The Hajj Trail:
A Journey Through the Past Inspired by the Classic Video Game

As an educator, I am constantly trying to innovate classroom instruction using digital humanities tools. One recent example is “The Hajj Trail”, an online interactive game I made with a historian of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. The game is based off travel accounts and early modern pilgrimage narratives and is designed to be used in the classroom as a different medium in which students can interact with the history of the early modern Muslim world. Currently in its beta stage, we hope to add improvements to the game throughout the coming year. The first stage of the game takes students along the hajj route from Istanbul to Mecca in the year 1671 with events, locations, and time of travel all based off various pilgrimage narratives. The educational goal of the game is to spark student interest in the history of the region by introducing them to the images, stories, and locations related to travel in the early modern Muslim World and the Ottoman Empire in particular. The game acts like a choose your own adventure as you make choices along the way on what to do and which roads to take. Historical background information is added to each stop and includes quotes from primary sources to give students a sense of what living and traveling in the early modern world was like.

For the game, I created a dynamic mapping system which tracks the players progress and the stops they chose to visit. To see the map, play the game and chose the “Progress” button on the left, which looks like this:

The mapping system was created using Leaflet, an open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps.