Interdisciplinary collaboration was the name of the game this year with Aurum, the collaborative VR experience between the Robbins Library and Studio X. Having made solid progress on gameplay, with two recipes and a full alchemy lab in-game, we turned to a new question: who exactly is this alchemist we play as?
So, we got to work worldbuilding. “As both a former Robbins employee and former story team lead, I was very excited to really develop Aurum’s storyline,” project lead Liz Hogrefe '24 said. “There’s so much story to tell about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the capabilities of XR help remove a lot of the stuffiness that can sometimes discourage people from engaging with these histories.”
This year, the primary story developer was a new addition to the Aurum team: Juliana Csizmadia '27, a researcher in Robbins that worked closely with the students in Studio X to develop the player character Kiana into a fixture in the titular town of Aurum. Juliana devised romances, economic crises, and murder plots throughout the town — all of which would involve someone seeking Kiana’s alchemical talents.
Csizmadia sees these kinds of stories as key to engaging new people in historical archives, something she’s passionate about as a double major in Classical Civilizations and Archaeology, Technology, and Historical Structures. “The game itself makes learning about alchemy more fun because it’s interactive, and people can use it from wherever instead of having to come see the manuscript in specifically this library,” Csizmadia said. Plus, “people who are interested in video games but not exactly archives might have some kind of interest sparked while doing something they enjoy.”
Building a rich world for Kiana (and subsequently players of Aurum) to inhabit has been a knockout example of what is possible when we work to bridge the gap between organizations that might not typically consider XR as a delivery method with the XR knowledge of our team.
