Tempus Alatum: Playing Through the Branches of the Timeline

Abstract

Modern history education has largely moved away from rote learning, including the memorisation of dates of
particular events. However, in order to understand causal explanation, students still need a good grasp of chronology.
Consequently, this is an area where history students currently tend to be particularly weak. In the game Tempus Alatum,
chronological time is visualised through a combination of a timeline and a technology tree. These two elements are both
constructed in game play using cards. The cards, in turn, are based on specific course content. The timeline element uses
cards to place historical events in chronological order, in relation to each other. Timelines have seen implementation in
historical trivia as well as entertainment games such as the recent Hitster series. Technology trees are hierarchical, visual,
and often cyclical graphs. They have been commonly used in strategy video games like Civilization to represent the
progression of research and development, but were also originally conceived using cards. This paper presents and discusses
a gameplay design for a card driven game that is aligned to concrete learning objectives in an introductory history course,
through the combination of these two elements. With the use of the Design Science Research framework this study had a
focus on the initial phases of 1) Explicating the problem, and 2) to define the requirements for the Tempus Alatum game.
Data were collected in a combination of a literature review, a study of earlier development projects at the university, and a
game analysis. The suggested game design is trans-medial, and the initial analogue card game is intended for later
implementation as an analogue, digital, and/or hybrid game. The fundamental purpose is to create a game to re-invigorate
a neglected, but crucial component in online university courses on history. Moreover, the suggested game is intended as a
tool for self-learning with a concrete alignment to specific learning objectives in higher education history courses.