When we started our project about two years ago, we took a long look at Second Life and discussed hosting our project there with some of their executives. Second Life offered a number of advantages, such as a relatively easy tool set for building things and an existing community of users, many of whom might be interested in helping with or joining our effort.

But Second Life also had some limitations for our particular project:

-- While the avatars players create in Second Life are very sophisticated, the tools for creating buildings aren't that advanced. The Architecture students who model the buildings for our project use the 3D Studio Max computer assisted design program, and those models couldn't be imported into Second Life.

-- Automated 3D characters (non-player characters in video game jargon) can't be created in Second Life, and we wanted to populate our game world with re-creations of many of the characters of 7th Street, especially some of the famous jazz and blues musicians.

-- Young people are not allowed into the same version of Second Life as adults, and we wanted young and old players to have the opportunity to explore the 7th Street virtual world and play the game together.

-- Hosting on Second Life could get expensive, because we'd have to buy an "island" in the game world and server space.

-- Finally, when we were considering Second Life in the summer of 2005, it had only been public for about two years, and we were concerned about having our game locked up in what amounted to a start-up at the time. If the company failed, our game could vanish with it.

None of this is a knock on Second Life. It's obviously now very popular and its feature set keeps improving. We just had particular needs that weren't a good fit. So we instead went with the Torque game engine, which the Architecture students can customize to add the features we want. When we go public with the game, planned for Summer 2008, we'll host it on a server here at UC Berkeley.

But others who want to re-create historic communities like Oakland's 7th Street as virtual worlds may find Second Life a good choice. We're still discussing the possibility of doing another version of our game in Second Life. And the lessons we're learning about video game storytelling, both technical and conceptual, can be applied to many different virtual world platforms.

Would it look like what they remembered? Or would it seem an alien world to them? Worse, would the game just trivialize a precious memory?

On Oct. 8 we got a chance to test this when my journalism students and I went to the West Oakland Senior Center to interview people about their memories of 7th Street and show them a video of the virtual world we've been creating.

When we played the video for the first of the seniors, I cringed over how he might react.

Another old-timer was viewing our re-creation of Slim Jenkins' Place, the area's premiere jazz and blues club, when he suddenly got animated when he saw the bar we had modeled from old photos.

The buildings the Architecture students working on the project had modeled seemed to resonate with the seniors and even triggered some old memories.

So we had passed an initial test - the game world was engaging enough that these players were willing to overlook the unreality of some aspects of it. This is what video game developers, borrowing a concept from Coleridge, refer to as willing suspension of disbelief.

But this little test only involved a handful of seniors, and we're planning more extensive viewings of the game with many more older people in the future. So we'll see how they react.

And a different test looms with another group that's part of our target audience for the game - young kids from Oakland who we hope will learn about the history of 7th Street through the game. There the main challenge will be not the realism of the game world, but whether the game play is engaging and fun for them.

Note: the photograph above of the bar at Slim Jenkins Place is courtesy of the African American Museum & Library at Oakland. The museum has provided us with access to their photographic collections, including one on Slim Jenkins Place. For people in the Oakland area, you check the the schedule on the museum's Web site for visiting the library and museum and viewing their exhibits and collections.

That's the question we're trying to answer with our "Remembering 7th Street" project that uses a video game to tell the story of Oakland, California's old jazz and blues club scene.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Oakland's 7th Street was a vibrant community and a mecca for jazz and blues musicians from all over the country. But in the late 1950s and 1960s the area fell victim to a series of ill-fated redevelopment schemes, and barely a trace of the jazz and blues clubs remains today.

We're trying to bring 7th Street back to life as a virtual world and video game.

We've been working on the project for nearly 2 years now, and we've faced many challenges, some expected, some not. There have been technical obstacles, problems getting photographs and other information needed to do a realistic representation of 7th Street as a virtual world, and many permutations of the game narrative.

I'll use this space to describe the issues that have come up and how we're addressing them. Our hope is that what we're learning will ease the way for others, especially news organizations, that want to use video game technology and virtual worlds to help local communities reconnect with important aspects of their cultural heritage and history.