Immersive Learning in Historical Contexts
A stick and a stake
For King James’s sake!
If you won’t give me one,
I’ll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
English Folk Verse (c.1870)
Do you recognise the snippet of the poem? You might not as this is not the most well known part of the verse. In fact, it’s the first six lines that will probably be more recognisable to you. Do you, “remember, remember the fifth of November?”
The conspiracy to blow up the English Parliament at the beginning of the 17th Century is now commonly referred to as The Gunpowder Plot. It is a story that is known best in the UK, but one that has spread globally thanks to its re-telling in literature, cinema, and many other creative works.
But how do you take such a well-known story and create an immersive learning experience from it? The answer to that has been beautifully and imaginatively realised in The Gunpowder Plot Immersive Experience at the Tower of London.
In this article I’ll be using the design of the experience to discuss some techniques for including real historical contexts and stories in immersive learning. To do that I’ll try to avoid spoilers for specific situations in the experience, but if you are planning a trip then think carefully before reading any further. At this point I’ll also note that I have no connection to the experience, other than being someone who paid to visit it.
The objective of this article is to highlight some of the challenges in working with historically accurate stories. We’ll also explore some of the solutions that the team behind The Gunpowder Plot Immersive Experience found for them. Or more accurately, what I think their solutions were based on my visit. There are more problems that they overcame than you might imagine!
Why are historically accurate experiences tough to create?
Capturing historical accuracy presents many challenges when creating immersive learning experiences. However, you might initially think that creating them is easy. After all, the story has already been written for you.
If you’ve read our other articles on immersive learning you’ll know that narrative is critical for learner engagement. In the design process it is typically written after we have defined our learning objectives.
In this section we’ll explore three key hurdles that need to be overcome when dealing with historical events:
- Existing knowledge of the narrative
- Bias in commonly accepted historical accounts
- Inclusion of challenging themes
The first of these challenges is that the participants in our experience may already know bits of the story, in our example they will probably know the ending. So how do we make their experience accurate but also exciting and still leave room for plot twists and suspense?
Luckily we’re not the first people to need to solve this problem and we can borrow lots of ideas from books and film. For example, we can focus on the stories of the people who are adjacent to the story but are not the main protagonists. We can also use gaps in the commonly told version of the story to create things that weren’t captured in the historical record.
We can also use agency to give participants the chance to change the story of those secondary characters. Another technique is to make the choices you give them, rather that the outcomes of those choices, the focus of our learning at the end. This is one example where I’m not going to reveal how the creators of The Gunpowder experience did this. However, I will say that they handled it very well.
Our second challenge with historical events is how accurate the story we are telling actually is. If our experience is about learning then we don’t want to be teaching something that is inaccurate or biased. Have you ever heard the following expression?
“History is written by the victors.”
The quote is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but its origins are probably much older. So interestingly, the quote could in fact now be viewed as a commentary on itself. Anyway, lets not get deflected by this sidenote and return to our original train of thought.
What the quote is trying to tell us is that many historical stories we think we know come served with a big chunk of bias on the side and a neat bow on top. So we must be careful not to see just one side when we tell a story. To do this we need to experience the world from both the winner and the loser’s perspective (as these are defined by our modern telling of the story).
In this immersive experience you get to do exactly that. You are sucked into a world of treachery, where at times you might feel like you are playing for both sides. It’s a world where everyone has their own motive and their own moral compass. Bouncing between the two sides of a divide is a great way to understand both of them and allow a richer and less biased retelling of the story.
Being asked to make an ethical decision where someone always wins and someone always loses is another great way to explore a topic in a learning context. This is something you are asked to do here. I won’t reveal what that decision is, but I’ll go as far as saying that it has real meaning in the context of your story.
And that brings us to our third tricky topic. History is full of bad stuff. Violence and death. People treating each other badly. Lots of behaviours we no longer tolerate.
Now, we’re not living in a perfect world today but go back in time and almost every story will quickly touch difficult themes. In an entertainment attraction for a general audience, those need to be explored carefully if we still want to do justice to the reality of our story.
Luckily we live in a world where Horrible Histories exists. If you want to work out how to talk about difficult subjects with children and young people then you have more than enough material to learn from. I suspect the creators of this this experience are well versed in that Universe, as they also tackle difficult subjects thoughtfully.
The subjects of just cause, religion, persecution, torture and death are all in there. They aren’t sugar coated or hidden away, but their treatment means that this is still a family friendly experience.
While these are three pretty big challenges there are others you will face when dealing with history. For example, language evolves over time and if the actors used contemporary language, a modern audience wouldn’t understand them. Think carefully about where the boundaries to your authenticity are set.
So you may start your experience design without needing to write a story, but you’ve got a lot of work to do before you can work with it. As designers, we’ve not even begun to think about how our story can be translated into an immersive experience and yet we’ve already had to navigate some huge obstacles.
Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer your experience to be about alternate dimensions or fluffy bunnies?
How do you immerse people in the 17th Century?
To make it feel like the 17th Century you want people to feel like they’ve travelled back in time. So how do you do that within the constraints of your experience? The tough questions keep coming thick and fast, don’t they!
At first glance a time travel mechanic may seem like the most difficult thing to create. Luckily there are many ways of doing it, although not all are as stylish as hitting 88mph in a DeLorean. All we really need is a simple experiential device to help us here. Something understated and subtle can be just as effective as jumping into the TARDIS and madly flipping switches.
In this experience the time travel device was simple but worked really well. The major reason for this was that on the other side of it you really felt like you were where you had been told you were going. But no spoilers here I’m afraid.
Getting people to think they travelled back in time is one thing, but how do you keep them immersed?
This is where actors can help. The characters can tell you their stories and in doing so the power of storytelling shifts your focus to them, not the physical world around you. Once they ask you to help them, their story becomes your story. You gain agency and this is more powerful for maintaining immersion than any set.
And just to be clear, the sets are amazing. You’re in the actual vaults of the actual Tower of London and that’s a very cool place to be! But also don’t be fooled, a huge amount of work has gone into transforming that space into the world you see. Just one additional challenge of working in a venue with such historical significance.
As well as keeping people immersed in the past its also important how you bring them back at the end. All to often this is done poorly and you are asked to step suddenly back into the real world. Here again there is a clever use of technology.
The same VR technology that is used for some of the action scenes* is also used to perform a few interesting functions at the end of the experience.
* I intentionally leave out details of how this tech is used to deliver wow moments during the experience.
Firstly, it’s used to resolve the outcome of the story (this is key). It is also used to show where the popular culture version of the story has its origins. By showing this we are also introduced to the traditions, or should that be myths, about the story that we know today. There is time travel happening during all this btw, bringing you back to the here and now.
This technique enables you to land back gently in the present day without the jarring jolt that is observed in other experiences. But this approach also results in another interesting technique being possible.
It creates an in-between world for the participants to experience, somewhere between the past and the present. After exiting the VR you are no longer fully immersed in the 17th Century, but you are still in the historic part of the venue. Therefore, you are still directly connected to what you just saw, heard, smelled and felt. This is the space where the learning is re-enforced. But how is that done?
How do you get people to remember what they learned?
In a previous article we talked about transformation through immersive learning. In it we discussed the final stage of a learning journey, the follow through. In learning contexts this is about ensuring the learner contextualises what they have experienced and in doing so further embeds their learning.
In the in-between world at the end of the experience we are asked to reflect on the journey we just took. This is a very useful tool for delivering learning in historical experiences.
We find out that the characters we interacted with were based on real people. We learn that some have had their names changed, which as an aside is actually a nice trick to help people remember them.
We also learn about which parts of the experience were based on historical evidence. This helps to remove any doubts about how accurate what we encountered was, whilst creating bite-sized chunks of “truth” that are easier to remember.
We are also left to reflect on a single theme, one that encapsulates the answer to the overarching question about creating historical experiences. How do we re-tell such a well-known story?
An answer to that question is to provide one big question for the participants to answer during their experience. In this case it’s whether violence is ever justified. But instead of discovering that by reading a book or being taught it in a classroom, we get to live through real events and arrive at our own answer. By learning in this way that answer is also highly tailored to our own personal belief system.
This big question also draws us closer to present day events where we are asked the same thing in a different context. The stories we hear today are also smothered in the same biases that we see in historical re-telling. However, one thing our experience in the 17th Century shows us is that there are never victors when violence is involved.
How do we summarise everything we’ve covered?
We know that immersive learning is powerful. We know that when used well it can deliver amazing results. As we’ve seen with this experience, learning about history through an immersive lens is possible, but to do that there are a lots of challenges to overcome.
The creators of The Gunpowder Plot Immersive Experience have solved these challenges in very creative ways. They have created an entertaining experience that also delivers effective learning. That is tough to do and in this case it has doubtless taken a long time to realise owing to the complexities involved.
I’ve tried to reveal some of the methods used without creating spoilers. Hopefully you were able to learn from them while still being able to enjoy the experience. If you want to find out more, then I recommend going to explore the story for yourself at the Tower of London.
And if you take only one thing from this article, remember that the poem we started with is more true than ever when immersive learning is involved, as now “gunpowder treason will never be forgot.”
Martyn is a founder of chronyko who have over 15 years experience building and running immersive training and skills development experiences. He has seen first-hand how immersive learning can have a measurable impact. He is a passionate believer in how we can all learn from these experiences to better support lifelong learning for everyone.
