Controversies: Historicising the Computer Game (original) (raw)
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Still Playing with the Past: History, Historians, and Digital Games
History and Theory
Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, was a significant publication in the establishment of historical (digital) game studies, a field that has since continued to grow. This review essay notes some of the key interventions made by the edited collection and its scope in accounting for the complexities of digital historical games. It also reflects on what the book represented at the early stages of the discipline and the ways in which scholarly approaches have developed (or not) in the decade since its publication. In doing so, it focuses on several key areas that arose in Playing with the Past and have remained central to historical game studies. In particular, this essay examines questions of digital games' relationship to "professional," written history; whether games can (or need to) teach their players about the past; and the troublesome reoccurrence of and reliance on certain difficult terms, such as "historical accuracy" and "historical authenticity." This essay argues that all three of these fundamental aspects of our current approaches to historical game studies require further criticality to build on the foundational work of Playing with the Past as well as the vital work published in the field over the last decade.
Construction of Historical Culture through Video Games
The objective of the study is to analyse popular video games with historical content and their influence on the reception and formation of historical knowledge and understanding. The key features of video games are: their hybrid nature, the significant impact on the young population, and, unlike other audiovisual media, the incitement to action and experiential engagement with history. Research will be undertaken in two parts. Five popular video games will be analysed; this will then be followed by an examination of commentary, discussions and disputes of players in specialized internet forums. More specifically, the survey results will relate to: 1) Decoding of the game ideology, 2) examination of their influence on the players’ historical knowledge and culture and, 3) examination of significations of historical thinking.
PhD Dissertation, 2021
For decades there has been a call for educators to explore new possibilities for meeting educational goals defined broadly under a number of twenty-first century competencies curricula (Dede, 2014; Voogt et al., 2013). These stress the need for students to combine critical skills development with an understanding of the processes and reach of technologies in daily life, in order to prepare them for a shifting cultural and economic landscape. In response, an extensive literature has grown up about game-based learning (Brown, 2008; de Castell, 2011; Gee, 2003; Gee and Hayes, 2011; Jenson, Taylor, de Castell, 2011; Jenson et al., 2016; Kafai, 1995; 2012; 2016; Prensky, 2001; Squire, 2004; 2011; Steinkuehler, 2006) that seeks to explore whether/how games can be used productively in education. History as a discipline lends itself particularly well to game-based learning. It is bound up in questions of interpretation, agency, and choice, considerations that gameplay and game design as processes highlight well. My research explores the uses of digital historical games in history education, and most especially in the acquisition of critical historical skills. These skills are defined as the capacity to view and engage with the constitutive parts of historical scholarship and objects: interpretation, argument, evidence, ideology, subject position, class, race, sex, etc. This thesis will present findings from two participant-based research studies that I organized and ran between 2018 and 2019. In the first, participants were tasked with playing a counterfactual historical game, Fallout 4, and talking about their experiences, as well as answering questions about history and historical understandings. The second study took the form of an interactive digital history course. In it, students, working in small groups, were tasked with creating their own historical games. Exploring both gameplay and game production answers the call issued by Kafai and Burke (2016) that researchers should view the potential for games in education holistically, rather than in either/or terms. Taken together, this thesis argues that playing and especially making historical games offers opportunities for learners to engage with epistemological concepts in history in meaningful ways that can advance their critical understanding of history as a subject.
A Game Design Plot: Exploring the Educational Potential of History-Based Video Games
IEEE Transactions on Games, 2019
The number of video games that are developed based on real historical events and evidence is increasing. These history-based video games provide players learning opportunities, but a certain type of such games-first and third person shooters-has not been carefully examined for their potentials. Knowing what players say about their game experience-even if the information and knowledge are inaccurate-helps researchers understand what type of learning could happen with such games. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to assessing games as learning environments, using the method of comparing authenticity of popular history-based video games. Through a qualitative data analysis, we studied players' comments on the web-based communication services, such as game forums, digital distribution platforms, and discussion websites. Casual players' conversations on these websites showed that there exist several learning potentials in the games for players including building their understanding about history and historical forces of the time, through personally relating to the specific events, social artifacts, and places.
Using Games to Mediate History
Companion to European Heritage Revivals, pp. 95-111, 2014
An old Chinese proverb says “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” More than any other medium, computer games have the intrinsic ability to involve their players in the world they depict; for they not only make us remember particular scenes we play, but also make us understand more of the world they involve us in. They are immersive, i.e. they make us forget the world around us, taking us away to a different place, a different life, or a different time. In this chapter examples are given of how different game genres, including Alternate Reality Games, mediate history in different ways, in order to give an idea of how computer games could be used to interest a younger audience in history. Examples discussed include 'Medal of Honor', 'Assassin's Creed' and 'Lost in Time'.
Video games that feature historical content – what I term ‘historicizing’ video games – often come in series. Civilization (I – V), Age of Empires (I – IV), Anno (5 pts.), Monkey Island (5 pts.), Total War (7 pts.), Assassin’s Creed (I – IV), to name but a few, are heavily serialized in that they all, save for their respective first incarnations, point continuously to the other titles in their series’, be it on a structural level or with regard to content. That they do so has many reasons that are totally unconnected with everything they represent, economic ones foremost, but also the need to meet genre- and audience-imposed expectations as well as technical limitations. This aside, given that players who liked one in a bundle are likely to play the rest also, the mere factuality of the series carries implications for the content worth mentioning. First, semiotically such a set of game titles is aptly described in Deleuze/Guattari-terms as an instance of the paranoid-despotic regime of signs, where signs signify nothing but other signs, bound up in an endless virtual cycle. And second, philosophically this may be taken as a prime instance of the Nietzschean ‘eternal recurrence of all things’. Both readings converge in the implication that as these games’ series seemingly stage ‘history’, they unlink history and temporality, installing a chron-alogical framing. Thus, they effectively replave in themselves any factual history as the concept is traditionally understood in Western discourse since the middle of the 19th century with affective historicity. In this, they may reflect (as other media featuring historical content as literature, film, TV, radio, comics, re-enactment, ‘living history’, LARP etc.) popular demands not satisfied by academia, or foreshadow a conceptual transition as part of the digital revolution. Time will tell – if this will still be possible, then.
An "Alternative to the Pen"? Perspectives for the Design of Historiographical Videogames
Games and Culture, 2022
This article presents how the tools of videogame design can be used to convey historical arguments, and to what extent historians could benefit from creating such videogames. We begin by positioning our argument within the literature on the writing of history, linking it to formal and writing issues, which leads us to delve into various definitions of what "videogames for history" could be, and what operational frameworks could be derived from those definitions. We then confront some key principles of design to a selection of actual videogame projects to discuss the possibility of "historiographical game design" to be considered as "an alternative to the pen" (Chapman, 2013, p. 329) for historians. Our goal is to identify general principles in the design of historiographical videogames, to provide an improved and refined definition of these games from a design perspective and to formulate general guidelines to inform further explorations through research-creation projects.