🔍 Culture Quest: A Game of Ordinary Things

🌍 INTRODUCTION

"Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start." — Raymond Williams

Welcome to Culture Quest, a 90-minute interactive journey into the everyday power of culture, inspired by Raymond Williams' foundational essay, Culture is Ordinary.

This game invites you to explore how place, family, work, language, and resistance shape the culture you live. Through seven short stages, you’ll uncover a new way to see the world around you — and finish by defining what culture really means to you.

No outside apps. No complex tools. Just you, a pen, your phone’s QR reader, and the willingness to think, feel, and reflect.

🗂️ YOUR TOOLS

  • Culture Map Tracker (provided handout)

  • Phone or tablet (QR scanner)

  • Pen or pencil

As you scan each QR code, you will:

  1. Read a short excerpt from Williams.

  2. Complete a reflection task.

  3. Discover and record a Code Word.

  4. Log your insight on the Culture Map.

Each part builds toward a final reflection you’ll write in Part 7.

🗺️ CULTURE MAP TRACKER

For each part, record:

  • Code Word (revealed at the end of each page)

  • 1-Sentence Insight (e.g. "Culture moves between land and memory.")

You’ll use at least 3 code words in your final reflection.

🏞️ PART 1: A View from the Bus

Theme: Place as Culture

"To grow up in that country was to see the shape of a culture, and its modes of change. I could stand on the mountains and look north to the farms and the cathedral, or south to the smoke and the flare of the blast furnace making a second sunset."

“The bus stop was outside the cathedral. I had been looking at the Mappa Mundi, with its rivers out of Paradise, and at the chained library, where a party of clergymen had got in easily, but where I had waited an hour and cajoled a verger before I even saw the chains. Now, across the street, a cinema advertised the Six-Five Special and a cartoon version of Gulliver’s Travels. The bus arrived, with a driver and a conductress deeply absorbed in each other. We went out of the city, over the old bridge, and on through the orchards and the green meadows and the fields red under the plough. Ahead were the Black Mountains, and we climbed among them, watching the steep fields end at the grey walls, beyond which the bracken and heather and whin had not yet been driven back. To the east, along the ridge, stood the line of grey Norman castles; to the west, the fortress wall of the mountains. Then, as we still climbed, the rock changed under us. Here, now, was limestone, and the line of the early iron workings along the scarp. The farming valleys, with their scattered white houses, fell away behind. Ahead of us were the narrower valleys: the steel-rolling mill, the gasworks, the grey terraces, the pitheads. The bus stopped, and the driver and conductress got out, still absorbed. They had done this journey so often, and seen all its stages. It is a journey, in fact, that in one form or another we have all made.”

Raymond Williams reflects on the physical view of his homeland: standing between the traditional world of faith and labor (the cathedral and farms) and the industrial world (blast furnaces). His journey through this space represents a journey through cultural transformation.

✍️ Activity: Sketch the Journey

Draw a simple line showing the journey. Label what each place might symbolize: north, south, the mountains in between.

🧠 Thinking Prompt:

What lies between the cathedral and the blast furnace in your life? What two “worlds” or ways of being have you stood between?

✅ Your Code Word:

JOURNEY
Write this word on your Culture Map Tracker and reflect on what this journey means for how culture is shaped by place.