had four hours in total to develop their ideas and demonstration materials for a digital game, and prepare a presentation for our guest judge Jon Ingold of inkle Studios.
The first team devised “Scribes of Succession”, a puzzle game which also invites players to learn about medieval records. After the death of a noble lord, his heir must show their claim to inheritance, and fend off the claims of a rival heir. The gameplay involves a series of tasks including locating a cartulary in a cathedral library, investigating who the scribes were that made copies of charters, and puzzling through their different handwriting, and identifying evidence to prove the heir’s right to succession against the rival.
The second team proposed the game entitled “Make your Claim”. In this game set in Scotland following the untimely death of King James II, the player is a clerk whose challenge is to evaluate the claims to lands of rival families. The clerk must decide who to support and whether evidence can be fabricated or ignored.
The third team created “Ink and Soil”, where the player’s job is to manage a medieval abbey’s lands and resources, and build up written records to protect their lands against neighbouring landowners. All the while pilgrims arrive making curveball demands on these resources.
Jon Ingold awarded an imaginary budget to each game. Scribes of Succession got £250,000, Make your Claim got £4,000, and Ink and Soil got £1,000,000 – as an indication of the scale of budget that might be required to realise each vision.
This Jam in the Archives event was a collaboration between University of Aberdeen, RGU, The National Library of Scotland, supported by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities, and Common Profyt Games Ltd. Special thanks to the Univeristy Collections team for their support, and to all our participants for their creativity and enthusiasm!
There’s only one thing that old Master Chalmers knew how to grow in the family garden: puzzlement. When he dies in 1511, his two grandchildren can’t believe their ears when they have old Chalmers’ will read out to them: Elizabeth receives an iron padlock, while Thomas inherits the family prayer book with the silver clasp decorated with the Chalmers coat of arms.
Elizabeth sits for a long time with the padlock and fidgets with its key. The lock fits in the palm of her hand. It’s rounded and decorated with a wavy pattern, like lighting, while the key is unadorned. Her grandfather must have imagined her growing up and wanting her jewellery box securely sealed. Is this my legacy? she wonders. Locking things away to never be seen? Was it not I who read from that very prayer book to my grandfather and little brother every night? Is it because I’m a girl that he assumes I want to keep secrets more than I want to read and pray?
Thomas sits in his own corner of the room, mindlessly turning from page to page. The roaring lion on the coat of arms is reaching out its paws to catch him. A family heirloom, entrusted to him. As usual, the letters get mixed up before his eyes and he can feel a headache coming on. I must be a grown man now, he thinks, if I’m supposed to learn all the things my sister does, and do them better. He sighs.
As if brought together by a pair of invisible hands, the siblings get up and meet in the middle of the room. Still silent, they exchange the goods so that the prayer book is in Elizabeth’s hands and the padlock and key in Thomas’. They nod at each other. No one will know.
Coral beads on a silver chain. Two rings, one her mother’s wedding ring, forged with the letters MM and TP for Marjorie Marr and Thomas Prat. A brooch in the shape of a circle with a sword inside. Every piece made of shining silver. Also, a wool mantle lined with rabbit fur. Agnes imagines these items in Uncle Ninian’s home, hidden away in a box under his bed until he needs them. She remembers how he’d come to her house over the years, trying to do all the things that a legal guardian is supposed to do: petting her on the head and asking if she was being fed and clothed properly, sitting down with her to teach her how to read and do accounts, only to get up from the table in the next moment. And she’d follow him like a puppy, playing the game with him of entering each room and locating valuables that she’d help him carry to his horse. He’d take anything from woven tapestries to sets of silver spoons.
‘You’re a good girl, ’ he’d say, quickly looking away as he climbed into the saddle. ‘God bless you, Agnes.’
Slowly but surely, he’d emptied her deceased parents’ house of books, jewellery, kitchen utensils, even furniture. In the final years before Agnes turned twenty-one, her nurse had to use a single pot to cook their meals. They shared between them one pillow to sleep on. What Ninian needed the money for, she didn’t know then. Orphans don’t get to ask their guardians what they use their inheritance for. It was assumed by the town officials that he, being her father’s brother, would act in the interest of the family estate. A young heiress was to listen, obey, and eventually learn. So she did.
Only her mother’s goods did Ninian leave untouched over the years, as though the striking red colour of the coral beads were keeping him away. They invoked the mysteries of God Almighty – Agnes had thought so herself when as a young girl she’d seen them first on her grandmother’s wrist, then on her mother’s. That’s why she, now twenty-one and a week old, is surprised to come home and find these items gone. Ninian’s key is on the table.
‘Very well, ’ Agnes says to her nurse, who’s clasping her heart at the loss of the goods, ‘soon my pockets will be overflowing with the rents from my tenants, now they pay me and not him. You’ll see, when I find the most expensive lawyer in town, it’s not you that will be crying for help.’
In court, Uncle Ninian is a pale shadow of who he was when he first became her guardian. He was self-important then, the legal representative of one of the richest girls in town, a head full of hair and words dancing on his lips like a poet. Whenever someone trespassed onto her estates, he went straight to court, and took her with him, as if he needed a tender girl to witness him act the hero part. Now, they sit opposite each other in the court room, him bald, thin and nervous, her red-cheeked and calm. Her lawyer speaks a language of carefully calculated blame:
‘Ninian Prat has owed a debt to every single one of us at one point or another. We all know the state of his repute in the burgh. We all know he’s a drunk and a gambler. We all know Agnes Prat will have to spend the coming years restoring her parental home to the state it was before her parents’ death, God have mercy on their souls. So I ask you, do you trust this man when he claims that Marjorie Marr’s treasures rightfully belong to him?’
It’s almost too easy. Uncle Ninian has made so many enemies in the burgh, boasting too widely of his influence over the town’s wealthiest child, and making too many promises he’s not kept. In the bustling street outside the tollbooth, Agnes ends up walking home behind her uncle. The crowd at the Market Cross parts to let him through, like he’s a leper among saints. He keeps his head down until he disappears behind a corner.
The following Friday, Ninian doesn’t come to court to hand over the goods or provide evidence for why he should have them. The case is postponed another week, but with the same result. Agnes sends her nurse to his home, suddenly unwilling to send the lawyer to insult her uncle further. But the nurse returns with a report of an empty house where there’s not so much as a pillow to sleep on, save for a single item, left on the threshold wrapped in cloth: Marjorie Marr’s coral beads.
‘Where do you suppose he’s gone?’ Agnes rotates the beads around her wrist.
‘To Hell, if there’s justice, ’ her nurse says. ‘And there’ll always be justice, the court has shown us this.’
Agnes agrees, but when she goes to sit by the window with her mother’s beads, she’s uncertain. Each bead that she touches with her fingers is a reminder of something men of the law rarely speak of. Mercy. Compassion. Redemption. She feels at once too young to understand these words, and far too old.
aberdeen registers 