Save the City! Interactive game of EIT Digital Master School student part of memorial year of Dordrecht

Six hundred years ago, one of the world's worst floods in history threatens the existence of the Dutch city Dordrecht and its inhabitants. 2021 is the year to commemorate this event. The city uses an escape room-like gaming app called SavetheCity! to teach young people about this event. The start-up Interactive City Discovery, co-founded by EIT Digital Master School student Stanley Kelder, is the brain behind this app that is launched in March 2021.

Kelder says the app is innovative. "It brings together the physical and the digital world. Users get a quest to solve in the app while wandering through the streets of Dordrecht. In so doing, they learn to discover the city based on its historical narrative. You cannot solve the game on your sofa: you have to go to the city in real life."

The origin of the idea arose just before Kelder started his studies at the double degreed EIT Digital Master School programme Human Computer Interaction and Design. He and his friend were touring across another Dutch city, Maastricht. "We like to explore cities. Therefore, we bought a city puzzle at the tourist office. We got an envelope with paper cards in it. We enjoyed doing it: you are outside, and it is a fun way of getting to know a city. We learned more about the city than we would otherwise. We wanted to do this in Amsterdam as well. We thought there should be an app for this. To our surprise, there was none. Then we thought: let's build one ourselves."

With the user in mind, Kelder started coding the app and sharing design ideas with his friend. "My friend helped to think about the puzzles we wanted to embed in the app. We went back and forth with our ideas. We made progress with baby steps. In Finland, I was eligible for studying a class in gaming. I learned that the story behind a game is one of the most important success factories. If the story is not convincing, then the game is poor. To create a convincing story, we decided to a third friend to join our fellowship: he loves creating stories. These insights led to the creation of the escape room as we have developed it now."

During the process, the idea of the app had shifted from a puzzle app to explore new cities, to an exciting escape room like game based on a true historical story to not just learn about the city but also relive the becoming of cities. In the app, the user is tasked to save the city. Even though this Saint Elizabeth flood happened 600 years ago, it wasn't the latest and will not be the last; the Dutch cities in these areas are built below the water level. Water safety is still high on the cities agenda. The gamer in the escape room needs to help Saint Elizabeth to prevent a new flood. Because in the escape room assignments are made to find certain emblems on buildings, users need to wander through the town. In the future, Kelder says, this might be extended with augmented reality, but for the moment this is too difficult and too expensive to develop, he says. "Pokémon Go is an inspiration for the success the app can be", Kelder says.