Ötzit!

South Tyrol. The year is 3300BC. Ötzi — the Iceman for his friends — is crossing the border to Austria in search of a quiet place to retire after a lifetime of hunting. Forest animals got the word and are hellbent on stopping him. He needs your help to fend them off and avoid getting stampeded.

How to play

You must quickly type the falling words and help Ötzi along his difficult path.

In addition to the usual letter keys, you will need a few more:

• ENTER (↩) confirms a word,
• BACKSPACE (⟵) deletes a letter,
• SHIFT (⇧) uppercases a letter,
• ESCAPE (Esc) pauses the game.

Warning: to play on desktop you will need a German keyboard.

Some knowledge of German may help, but it's not necessary. It's far more important to have some familiarity with the Fraktur script you will be reading. By the way, here's the alphabet:

Technical information

This is a custom purpose game developed by the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Eurac Research for the Zeit.shift project. Zeit.shift has digitised approximately 500,000 pages of historical Tyrolean newspapers, and seeks to promote access to these digital collections through the development of games, activities, as well as an e-learning course.

Ötzit! primarily targets German-speaking players in the 11-14 age group but is open to all casual gamers alike. The goal of the game is to increase players’ awareness of the digitised newspaper collections, their ability to read historical documents written in Gothic script (Fraktur) and their knowledge of Tyrolean history.

All data anonymously contributed by the players (i.e. typed words) is analysed and used by the project to research automated means of crowdsourcing OCR corrections and improve the searchability of the digitised collections.

Press coverage

• 26.12.2022, Es gibt nicht nur ein richtiges Deutsch, salto.bz
• 18.12.2022, Il gioco online dedicato a Ötzi (con tanto di concorso a premi): “Aiutatelo a trovare un luogo dove ritirarsi”, il Dolomiti
• 17.12.2022, Premiati i sei vincitori del Gioco online “Ötzit!”, Gazzetta delle Valli
• 16.12.2022, Gewinnspiel Ötzit!: Preisverleihung an sechs Sieger und Siegrinnen, Südtirol News
• 13.09.2022, ‘La Biblioteca provinciale Teßmann organizza sino al 30 ottobre il gioco a premi online «Ötzit»!', lavocedibolzano.it
• 13.09.2022, ‘Online-Gewinnspiel für Kinder und Jugendliche startet am 12. September’, Südtirol News
• 13.09.2022, ‘Ötzit: Startschuss für Online-Gewinnspiel für Kinder und Jugendliche’, Autonomous Province of Bolzano-Südtirol Press Office

Awards

Ötzit! was first runner up at the DH Awards 2022.

Credits

This project is realized through the collaboration of these institutions:

• Institute of Applied Linguistics at Eurac Research
• Landesbibliothek Dr. Friedrich Teßmann
• Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol

All game assets are used for free thanks to these generous artists:

• the player sprite is Elementals: Ground Monk by chierit,
• the animals sprites are Animated Wild Animals by ScratchIO,
• the forest background is Free Pixel Art Forest by edermunizz,
• the sound effects are from 8-bit / 16-bit Sound Effects (x25) Pack by jdwasabi,
• the music is from Minimalistic Loops by gooseninja.

This game is developed by Paolo Brasolin c/o IAL @ Eurac Research and released under the MIT Licence. You can find the source code here.

Special thanks to Giovanni Moretti.

Funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the Interreg V-A Italy-Austria 2014-2020 programme.