Dungeons & Documents
Ellen Fanning Feargal Keenan Lena Boese
Dungeons & Documents is a two to four player competitive board game that is loosely inspired by popular games like The Settlers of CATAN and Snakes and Ladders. The lore behind our game, which combines a medieval setting with modern, digital technology, is essential to attracting players to the game and contextualizing the purpose and journey motif of the game. 

The story of Dungeons & Documents is set in the Kingdom of Archeion, which is split into five parts: four provinces, and one central Citadel. The Kingdom has entered a new era of peace after a long and brutal war, the "War for the Cloud", which began after the discovery of a new magic, which allows any kind of document to be replicated and kept in a ‘cloud’. King Codex III, in an effort to bind the provinces together by shared knowledge and community, has ordered that a chosen archivist be sent from each province bearing their land’s most important and treasured documents. In order to reach the Citadel, the archivists must travel over dangerous terrain full of threats that can weaken and even destroy their precious digital collections. For them to succeed, they must draw upon their knowledge of digital preservation practices so they may triumph over danger and take their place in the Citadel’s Renaissance Library. 

Across the course of the game, players have to keep preserving the three digital objects they have in their possession by doing backups (adding 'lives') and adding metadata (adding value). By linking backups to the common concept of 'lives' from video games and metadata to the concept of value, which is tallied up at the end of the game and which determines the winner, the game manages to incorporate digital preservation terms into game logic. Through the use of these simplified concepts and the journey motif, the game communicates the following basic digital preservation principles: the ongoing nature of digital preservation, the importance of backups, as well as the fact that the more metadata an object has, the more valuable it is.
communications and advocacy for dp start 2 preserve