Theory, design, research,and use of historical games in and beyond history education. Look here for links to current research, lists of available historical video games, reviews, and essays on a variety of topics connected to historical games. Created and maintained by Jeremiah McCall (jmc.hst@gmail.com; @gamingthepast; @gamingthepast@historians.social), teacher, historian, historical game studies person, and author of Gaming the Past
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, Second Edition
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I’m very pleased to share Paradox’s Educator’s Guide for Europa Universalis IV (that I wrote) is now available for all. EUIV is a challenging game & I spent considerable time breaking down exactly how I’d use it in history classes in hopes the many interested educators out there will give it a try.
It’s a 3 part guide: Logistics, Student initial play guide, and historical problem space analysis of EUIV. The focus is on the game as history so interested educators can decide what parts they want to focus on and what aspects of the history are more and less problematic in the game.
Hopefully it will be of some use out there. I enjoyed the challenge, and I am very glad to have a worked example out there for educators about how to use the historical problem space framework for teaching. Of course, as always, just reach out if I can help you further or reach out to Paradox.
Just posted the most recent prototype (A1.8) for Cursus Honorum, a Roman Republic political competition game in the form of a Roll-N-Write. Needs a few player markers (4 per person is fine) and dice but other than that, print out the player sheets and go to it! I have playtested it with student groups of 4 and 5 and running multiple groups at the same time. I think it will work for 6; probably slows down too much with more than that in a single game. If you do check it out, I’d be grateful for any constructive feedback.
Just a quick reminder/introduction. The Historical Problem Space framework is a set of terms and concepts I’ve been developing over the past decade+ to help all intersections of educators and academics analyze historical video games in away that is holistic and recognizes that historical games are both functional as working computer programs (and, to a lesser but still useful extent, analog games) and as cohesive designs. This means any particular historical phenomenon in a game is functionally and cohesively connected to al the rest of the game design.
The framework continues to develop but my most recent core writings on this are:
And there are links to other articles and talks about HPS on this page
Greetings to all who, like me, find themselves fascinated by historical games,
Not infrequently I find my thoughts well ahead of my writing on the Historical Problem Space framework for historical game analysis (https://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/mccall) (Yes, I’m that sort of person who thinks about games and history games a significant amount of the time) Today I was working out a lecture on 4x games so that my students will have some genre understanding when looking at Colonization and Imperialism (the 4x games — but of course the historical phenomena too). I’ve been referring to the different kinds of action-choices a player agent can make in gameworld space.
I have listed and briefly discussed some of the core action choices a player agent has available in a gameworld space. I thought I had perhaps listed them all in the 2020 article, or perhaps in GTP 2.0 but now I’m thinking the core action-choices in gameworld space should be (helpfully, I hope) set out in one places until I can work them into a published article or book.
So, a quick reminder, the gameworld space is the space in which the player agent (the main playable character) pursues the goals (if they choose) that the developers have set for them and, while doing so, encounter the various elements in the space (a.r.t.o s= non-player agents, resources, tools, obstacles etc). The player agent makes and takes action choices in order to (if they choose) attempt to achieve the goals the developers have designed for the game. The “problem” in the historical problem space design that is standard in historical games, is to solve, avoid, overcome, utilize etc. the elements (a.r.t.o s) in the gameworld space that are keeping the player agent from the designed goals or can help the player agent.
Gaming the Past, Second Edition, is out today with Routledge! I am so very grateful and excited to have had the chance to revise significantly and add to the first edition work that came out over a decade ago. I thought perhaps it is a good time to reflect a little on my time and work in Historical Game Studies and in teaching history using video games as tools. Here’s a first post to see if it’s of interest to anyone else.
— Jeremiah McCall
Though I experimented a little with interactive learning in history in my graduate years finishing my PhD on Greco-Roman History with Nate Rosenstein at the Ohio State University (2000), I did not work with making and integrating actual physical games until my first history teaching position in a secondary school. Hoping very much to add life to my ancient history courses (high school) I made a couple of physical game prototypes: One a simulation of Roman politics in the Republic and the other a simulation game of ancient warfare. For students, the interest these games brought to the areas we studied was palpable, and I knew I wanted to do more with games in history education. This process continued when I came to Cincinnati Country Day School and had access to laptop computers. I experimented with some board games like Diplomacy and continued to work on designs for tabletop prototypes–many never reaching a truly playable state. I was struck along the way with the amount of research I had to do to make a historical game. Inspiration–get students to design games as a way to encourage them to study a historical topic in depth. This led to my first “Historical Simulations” senior elective at CCDS, in the winter and spring of the 2004-05 school year. While the course was focused on having students design their own historical tabletop games I was also struck by Civilization III as a potential model to play and study. So, in addition to the design part of the class, I had students play Civ III and compare it to the first chapter or so of Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies. This experiment with Civilization (III) caught the attention of friend and colleague Kurt Squire (now UC Irvine) who invited me to speak at the Education Arcade in May of 2005. I was part of a panel discussing the use of Civilization III in the classroom. There’s still a video of the whole panel to be found on Youtube (and me considerably younger with a great deal more hair.)
I wrote this section on MCB games for the genre chapter Gaming the Past, Second Edition, but had to cut it for reasons of space. Just posting it here in case it’s of interest
A somewhat more unique mobile genre is the Clash of Clans clear mobile genre (we’ll call “mobile civ games” for short) These games are clear examples of the freemium game model where players may play for free but get access to extra abilities, resources, etc. if they pay money to the developers through microtransactions. In games of this genre, the player agent leads a civilization—from a list of historical states whether Roman, Chinese, Aztec, or any number of other options depending on the game. The player agent constructs settlement in a home-base location with some geographic features: generally open land and land that must be cleared to be developed upon. The player agent fills their home-base settlement with various types of buildings. The core buildings are houses, each supporting a limited number of workers for the player agent. These workers then construct all the other buildings of the civilization. Buildings range in function from barracks to resource storage to defense to research.
There tend to be a small number of standard resources in these games, two or three: often food, coins, and wood or stone. These are stored in stockpiles with finite capacities in the player agent’s settlement. Resources are sometimes gathered automatically by the civilization when the player is logged out; sometimes the player must log in to gather resources, a design technique to encourage players to regularly visit the game and keep up the player base. If the player agent’s resource stockpiles are full, all additional harvesting of those resources is stopped until the player logs in and spends the resources. So, for example, if the player-agent’s food stockpile is full, all additional incoming is wasted, a lost opportunity, and the player will need to log in and spend food on some project to avoid missing out on acquiring resources. Indeed the whole game is designed around real-world time consumption and players can decide whether they want to commit more real-world time to the game, logging in and playing more frequently, and, as the level up, waiting longer and longer times to construct more powerful buildings and armies, or purchasing special resources with real-world money to cut down on time.
Part 1 of our dialogue blog is here. Last time, Luke left us with Chris King’s argument that game developers should choose their historical interpretation based on whichever suits the gameplay best. I always felt a bit uncomfortable with that, but maybe I have too much of an agenda as a historian! . We’ll start this second instalment from there.
JEREMIAH: That does seem to be a rather bold statement. Here my response as an educator with historical games and as an academic studying historical games might differ. King’s suggestion works perfectly for a history class so long as the teacher presents the game as an interpretation, a model, that needs to be critiqued for defensibility by students (McCall 2011 and now McCall 2022, forthcoming). I suppose though that even from a more formal academic analysis, the idea of picking a historical interpretation based on mechanics is probably not noticeably different than the practice we mostly all seem to recognize: that in a conflict between fun/playability and historical accuracy (leaving aside how problematic that term can be), devs on record tend to say that they will usually go with fun/playability–I’d have to go back to look for references; pretty confident Sid Meier has said that. Also pretty confident that Soren Johnson agreed and elaborated on this principle back on my first GTP:Designer Talks podcast. In a sense “picking the historical interpretation to suit the game mechanics” is just a variation on this right? Even so, it’s a generalization of course, so whether devs pursue something more on the consistent with historical evidence (“defensible”) or less will depend on their originality pillar, right, to the extent that advancing a certain historical proposition could be part of a game’s originality? (or the expectations pillar if players expect a defensible historical model?)
LUKE: I wonder too if video games’ position in media-culture-hierarchy also gives game devs a lot of flexibility precisely because they don’t have to be defensible. Academics (and a lot of devs, too) would I think argue that video games very much are vehicles of history, but I’m not sure all audiences would agree. When video games aren’t presented as an authority (in the way that a book, museum, or academic might be, however flawed that is) the worry about whether a historical model fairly represents the period or discourse becomes unimportant – it is, after all “just a game”. For me though, games that take this line run a risk of trivializing the past, or even exploiting it for inspiration and genre appeal. It creates a nonsense proposition: that fun is directly incompatible with good history.
After a too-long hiatus (4 years), a new series of dialogue-blogs start on Gaming the Past with this installment. This time my very-esteemed interlocutor is Luke Holmes, Game Designer at Creative Assembly (previously museum-worker, with a History MA). We’ll set out on what we both excitedly hope will be a series of substantial discussions by talking about developer goals and the design of historical games
LUKE: I’m going to jump right in! When studying historical video games, historians often think about what games are trying to say, and how they say it. We do our best to draw conclusions from the characters, levels, narratives and mechanics, and to some degree judge these products by their historical interpretations. How faithful was Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey to ancient Greece? How far can Civilisation be used for teaching and studying history?
We look at the goals given to the player, and we analyse whether they are historical. Is the decision of whether to hire knights or archers in Age of Empires IV reflective of the kind of decisions that historic nations had to make? I know you’ve done a lot of work in this area, Jeremiah, so I’m interested to explore this a little more.
JEREMIAH: One of the reasons I am so pleased to get to work with you on this, Luke, is because the developer perspective is so critical to historical game studies but not explored nearly enough. Historical game developers are historians. They meet the basic criterion: they create curated representations of the past (something any number of historical game studies folks including myself have emphasized, not least of all Chapman 2016). So, it follows that a key to better understanding the medium of historical games is to better understand developers’ approaches to designing GAMES that are historical. Your insights will be of great interest in this light. It’s always good to remember that history, categorically ≠≠ academic written history.
Update for September: I did playtest prototype A with students and found the core game solid–at least enough for a good class reflection. Here is the most recent prototype that I used.
Like all prototypes, this will break, and I’d be grateful if you sent me a note about how it broke so I can improve on it. But I think Prototype A probably works well enough (I haven’t group playtested it — that’s where you all come in) to use in a class (I’m going to this August).
A better appreciation/understanding of peasants in agrarian societies. It is very hard for moderns to appreciate that the vast majority of ancient agrarian societies (some 80-90% of population) were peasant farmers, i.e. subsistence farmers. They lived and worked in a state of subsistence, just enough to get by, with little bits of surplus food. That tiny surplus, magnified over thousands of peasants, was what the state extracted to fund non-farming activities from armies to building projects etc.
Gaming the Past, a book devoted to providing practical guidelines for teachers who want to use historical simulation games effectively, is published by Routledge and also available on Amazon
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History Respawned is a series of videos and podcasts where historians discuss historical video games. Created and directed by Bob Whitaker and associate editor John Harney, the series is a must for those interested in history in video games
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