There are a few major changes to the game coming up, inspired by Tecumseh Lies Here and the Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry. They focus primarily on improving the following aspects:

• Incorporate more environmental history methodology, particularily the idea of reading landscapes (support with some placemaking)
• Incorporate more diverse perspectives within the game’s characters (right now, there are a lot of suspicious folks who turn out to be fighting the trees’ takeover, and this shoudl be ammended to include voices from the pro-takeover planners.)

In particular, I think it would be fun to incorporate some of the NCC’s correspondence in the Greenbelt expropriations, as it was often quite emotional for the “exercise in rational planning” the Greenbelt was intended to be. Letters between officials and community groups like the Blackburn Property Owners Association speak more to the debate over what a landscape should be, what values are important, and the subjectivity of all this. They also speak to the heavy-handed approach the NCC took toward many of the expropriations.

Moving more into the city, there are plenty of Ottawa Journal articles that refer to the planting efforts that have taken place in the 20th century. They too provide colour, and would give players a chance to work with primary sources without having to go to a library. The Tecumseh group deliberately incorporated physical research into their project, bringing players into institutions to engage directly with the material. This doesn’t work well with mine from a playability standpoint, as it would draw out the game substantially and takes away from the landscape-centered storytelling. I”d rather have the documents pop up in the app, so you can reference them while standing amid the landscape they speak to. It gives players more of an opportunity to draw their own conclusions, and reinforces the idea that of multiplicity in lanscape interpretation (and layered landscapes).

I’ve dug up some documents that would work well in the aforementioned two contexts, and am now working on building them into the existing narrative.