Year: 2018 (released only in Europe for PS4)

Developer: Steel Minions (Sheffield Hallam’s University Game Studio)

Website: steelminions.com

Genre: educational, scientific, historical

Yesterday night I played The Chantry. It’s an educational narrative game in VR promoted by the REVEAL European research project involving 6 EU partners including Dr Jenner’s House (scientific museum). The REVEAL project is funded under the European’s Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, and receives external project support from Sony Interactive Entertainment under the PlayStation First Academic Development Programme.

I appreciate games to convey serious, cultural and educational topics, it’s a not boring, dynamic and compelling way to learn something new, important and constructive. Obviously educational games are a bit didascalic, they have to be realistic and scientific; you have to read several documents, watch historical videos, etc. It’s a bit like entering a multimedia museum or be part of a documentary film; they teach you lessons requesting curiosity, active effort and attention. No Pindaric flights through your immagination, emotions and feelings are moderate. Nevertheless they are really good entertainment, mind training, very useful, precious, constructive, fundamental.

By the way the most of times I prefer art for expressing deep contents; art is fictive, imaginative, romantic; it plays with our feelings and emotions through breathtaking stories. Art is not accurate reflection of reality, it can even sugarcoat or twist the real facts, sometime it can be dangerous, it can deceive our perception. It is something to handle with care, not so easy to manage, but really powerful. Usually people are prepared to receive the same message more through art than through real facts. It’s the same principle at the root of religions: humans fear to face the hard facts, they prefer to believe in abstract and metaphysical ideas indulging their hopes!

Nevertheless I find really funny to play educational experiences like Attentat 1942 or The Chantry. I found the latter very intriguing, it has kept me awake for 3 hours at night. I decided to give it a chance because of its very low price around 5 euro/dollars. For being a five bucks games, it has really good graphics (compared to other VR games) and remarkable voice acting. I had no idea what was waiting for me, I did know nothing about the game, except it was an educational title centered on exploration in order to reconstruct real historical facts. I’ve to admit I felt completely immersed while trying to figure out the whole story. I was particularly surprised and pleased by the main topic: The Chantry tell us about vaccines!

Nowadays it’s a very debated topic in Europe and perhaps also in USA. Some diseases, which we thought to be eradicated, are coming back, e.g. measles. Vaccination coverage of population has been decreasing in recent years, because many nations removed the mandatory vaccination. Now they have reinstated it for containing the contagion; no epidemic alarm, very few cases of disease, but we need to increase the vaccination coverage for eradicating again the disease. It could sound weird to you, but there are a lot of ignorant people thinking that vaccines are harmful, causing autism and other health problems. Fluff! They see conspirations everywhere, in their opinion vaccines are a form of speculation by pharmaceutical companies. Well, the fact is that any medication has controindications; to be honest, even the food we eat has a lot of controindications varying from person to person. Ignorant people has no memory of the past with no vaccines where epidemics were the first cause of death; they ignore that pharmaceutical companies cannot do speculation through vaccines, they are sold at the production price, no earnings are allowed. Oh, by the way, I’m not getting paid by pharmaceutical companies; I tried to contact Novartis, Bayer, etc. “Hello, I’m writing an article defending and promoting your vaccines; could I receive some funding?”. Nobody answered! What a pity, Video Games & Art project needs funding! 🙂 🙂 🙂

The Chantry tell us the story of the first vaccine ever, the smallpox vaccine. In the eighteenth century 400000 european people was dying every year for smallpox infection. Still in 1967, 15 milion people all over the world contracted the desease and 2 milion died. Smallpox made a lot of people blind. It was really an ugly disease. Thanks to a massive campaign of mandatory vaccination, the infection was finally eradicated all over the world in 1979. Today we fear it can be used as biological weapons by terrorists.

The smallpox vaccine was the first vaccine ever to be discovered, thanks to the experiments of dr. Edward Jenner ( UK, 1749 – 1823). The Chantry tell us the whole story in a compelling way, as only Video Games and VR can do. It’s a sort of investigation: you have to collect documents and clues scattered through the old Jenner’s House (today a scientific museum) and solve some puzzles, in order to progress and understand who the doctor was and what he did. As just said in other articles, I love when you can take some real step around the virtual rooms; not every VR game allows for it, The Chantry does!

Story itself is very interesting, you can feel all the horror generated by the disease. Jenner made a lot of weird and controversial experiments before to succeed; scientific studies was not so tolerated at the time by religious beliefs, and the medical community at first was very skeptical about dr Jenner’s work.

Well, maybe it would have been better an artistic approach, a fictive and romantic adventure set in the middle of the smallpox epidemic; but I can assure you that The Chantry has completely caught my attention for three hours. I’m very happy to have learned a lot of important things concerning history, science and vaccines; and I’m very proud to write about such important, cultural and actual topics thanks to Video Games and not movies! 🙂 Long life to artistic and educationl games! And to VR of course! If you’re a VR nerd like me, don’t miss The Chantry! 🙂