"How can interactive digital storytelling using survivor narratives reshape public understanding and emotional engagement with historical urban disasters?"

Academic Relevance:

• Digital Heritage Theory: The project addresses a core challenge—how to preserve fragile 150-year-old letters while making them more engaging and accessible than traditional archival storage.
• Serious Games turned into Digital Game: Tests whether games can serve legitimate cultural preservation and educational purposes, not just entertainment.
• Historical Narrative Studies: Explores whether authentic survivor voices + interactive participation reshape how people conceptualize historical events.

Societal Relevance:

• Climate & Disaster Resilience: As climate change intensifies urban disasters, understanding how past communities survived becomes actionable knowledge for contemporary cities.
• Intergenerational Memory: With direct survivors aging out, digital games preserve testimonies for generations who won’t have access to living witnesses.
• Educational Crisis: Traditional history teaching fails to engage digital-native learners; games reach audiences who ignore textbooks.
• Raising Awareness: Connects historical and contemporary urban vulnerability through immersive survivor narratives, forcing players to emotionally recognize disaster inequality and modern city fragility.
• Urban Planning & Public Participation: Historical narratives help communities understand why resilience planning matters.

The game serves seven primary target groups, each with distinct needs:

Key User Insight: Each group has different motivations but the same core benefit: understanding the Great Chicago Fire as a systems-level disaster affecting different communities differently, while caring emotionally about survivors' stories.

Through embodied, multi-perspective, emotionally-resonant participation in authentic survivor experiences that progressively builds:

• Systems-level understanding (not facts)
• Durable emotional investment (not intellectual interest)
• Civic responsibility (not passive consumption)

Historical understanding and emotional engagement are not passive absorption of facts, but active co-creation of meaning through interactive participation with authentic survivor voices in spatially and temporally meaningful contexts.

• 1. Angle, P. M. (Ed.). (1971). The Great Chicago Fire. Chicago Historical Society. - link to the book
• 2. Gee, J. P. (2003). "What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy," Computers in Entertainment, 1(1), 20–20.
• 3. Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). "The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721.
• 4. UNESCO. (2003). Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Paris.
• 5. Barsalou, L. W. (2008). "Grounded cognition," Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645.
• 6. Murray, J. H. (2011). Inventing the medium: Principles of interaction design as a cultural practice. MIT Press.
• 7. Larson, E. (2003). The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. Crown Publishers.
• 8. Nagamatsu, T. (2021). "Why does disaster storytelling matter for a resilient society?," Disaster Prevention and Management, 30(2), 234–245.
• 9. Miller, D. L. (1996). City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. Simon & Schuster.
• 10. Unity Technologies. (2024). Unity Manual (Version 2023 LTS). Retrieved from https://docs.unity3d.com/

This section lists the historical images used in the project together with their source links for proper attribution.

1. oldchicagomap.jpg – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
2. 1928watertower.jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire078/
3. 1929watertower.jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire078/
4. 58183-waterworks-1891.jpg – chicagomag.com/.../joseph-kirkland-chicago-fire-photos
5. Court House Shortly.png – https://greatchicagofire.org/item/ichi-64281/
6. Near North Side ruins.png – alamy.com/...near-north-side...
7. Oleary home 2.jpg – http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/6335.html
8. Portland_Block.jpg – https://chicagology.com/rebuilding/rebuilding041/
9. Second Presbyterian Church.jpg – https://glessnerhouse.blogspot.com/2021/08/chicago-fire-stories-part-i-second.html
10. SecondPres church.jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire079/
11. The Lind Block after the Fire; P. B. Greene, Stereograph, 1871.jpg – https://greatchicagofire.org/item/ichi-64152/
12. The Sergeant Building befo.jpg – https://greatchicagofire.org/item/ichi-64373/
13. centralhighschool1857.jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire017/
14. chicago museum before.jpg – https://greatchicagofire.org/item/hb-00888-g2/
15. chicagowatertower1927.jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire078/
16. court house 5.jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire003/
17. court house befo.jpg – https://greatchicagofire.org/landmarks/chamber-of-commerce/
18. court house befor randolph.jpeg – https://greatchicagofire.org/item/ichi-62080/
19. court side city core.jpg – alamy.com/...dearborn-street...
20. courthouse 4july1855hesler.jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire003/
21. fire_background.jpg – https://ssnd.org/the-great-chicago-fire-part-i/
22. modern_history_museum.png – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_History_Museum
23. olary home.jpg – https://greatchicagofire.org/landmarks/oleary-home/
24. old water tower.jpg – https://greatchicagofire.org/item/ichi-06859/
25. ichi-06859 (alt).jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire079/
26. to the people.png – https://archive.org/details/greatchicagofire00angl
27. washington street.jpg – https://greatchicagofire.org/item/ichi-63070/
28. washington street.png – https://greatchicagofire.org/item/ichi-63070/
29. water tower color.jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire078/
30. watertower1871b.jpg – https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire078/
31. chicagohs1886map.jpg - "https://chicagology.com/chicagohs1886map.jpg"