Introduction

On 4 May 2018, at 10 p.m., on the former Timex Harrison Road site, 300 voices are singing Sheena Wellington’s Women o’ Dundee. They have spent the three hours leading up to this moment immersed in their city’s recent history, learning more about the women who gave Britain its first massively popular home computer, the ZX Spectrum, and how this eventually sparked Dundee’s current success in the games and digital technology industries. They walked through Camperdown Park and up Harrison Road to the former Timex factory, listened to oral herstories of women who worked on the assembly lines, played video games that paid homage to the ZX Spectrum, and watched Sir Clive Sinclair as he celebrated the production of the millionth ZX Spectrum in Dundee.

This was Generation ZX(X), a multi-media, mixed-reality event which aimed to develop hybrid video game/performance design methods for engaging with lived experience and oral herstories of specific sites (Figure 10.1). I propose that the development and design methods of Generation ZX(X) provide an innovative way of enlivening archives that can be productively applied to transnational histories. The methods, strategies and techniques used in Generation ZX(X) outline a design framework called storywalking. Storywalking invites a critical engagement with the archive and the site, enlivening the archive and transforming oral histories, lived experience and collective memory into gameplay.

Welcome to She-Town

The story of She-Town begins in the 1822 when the first bales of jute arrive in Dundee dramatically changing the landscape and the social fabric of the city. The city expanded quickly and by the 1850s more than half of the population’s livelihoods depended on jute, earning Dundee the nickname ‘Juteopolis’. Jute was imported from Bengal which meant that the economic development of Dundee and the socio-political destiny of its people was bound to jute cultivation, export and production in India. The raw jute prices, the production costs in Calcutta and the stock market in the United States all affected the prosperity and working conditions of jute workers in Dundee.