Game tells story of early Chinese-Canadians
A Richmond-based software firm has helped develop a free online educational game showcasing the life and times of early Chinese-Canadians in B.C.
Gold Mountain Quest is a game developed by Catstatic Interactive for a multi-disciplinary project led by University of B.C. aimed at shining light on the forgotten histories of people in Canada.
It's aimed at students in Grades 5 to 7—providing a unique history lesson about Chinese-Canadians in 1911. Players experience what life would have been like as a youth a century ago in B.C., while learning about historical artifacts and having fun.
"The lives of the characters in the game would have experienced a similar lifestyle to the early Chinese who settled in Steveston in Richmond's early days," said Josh Kuo, creative director at Catstatic, which developed the game based on a model created by university students at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver.
Designed to be completed in under one hour, the game is set in a typical western Canadian town, and characters and artifacts are true-to-life, having been drawn from historical data.
The game is part of the Chinese Canadian Stories project, led by Henry Yu, associate history professor at UBC.
“The stories of Chinese Canadians have either been left out of our history, or the stories we hear are often about the terrible things that were done to them, rather than what they were doing," said Yu in a news release.
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