KNOWLEDGE STRANGE SICKNESS

The story behind a historical game about an eerily familiar pandemic

Historical games can be educational, whether or not they’re designed to be, but rarely are they this relatable. As the opening of Strange Sickness puts it, “You’ve read the stories of kings, queens, knights and bishops. You’ve heard tales of the battles they fought, the schemes they spun and the castles they built and defended. But this is not one of their stories.” It is, in fact, taken from Aberdeen’s ‘common book’, a record kept for hundreds of years that documents the lives of ordinary people and the impact of events on their day-to-day existence. In this case, taking us back to the 1490s, and the imminent arrival of the Great Plague. And it’s impossible not to see the parallels between what absorbing piece of interactive fiction and life in 2022.

The project began, however, before COVID-19arrived on our doorstep. Historian William Hepburn, who has a PhD follows in this in medieval Scottish history, was tasked with looking into Aberdeen’s early civic records, one of the most comprehensive collections of town records from the era in Europe. “I worked on a major research project that transcribed this and made them into a digital, searchable resource. And on that project, we had a lot of conversations – even with the work we were doing there – to make them more accessible. It was still going to be hard for a lot of people to get something out of this, but we knew from looking at them that there was a lot of really interesting stuff in there.”