Ottoman History Podcast - On the Hajj Trail

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

with Tyler Kynn hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | Beyond attending classes, reading books, or listening to podcasts, how do people learn about the history of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East and the Islamic world? In this episode, we discuss a gaming project, The Hajj Trail, as one alternative. Like the 1970s educational computer game The Oregon Trail, The Hajj Trail is an interactive simulation of historical Hajj pilgrimages to Mecca. It aims to provide students with an opportunity to interact with 17th century Ottoman social and cultural history through a hypothetical journey on the road to Mecca. Also like its US-based predecessor, the simulation asks participants to make choices along the way, one beset with financial, ecological, and political obstacles. The visuals, music, and situations have been drawn from primary sources gathered by our guest Tyler Kynn, and his collaborators. As the co-founder and current project lead, Kynn sat down with us to talk about creating the The Hajj Trail and how he has used it in the classroom. We discuss the impetus for the project, the mechanics of assembling it, and the learning opportunities that can arise when historians take seriously the potential of pairing education and play. « Click for More »

Games are all about world building and history writing is also all about world building. When you have to code in everything about that place, you have to find what that place looked like, and then you start to understand the hours of travel between these places and the amount of time spent in these places in between these major centers of the Ottoman world, you get a, I think, more of appreciation and more of an interest in sort of how did these places, how were these places shaped by this global network that crossed through their own backyard. There's this notion in game design that you don't play the game, the game plays you. I think it's important for historians to engage with gaming more broadly because if we just

leave it only up to game developers, they're going to obviously do these butchered versions of history that we see all over the place. Hello, this is Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Matt Kazarian. In this episode, we are welcoming... Tyler Kinn, an assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and co-creator of The Hodge Trail. and co-creator of The Hodge Trail. Dr. Kinn will be talking about a project that he and Russ Gastia have put together in the past few years, this online game, The Hodge Trail. Mirroring some aspects of the 1970s educational simulation, The Oregon Trail, The Hodge Trail draws on some aspects

that may be familiar to a number of our millennial listeners who interacted with the classic computer game in the 1990s, the Oregon Trail. We will talk today about the research and rationale behind creating the Hodge Trail. We'll talk a little bit about how exactly the simulation works, and we'll also talk about how it can be utilized to teach histories of the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic world, and the Middle East. We also have a green screen behind you, it seems. Just in case. Just in case.

We can actually have some reenacted Hot Shirt scenes right here. That's right, that's right. Yeah, it's perfect. I'd like to be Mihrim Asultan. You can be... So, anyway. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the project itself. So, what is the Hodge Trail? What's the object of the game? Yeah, so, once again, thanks for having me on to talk about this project. The Hodge Trail is essentially, as you had mentioned, it's loosely based on the Oregon Trail from the 1970s, done in most U.S. classrooms.

Most students that grew up in the 90s are familiar with it because it was basically uploaded onto thousands of computers in schools, public schools across the country. And it's a sort of this project that is attempts to sort of take historical narratives to the Pilgrim's Mecca which largely comes from my own research and my own dissertation work and relay those Pilgrim's narratives into a simulation that students can explore and be introduced to the cultural history of the Ottoman world. There's many ways in which the story itself or sort of playing through the simulation is not really about what happens when you get to Mecca, but about the journey and exploration of sort of the different dynamics of the broader Ottoman world in the 17th century, which is where the simulation is what we prefer to call it, where that is set. All right. So the simulation takes place in the 17th century across the

Ottoman world. Yep. And essentially the student or player will choose a character very similar to the sort of old starting up of the Oregon Trail. They'll choose their character. They'll choose one of three starting points, Sarajevo, Istanbul, and Damascus. And we can talk about why those particular places. And they will then travel from that city all the way to Mecca. There's like a sort of a time limit of like how long they're supposed to get there. Timing is important for the Hajj, right?

Yeah, time is incredibly important. Actually, every single sort of hour that you travel between locations is based off of a early 18th century pilgrimage narrative, a menace-like Hajj of an Ottoman from Sarajevo named Yusuf Rumi, who basically puts in every single stop he went to and how many hours of travel it took him to get there. And so the entire sort of simulation itself is following the actual travel times as best as we could render them that would take you to get there. And I am pleasantly surprised that when a student plays through sort of at a normal pace through the Hodge Trail, they do end up getting to Mecca from Istanbul and the amount of days that it actually that we know from actual historical narratives, that's how long it would take. And so you go from

place to place, encounter events, negative and positive along the way, you go to different cities, you explore the sacred geography of the broader Ottoman world, and eventually the student or player will hopefully get to Mecca, where they will sort of finish the simulation. If they don't succumb to bandits, disease, or bankruptcy. Yeah, there's lots of ways in which one perhaps dies during the simulation. And I, you know, my students always ask me for tips and tricks of how to get through. And I always tell them, you know, we built in those hints into the text of the simulation itself. So, you know, it's their fault in a way if they didn't read properly in many ways. So it encourages close

reading. Yeah. So we talked a little bit about the object of the simulation. Yeah. So what's the goal there? What I want to know is what was your object, yours and Russ's, in creating this simulation? Yeah. So this sort of came about when I was finishing up my graduate work at Yale University, Russ Gastia, who was one of my cohort mates. And I'd always been talking about all these sort of pilgrimage narratives I was reading through my dissertation work on talking about the 17th century Hajj pilgrimage and all these sort of crazy stories these pilgrims talk of being raided by bandits, the lack of water, getting lost in the desert, all these things that

sort of come up in these great historical narratives. And he always said, oh, this sounds a lot like the Oregon Trail. Wouldn't that be easy to code? Prayer phrasing, most likely his quote. And we thought, okay, in 2020, we sort of went together and sort of talked about, okay, we could put this together. We could basically make an educational tool that I was starting teaching my first time. I wanted to have a way that my students could read through historical narratives about the Pilgrim Shemekka, about the Hajj, incorporate into a classroom in a way that felt a little bit more tangible, more impactful than just giving them a primary source to read and hoping that they sort of they get sort of this broader understanding of sort of what travel was like in the 1700 world,

how these texts can introduce you to the cultural history of the broader early modern Ottoman world. And I thought having a simulation had a much better job of doing that and introducing that to students, where rather than sort of reading through a narrative and sort of jumping through stop by stop by stop and be like, oh, well, what do they say about Aleppo? What do they say about Damascus? What do they say about Mecca? Sort of skimming through as you're reading, like all of us do, when you actually have to go through a simulation and go through 10 hours of travel between here, 12 hours of travel in simulation between here and there, and all these sort of minute stops along the way, you get a sense of the broader notion of distance and time and the difficulty

of the travel across the early modern Ottoman world, much more so than just skimming through a few pages of a primary source. And so the goal was to create feeling that the medium of a simulation was a better teaching tool in which to sort of give students a sense of travel, distance, time, the broader cultural context of the Hodge than just simply giving a primary source narrative. And so we started coding together the project in 2020. And something that we thought would be a month or so long ended up being still ongoing process and, you know, learning coding in that process to put this together. I mean, we can talk about the future development of it. But obviously, I always sort of joke that I think I spent more time coding the Hodge trail than I did writing the dissertation, much probably to the chagrin of my advisor. But it was very much a passion project,

and I've seen it in use in classrooms where I think we can talk about further, but I think it's been something that has been helpful for students to reimagine or reshape their imaginary of the Ottoman past. Jumping off of that, let's get a little bit into how exactly it works in terms of the routes, the characters, and how long a typical run

through the simulation takes. Yeah, so there are three main routes that we built in. We started off with starting from Istanbul, where the traditional Ottoman caravan would leave from Uskudar. We eventually added in Damascus as a short playthrough, because we found that through our surveys of people that had playtested from Istanbul to Mecca, they would generally take two to three hours for someone to get through that. And so we made the Damascus starting point, which is where the Shami caravan would leave from as the sort of shorter playthrough, maybe an hour or so that one could get through the process. And then we also then added the for a longer playthrough of generally four hours of if you're really going through everything, you could speed run it in

shorter than that, but from Sarajevo, which I always wanted to add Sarajevo into it because that's where the Hajj narrative that we built the entire route, the main route from all the hours of travel, that account starts from Sarajevo. So to do sort of honor to that text, we wanted to also include these sort of Ottoman Balkans as also a front and center in the narrative as well. What was that text again? That's the Menasikul Hajj by Yusuf Rumi, and it's at the Gazi Husra Beg library in Sarajevo. And so yeah, so we have the main route. There's also side routes that we added in to sort of represent sort of the multiple sacred geographies that overlap in the Ottoman world, the Haji Bektash Shrine in sort of central Cappadocia that pilgrims were talking about going to,

going to Jerusalem. We also added a sea route where some pilgrimage accounts take ships by sea. So we added that as well to basically give the student or players sort of multiple varieties of ways to take to travel through the Ottoman world. And just like when you read Evliya Celebi or any of this famous 17th century Ottoman traveler, whenever he goes to a different city, he always talks first thing, what is the local shrine that one would go to here as sort of the basic understanding of that urban space. And so there's a way in which the player, no matter what route they take, they're going to be exploring some sort of Ottoman built sacred geography of

the early modern world as if they were reading a pilgrimage narrative except they're the one crafting the route of that narrative so there's many different side routes that one can take there's many different ways in which you could play through it multiple times and have very different experiences as you go through the simulation yeah i really liked it when i was playing a little bit before our meeting and there's something very different about interacting in each stop having a set of options do you want to go to the baths do you want to go to the coffee house do you want to go to the imaret do you want to go to wherever there's a huge difference just

having that kind of repeated each time and knowing oh i should go to the imaret if i'm interested in food or i could go visit this dignitary, or I could go visit this shrine. And then the pictures and the illustrations and miniatures and all these things that you include in it are, they're dazzling. And with the texts below, could you talk a little bit about that research process? So the first step was for every stop we wanted to have, each stop or location sort of represents some of the main institutions that one would find in an Ottoman city. And there's places, you know, so you can go to the shrine.

We have the coffee house in every location because it serves a simulation function of providing you find other people to go in your caravan with you. They give you different bonuses, essentially, in sort of the quote unquote game mechanics of it. essentially in sort of the quote-unquote game mechanics of it, but to show the sort of the coffeehouse culture of the Ottoman world, the imaret providing food, the hamam providing health, as it was, you know, connected to healing in different ways in the Ottoman world. So there's ways in which we wanted to incorporate these things. When you come to a place, you can get a sense of how large is this location? Are more of these things available?

We would also base it on the accounts themselves. So if we had a pilgrim going there to that location, look into the account, see, okay, do they say that they saw a shrine here? Do they say that there was a bit large caravanserai here that would have maybe an immorate providing food or charity for pilgrims? What are the things that the accounts actually say

about these locations that we can sort of build them out? And of course, there's places where in major cities, we omit some easy things to happen to you, there is some choice involved in sort of the on the simulation development side, where we're, you know, not going to make it that everywhere you get free things from charity, but rather to reward the players that are sort of going slower on the pace that traditional pilgrims would have followed, they're going to get a little bit more benefits throughout the way. And then on each and every location, we have historical quotes as best as we could find. And it was the greatest scavenger hunt in my mind of all time

to find, you know, for obviously the major cities, Istanbul, Damascus, Aleppo, Konya, you can find a great Ottoman quote describing this place of how someone at the time would see it, that the player can then relate to. So how did someone at the time would see it, that the player can then relate to. So how did someone at the time see this place? How did they imagine it? But for some of the places in between, it was quite the journey to find historical accounts. I had to reach into 19th century European travel logs to central Anatolia just to find how does someone describe this small town or this village in central Anatolia, and then pairing those historical quotes with as best we could source historical images with a sort of a

priority list of if we could find Ottoman miniature, we put that first. If we can't find Ottoman miniature, we jump to a European painting. If we can't find a painting, a miniature or something of the exact place, then we sort of go to a photograph maybe from late 19th century. And there's a few of those that are, you know, I don't like having the photographs in there of some places and it hurts my soul every time I see that we had to put one in. But it's because sort of finding sort of descriptions or visualizations to give the player, the student to basically help them build a new imaginary of how they see the Ottoman world, the place to start.

The whole idea of the Hodge Trail is that it's not going to be the end-all be-all of what students would see of the early modern Ottoman world, but rather an entryway, a way in which they could get curious about the Ottoman world. Maybe they're going through and they see images of Ottoman miniature paintings in Eskişehir or Adana, and they're like, hey, I thought that was really interesting. And there's links to go to find that image or find where that text comes from and maybe they can delve down some rabbit hole of that the game sort of or the simulation points them to and that's sort of the broader sort of aim that we see for this and its place is that it's really a starting point for students to spark their curiosity and reshape their imaginary of the world, which is, you know, in the world of media or particularly gaming, the Ottomans are only seen

as having like gunpowder, Islam, and then violence. And that is sort of the general sort of perspective that games and sort of broader media presents of the Ottoman world. And this is a way in which to try to introduce very early on to students to very aggressively reshape that imaginary, sort of having students go through the Ottoman world, both in a time of crisis of 17th century, but also a time of the ability to travel and sort of connection between all these places and mobility as well. As you were assembling in all of these sources and what you called the greatest scavenger hunt of your research career, what stops or situations did you stumble on that surprised you the most? You know, when I was doing my research for my dissertation and I'm going through pilgrimage narratives, Ottoman archival material related to the Hajj and Hajj sponsorship in the 17th century.

I always went to sort of looking at the major places because that's what pilgrims are mostly talking about. That's what Ottoman records are mostly care about in sort of cities of Damascus, Medina, Aleppo, and the other stops along the way. But as you sort of go through and you sort of have to find images, quotations, describing these places of every single stop of the some 300 plus different stops and locations that we added into the Hodge Trail, you get a sense of the minutiae of the everyday, the way in which going to Damascus or going to Aleppo was just a very small fraction of what most pilgrims saw in their journey to Mecca. And most of it was these rural landscapes of the Ottoman world,

these places that are just a caravan sarai in the middle of a plain with maybe a small village next to it. And those things in the narrative itself will have just one line about them. And, you know, eight hours, we went from Konya to this place outside of Konya. And then we took 10 hours the next day to go to the next caravan sarai on the way. And in the narrative, they're fairly short. But when you have to, you know, code in everything about that place, you have to find what that place looked like. And then you start to understand the hours of travel between these places and the amount of time spent in

these places in between these major centers of the Ottoman world. You get, I think, more of appreciation and more of an interest in how were these places shaped by this global network that crossed through their own backyard. And this is something that hopefully in a future second book project, I want to do more of a micro historical approach with court records on one of these places. That's not a major city, but one of these places shaped by the Hodge route going through it that I only sort of became focused on through coding for the Hodge Trail. It wasn't necessarily, you know, it wasn't, that's a fault of my own research strategies, but in the Hodge Trail itself, the appreciation of these places in between that do make up

the majority of the time of the world that pilgrims see when they're traveling or travelers see as they're traveling across the auto domains. It's not just the major cities. It's these smaller places. And that's something that was also a frustration that for some reason, maybe hopefully some art historian can find some great source for me. But it was always such a trouble to find Ottoman images of these rural landscapes. It seemed that Ottoman images, at least the manuscript paintings that are

published or available for scholars to see online, there's such a focus on urban spaces and the urbanity of Ottoman rule and that you don't see that for depictions of these rural landscapes. It was very hard to find Ottoman images of rural spaces in between. Who knows if that leads to some broader notion later on by some other scholar looking into that. But that's something also that sort of came out just through the process of coding the Hodge Trail itself rather than simply just normal research I'd been engaged in. I want to shift gears a little bit to talk about using the Hajj trail as a teaching tool. So you've had experience doing this in your own classrooms, and I'm sure you've also interfaced with others who have had done the same, both as people who are participating in the simulation as well as instructors who are using it in their classrooms. What different aspects of the Hajj or Islamic or Middle Eastern or Ottoman history,

what different aspects of these histories do you notice students picking up when they interact with a simulation as opposed to a text or just a book? You know, I've used it in my own classes. I know lots of friends that have used it at different institutions as well. And also we've had, you know, students write, you know, summaries of their experience as they played through it. And then in my own classes, I have sort of like an assignment that they have to write it as their character, the things they encounter like they're writing their own Hodge journal throughout. And at the end, they sort of reflect on sort of what they picked up from the experience. And there's this way in which one, I think, just sort of the

general notion of sort of centering the hajj in sort of the Ottoman narrative. It's always something that in Ottoman scholarship, it's sometimes put off to the side as something that's happening, but it's not sort of central in broader narratives, even though it connects the sort of the tissue of every corner of the Ottoman world. And this is a way in which I think it helps center the importance of the Hajj in sort of the story of the early modern Ottoman world and the cultural history of the Ottoman world in a way that a booked project would take many, many years to ever have that broader imaginary impact for undergrads. The other thing that sort of really came out from students or people playing through the Hajj Trail is there's a sense of, I get a sense that

the students have a better understanding of the space of the Ottoman Empire, the distance, location, how far things are apart. There's a way in which I think as teachers, we're assuming students have the same sense of the geographic scale. Many of us have been to these parts of these regions that we're talking about. And I think the scale of the Ottoman Empire, the distance, the rhythms of daily life become much more apparent when you're giving them the simulation to play through that sort of mimicking some of those aspects in a way that a reading or a textbook has a harder time conveying. And so I think the medium has been helpful. There's also things that we changed based on sort of student feedback. Famously to me, I had students that just, we have three side characters that you can travel with and all three, the students would just have all three of their side characters die off and they didn't really care to stop and let them heal because they only cared about themselves and their own character of getting through. And then so we realized sort of in sort of the notion of a coder or a game developer, what mechanics you make shape the values. There's this notion in game design that

you don't play the game, the game plays you because the developer, what mechanics you put in, putting in water, food, all these pressures, that's telling the player what they're supposed to value in the simulation. So it's a very sort of almost a top-down structure of sort of what they value. So that's why we added the side characters, 40 different characters that also represent different parts of the Ottoman world and the Hajj, where you can have a janissary officer with you. You can have a water porter and all these different people that can travel in your caravan.

And that was also to give, breathe life into those side characters so that students that had a mechanism to why they're valuing them why they're sort of once again playing through this trying to you know play it as if they you know value the lives of these other fictional characters that are with them and so that's a you know there's several of these types of things that we made changes based on students playing it and sort of trying to sort of make sure it's the best possible simulation that we could make for students engaging mostly for the first time functionally with the Ottoman world. Welcome back, Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Matt Kazarian, speaking here with Tyler Kinn about the Hodge Trail. So this is all well and good. I can imagine some more suspicious approaches to games and learning.

suspicious approaches to games and learning. I could imagine some people asking, what are you really going to learn about the Hodge from playing a game? I just think back to my experiences playing the Oregon Trail. I don't know how much I learned about it, but I'm wondering, how do you respond to such critiques? That is there. You know, there's always a question of sort of, is the method you're using or the medium you're using to sort of sort of, is the method you're using or the medium you're using to sort of explain something? Is that actually, what does it actually do? And there is a fair amount of academic research out there about choice and learning how students, if they're in sort of a choice-based simulation, like a game where they have to choose one thing or another, they have to make decisions. There's research out there that sort of shows that

helps retention better, that they're going to better remember those situations, the material that the oregon trail ever had in sort of their educational actual production beyond just their omittance of like indigenous peoples in their imagination of the american west you know and that's through sort of the historical narratives the historical quotes that we put on every single location that you don't necessarily have to look at as you go to every single place but maybe maybe a place you find interest in as the students like playing through and they get to the Island of Rhodes or they get to, you know, other places along the way, like Aleppo or Damascus or these places, they have historical documents that they're going to be looking at that are in there that are quotes from actual travelers

of the 70th century describing this place and describing the landscape, describing their experiences there. And I think that in and of itself is sort of it's like they're walking through a database of the experiences of travel in the Ottoman world. And the students will encounter those things along the way in every single event that happens to students. Every single random event that we have in there is all based on things that are sourced from historical material. And so there is a concerted effort. I think there is a big difference. And this is why I think it's important for historians to engage with gaming more broadly. Because if we just leave it only up to game developers, they're going to obviously do these butchered versions of history that we see all over the place in modern media.

butchered versions of history that we see all over the place in modern media. And if we simply say, well, we're going to step back from that because that's not academic, we're leaving the entire floor to those other representations. And we can't prevent students coming to the classroom where most of our students come into the classroom with much of their imaginary of the Middle East or the Ottoman past is largely shaped by the billion plus dollar industry of gaming. And yet historians have had very little input in that broader imagination. And so this is a way to both connect to students through a different method, a method of choice based learning, which has shown to sort of increase retention, and also one that's done through a sort of historical source based mindset of what you're

creating here. Of course, there are choices that, you know, I have made as we have made as the coders and developers of this, where we have to make choices for the purposes of a narrative. And that is something that, you know, is always going to be there. And that's true also in just historical writing. I always like to say that games are all about world building and history writing is also all about world building. We also, as historians, have to present to our reader the broader sort of world and context in which an event or an individual stories is happening within and the same thing is happening in when you're presenting a game to students as well. So what I'm hearing is that introducing choice in the learning actually has some proven improvement for retention and for learning on

one hand and then on the other, that this is actually, and I've seen it, and I can say far, far more deeply researched and far more historically grounded than a lot of other simulations out there. What's the future look like for the Hodge Trail? It's growing on two fronts. The first is sort of immediate updates to the current simulation as it exists currently online, which is fixing out some typos that are... We built it through this program called Twine, which is basically a visual way of organizing HTML code that's for people like myself who did not have a background in coding when beginning a process like this. And it doesn't have spellcheck. But so like fixing those minor updates and then also where I'm putting together a large database of every single image

we use in the Hodge trail to then add a second tab on every single site with an art historical context tab and working with Sabiha, our historian of the Hodge to sort of create sort of context for the images that the students encounter. So that's the, you know, the 300 plus, 350 plus images. It's a lot of things to now put in a large database and connect them all. But the plan is to sort of add that into this version.

And eventually also, hopefully by the end of this next summer, add at least Egypt and Cairo into the Hajj Trail, as that was the other main caravan route left from Cairo along a different route along the coast of the Red Sea to Mecca and Medina. And we would connect that to the routes that already exist by sea as well for, you know, if you could start in Sarajevo, go to Dubrovnik, take a ship and make it to Alexandria and do that sort of route to add more variability as well. On the broader scale, I'm working with two folks in Canada at the moment, Zaid Khan and Mustali Raj, who's a graphic designer, where we're putting together a pitch deck together

to basically say this version that's out right now is sort of like the demo free version that, you know, coded on our own. And then we're going to be going to funders museums and other organizations to and we're also currently talking with indie game developers to talk about what would this look like if it was a funded project because this was all done essentially you know russ helped with the early code and then i just produced the rest of it um over sort of two years um it's all been sort of volunteer unfunded and so we want sort of a future version of the hodge trail more professionalized looking version that would basically you can think about like if you ever played paper mario like a 2d 3d

setup it's like an ottoman miniature painting come to life and you can move your character around each of the towns there's a map that moves in the background and as you go between these locations the page turns of the manuscript and then as you go between different locations the grander plan would be for uh the art style to change because we'd want to eventually add Safi Duran, Mughal India, and Morocco into the broader routes as well. And then you could also get this with graphic designers building sort of the world from early modern miniature painting or just painting in the Islamic world. in the Islamic world, that that would also provide visual cues for students of sort of becoming to, sort of come to appreciate

these sort of broader colors and strokes and designs and imaginations of Islamic art as well. Yeah, and be able to start picking out aspects of, say, a Safavid miniature versus an Ottoman one, versus a Maghrebi one. You know, but yeah,

to have this sort of difference and this merger and sort of, and that's sortrebi one. You know, but yeah, to have this sort of difference and this merger and sort of, and that's sort of our concept. And we're currently talking with indie game developers to get quotes on sort of what this would cost

for that type, you know, what this, what we can then ask for eventually to funders to try to have this more professionalized version that can also then reach probably a broader audience

because it will be much more clean cut and also much more, I think, grander in what our original imagination was for the project. So I'm hearing in the short term, adding Cairo and really filling out the context for all the visuals with the help of your collaborator Sabiha. And then in the long term, the sky's the limit. Well, I want to thank you again for joining us today on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. I love Ottoman History Podcast. I assign it to my students occasionally, so I recommend people doing that. For those who want to find out more, you can visit

our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where we will post a bibliography, links to further reading, and a link to the Hodge Trail, where you also can participate in the simulation. For any other interests that you have on Ottoman History Podcast, you can also visit our website. And until next time, take care. Thank you.