Mike brought back fond memories of my family's visit to Plimoth Plantation. While I holed up in a hotel finishing a report, my wife and then 8-year old went to the plantation four days in a row. They were just blown away by the experience of chatting with Pilgrims who were nothing like our Thanksgiving cartoonish stereotype.

When I was done writing I finally got to see it for myself. To me the amazing thing was to imagine what these actors were experiencing. They had learned so much about that era: the names of all the other colonists and what they were like, the peculiar dialect of English that Pilgrims spoke, the art of building houses and making clothes, the details of the religious/political snits the colonists got into. If we could have kids play the role of Pilgrims and not just tourists, we'd really have something.

And to add to the list of ways to do it (besides Quake), let me point to
SCOL, a suite of tools and services created by a French company;
Coldstone, now in beta but has already been used to create a published game, and
Adobe Atmosphere, a very cool authoring tool also in beta and destined to make a big splash in 2002.

Of all these, Quake is cheapest and is available now. The trick will be in warping the program to be something more benign.