Adventurous

Why do people play? And in what contexts? How are protagonists portrayed in games? With the special exhibition "Choose your Player. Game Worlds from Dice to Pixel", the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen explores the phenomenon of games as a cultural medium.

For several years now, the museum has always offered a virtual extension to its special exhibitions under the name "debatorial®". For "Choose Your Player", the web app is now taking on this role. It allows visitors to experience one of five exciting pen & paper adventures directly in the browser and optimized for smartphones. And discover the exhibition along the way.

As is usual with a game, users can first generate their own 3D character to match the design of the exhibition and create a username using a playful mechanism. The resulting image can be downloaded, shared and published on a display wall in the museum. Visitors can thus immortalize themselves on "the wall" in digital form. 

Five solo adventures can be played. The program uses a question-and-answer mechanism to help users decide whether they want to play the game as an explorer, scientist, journalist, hacker or child. The actual stories are presented in a chat-like format, codes have to be searched for, puzzles solved and points collected. But beware, lives can also be lost.

Technically, the new debatorial® is consistently based on the headless CMS strapi. We also use this for the zeppelin-museum.de website. This makes it very easy to maintain the stories in two languages. The system is highly performant and can be flexibly adapted and expanded at a later date.

The stories were written by Orkenspalter TV, the gaming community project centered around pen & paper role-playing games, live action role-playing (LARP) and comics, and is part of a larger story that will only fully unfold once all the solo adventures have been played through. 

‍Currently,the web app is the digital equivalent of the analog, but in the future it will even be possible to experience a purely online adventure without visiting Friedrichshafen. Until then, however, and in general, we definitely recommend taking a trip to Lake Constance. It's worth it - and we say this from our own experience - even if you haven't been particularly interested in zeppelins so far. That can quickly change and the museum also offers much more, we promise.