The British Library Ventures Off the Map The Off The Map competition is a collaboration between the British Library and GameCity, a videogame cultural hub and festival run in partnership with Nottingham Trent University. It challenges higher education students based in the UK to create videogames inspired by the British Library’s collections. The 2014 Off The Map competition accompanied the British Library’s exhibition “Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination”. Curators selected maps, sounds, text and illustrations to provide three Gothic themes for entrants to base their videogames on. These were author William Beckford’s home Fonthill Abbey, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death and the seaside town of Whitby, which features in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The 2014 winning entry Nix, created by three students from the University of South Wales, invites gamers to reconstruct Fonthill Abbey via a series of puzzles in a spooky underwater world. It uses Oculus Rift, a revolutionary virtual reality headset for 3D gaming, to enable the user to virtually explore the Abbey. You can see a flythrough of their game here. For 2015, students are currently working on their entries for “Alice’s Adventures Off the Map”, as the competition accompanies the Library’s forthcoming exhibition, opening in November, which celebrates Alice in Wonderland’s 150th birthday. Stella Wisdom is a Digital Curator at the British Library, where her role explores and promotes new methods of research using both born digital content and digitised collections. In 2013 Stella co-founded with GameCity a competition for Higher Education videogame design students called Off the Map, where students are challenged to create videogames inspired by British Library collections. Stella has worked for the British Library for nine years and prior to working in Digital Research, she managed Collection Storage at the British Library’s site at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. Stella has also previously worked at the Library and Information Statistics Unit based at Loughborough University, the Warburg Institute Library and the National Library of Scotland.

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Off the Map videogame competition for 2013
Three sub themes:
• Stonehenge, including a proposed plan to rebuild
Stonehenge
• Pyramids at Giza
• 17th Century London, including a survey map made
months after the Great Fire of 1666

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C.J. Visscher, London , 1616 (detail) Maps C.5.a.6

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John Leake, An exact surveigh of the streets lanes and churches contained within the
ruines of the City of London, 1667. Maps Crace port 2.58

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2013 winning team: Pudding Lane Productions from De Montfort
University, Leicester who created an interpretation of 17th Century London
http://youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0 (Flythrough starts at 0:50)

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2013 winning team: Pudding Lane Productions from De Montfort
University, Leicester who created an interpretation of 17th Century London
http://youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0 (Flythrough starts at 0:50)

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Gothic theme, tie-in with the Library's exhibition
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination
3 October 2014 - 20 January 2015
• Fonthill Abbey
Home of William Beckford, author of Vathek
• Edgar Allan Poe’s
Masque of the Red Death
• Whitby and its association
with Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula
Off the Map 2014

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Image from Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey, John Rutter, 1823

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Image from Delineations of
Fonthill and its Abbey,
John Rutter, 1823

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Model of Fonthill Abbey in the exhibition

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2014 winning team: Gothulus Rift, University of South Wales
Created a Fonthill Abbey inspired game called Nix using Oculus Rift
Blog: http://nixgamedevblog.blogspot.co.uk
YouTube flythrough: http://youtu.be/8ESieZO4VHw

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2014 winning team: Gothulus Rift, University of South Wales
Created a Fonthill Abbey inspired game called Nix using Oculus Rift
Blog: http://nixgamedevblog.blogspot.co.uk
YouTube flythrough: http://youtu.be/8ESieZO4VHw

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View of the coast by Whitby, Francis Jukes, 1804

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2014 second winning entry: Team Flying Buttress from De Montfort University
https://youtu.be/P6DLOZA5AGw

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2014 second winning entry: Team Flying Buttress from De Montfort University
https://youtu.be/P6DLOZA5AGw

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Harry Clarke illustration for
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story,
The Masque of the Red Death

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2014 third winning entry: Team Shady Agents from University of
South Wales, with their game Beneath The Crimson Moon
https://youtu.be/m3eM3daPm9U

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Alice’s Adventures Off the Map
Part of the British Library's celebrations
for the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland
http://gamecity.org/alices-adventures-off-the-map/
Off the Map 2015

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Some work in progress: The Wondering Lands of Alice
Team Off our rockers:
Amber Jamieson, Braden May, Dan Bullock, Denzil Forde, Freddy Canton & Luke Day
https://youtu.be/uuG5sAtEZzs

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Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator
@miss_wisdom
Digital Scholarship Blog
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/