What does it mean to inhabit a historical place rather than read about it? A Murder at the Ahwahnee (AMATA) is an educational murder-mystery game, developed by faculty and students at University of the Pacific, set at Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel in the winter of 1930. Players take on the role of Edward Oscar Heinrich, the Berkeley forensic scientist known as the “American Sherlock Holmes.” They explore a reconstructed hotel, interview historically grounded guests and staff, and weigh means, motive, and opportunity. Along the way they encounter the debates that shaped the National Parks after Muir: preservation versus development, utilitarian versus ecological conservation, and questions of race, gender, and Indigenous sovereignty that the conservation movement often left out of its story.
Interactive media can build a powerful sense of place, and it can also distort one. A game can let students walk through a past they could never visit and make them weigh competing voices as evidence. The same game can flatten ambiguity into solvable puzzles, reward speculation that the record cannot support, and present the homelands of Native communities through a lens they did not choose. Drawing on the research, design, and consultation behind AMATA, we show where those tensions arose in practice and how we handled them, and where we are still unsure. We invite the audience to consider when “playing” history deepens our connection to a place and when it may stand in for the harder work of understanding it.
