Play your way through McGill's spaces and rare and special collections! These games open up new and interactive ways to explore the treasures in the collections. In keeping with the library’s exploration of Serious Play, these games move seamlessly from historical moments, objects, and characters to our current virtual world. Read more about the Library Game development.
Raising Spirits
A detailed, fun – and very mysterious – online orientation game. Crafted and launched by McGill Library alongside Paul Darvasi and Gargamel Studio, the game lets players explore McGill’s campus as well as its long history.
Put on your thinking caps, and take a leap into the unknown. This game is sure to raise spirits – yours and perhaps others that have long been at rest.
Raising Spirits: Part 2
The Pathologist awaits. Are you ready?
Explore the second half of the McGill Library Orientation game. A mysterious corruption plagues the McGill campus, disrupting websites, scrambling resources, and warping spaces.
Find your guides and puzzle your way through 3D photospheres of familiar library spaces. Find the pathologist to help stop the poison’s spread!
Quiz That So?
How well do you know McGill history? When did the first female astrophysicist make waves at McGill? Who was the “Man of Bronze?
Take on the Quiz That So challenge and find out those answers and more. This game explores some of the lesser-known stories in the McGill archives. Take on the trivia challenge and explore the McGill campus with the help of your guide, Max McMartlet.
See McGill through a different lens as you discover the stories of some extraordinary McGillians.
Game Development
An interdisciplinary team of librarians, archivists, game designers, artists, and developers worked together to design and build these games. Key collaborators were Paul Darvasi, and Elisa Navarro Chinchilla of Gargamel Studio.
The first two games, Raising Spirits Part 1 and 2, set players on a journey across time and digital space in a series of multimedia puzzles that doubly reveal and obscure, leading to a mystery interwoven with McGill’s past, present, and future. These two long-form narrative escape room games deal with a disruption on campus where players have to save the day and rid McGill's virtual campus of an unknown and mysterious scourge.
Quiz That So?, the third game continues to animate the Library’s rare collections and spaces with a trivia game with a twist. This time around, archivists, graphic designers, librarians, programmers, and students have created a colourful, 1950s-inspired, trivia game that uncovers remarkable and under-told McGill stories while taking players on a search to find seven McGill experts in spaces throughout a virtual campus.
