Gaming the Past

JM’s Starting Note: This discussion began when I asked on the Historical Game Studies Facebook page for feedback on my most recent article expanding on and articulating the historical problem space framework https://thersites-journal.de/index.php/thr/article/view/238. My colleague and friend Vinicius Marino Carvalho asked some of his, as usual, insightful questions that got us discussing all sorts of topics in historical video games and the medium of game history. From this point we will follow our discussions where they lead.

Vinicius: So, I just had the pleasure of reading your latest article “Agents, Goals, and Action-Choices”. You seem to be developing the Historical Problem Space framework toward an interesting new direction. I wonder if you’d be willing to discuss a couple of ideas in more detail?

1- It may be just my impression, but you seem to have taken the HPS to a more overtly structuralist direction than your previous papers (e.g. “historical games are games, and that means they take the form of historical problem spaces”; “At their core, each game, like all historical games, presents a historical problem space with a player agent”). Has your current work on your upcoming game design book prompted this shift? Or have you always thought about the HPS this way?

2- Have you thought about publishing a complete(-ish) (and stand-alone) typology of HPS structures? This is the one thing my students most frequently demand when I assign them HPS-based activities. I ask them “what is this game’s gameworld?” and they reply, “I want to know what all the options are”. Given how messy and inconsistent (commercial) genre conventions sometimes are, I can’t blame them.

Jeremiah: Thank you so much for your interest and questions my friend!

1) I think that’s a fair read, that I have taken HPS into a more structuralist direction. At its core HPS is for medium-sensitive descriptive analysis rather than prescription (and that’s how I intended it in 2012 — a “common-sense” analytical approach to historical games. But as you (a fair amount with your own work and interests) and others have increasingly suggested, using it as a tool for game design crosses more into prescription. I am divided; I think let’s take (as I do) Salen and Zimmerman’s (2004) definition of a game as (exact words escape me) something like “an artificial conflict/competition, shaped by rules with a quantifiable outcome. From that understanding any historical “game” developed with that idea about what a game is is fundamentally about goal-oriented action by players. (Nguyen with games as crystallized agency is really good here too)

And when we add the observation that historical games (I tend to prefer thinking of games with defensible models of history as you probably recall but it works with them all) pretty much MUST have a world context (it’s hard to be about history if there is no reference to a historical spatial context, right?), then we are getting pretty close to prescribing. “If you are going to design a historical game, the medium of game and the established conventions of designers demonstrate that a sure-footed way to progress is to design as an HPS.

Does that make sense? I am completely aware that one can design an experience that is a blue screen and claim it is a historically referenced game, but I would suggest that a design like that is not really a game as we understand it (though if the blue refers to any space, I suppose it is spatial).

So yes, I have definitely been influenced by using HPS as a design tool for the book (and using it myself of late btw in my own class analog game contributions.) And I think it provides robust terms for the practice of historical game design (by all people in all situations) and the interpretations they offer.

I should cut this response up for social media spare parts (JM’s note: and we have!): we haven’t even gotten to your 2nd point.

2) I have thought about it, my friend, and I am delighted you use it in classes and your students more terminology. Next book project will start in 2026-7. HPS is definitely a contender. I had actually thought that would be my next one before _Designing Historical Games_ then realized I had more work to do working through HPS. I hope this current article on HPS does some of that with genre and the addition of functional and cohesive.

Vinicius: Really glad I decided to reach you here, rather than on Blue Sky or Twitter. This conversation would have been mangled by the character limit.

It does make sense. I don’t think it is controversial to claim that games are based on inherent structural elements – although we might not always agree on how to describe them (e.g. I’m generally suspicious of the “quantifiable outcomes” thing, which I know sounds hypocritical coming from an economic historian. Lately, I’ve also been getting uneasy with the realist/conceptual distinction).

As for the typology: it would be quite useful to me, for a variety of (admittedly, very niche) reasons. However, I think it could be useful for you as well, as a way to map possible blind spots in the HPS.

E.g. I don’t recall you mentioning “witnessing” as a type of action before, like you did in this paper (although my memory could be wrong). I think this is quite big: witnessing is not an obvious action type like “getting resources”, and omitting it would mean leaving out entire genres of games (e.g. walking sims, many adventure games). There might, however, be other omissions out there, just as significant as “witnessing”. And maybe by accounting for them, fringe examples might turn out to be not so fringe after all.

Jeremiah: Perhaps AB (after book) an article on Gameworld spaces is a good area to target next. Anyway, I definitely agree that there are likely to be blindspots and a whole book would be enjoyable to write.

Many people pointed me to witnessing — I think Jeffrey Lawler at CSULB was the tipping point. We chatted after I gave a talk for his students a couple of years ago and he was working on Red Dead Redemption. GTP 2E actually includes witnessing, so this is the second time I’ve included this action. Its initial absence was definitely a result of my predilection for strategy games and my tendency to think about games like Civilization and Age of Empires etc. first. And it definitely helps with that very nicely.

But since the distinction between realist and conceptual approaches makes you uneasy, what did you think of embodied and unembodied player agents as my spin on realist and conceptual? They overlap a lot but for HPS which focuses on gameworld structures more, the unembodied/embodied does some lifting that I like.

(note: for the original development of the concept of realist and conceptual simulation approaches in historical video games, see Adam Chapman (2016), Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice

Vinicius: I think embodied/unembodied sidesteps my major issues with the realist/conceptual distinction. I’ll elaborate these points in a forthcoming paper I’m writing with Amanda Viveiros Pina, but I think I can spoil some early thoughts:

1) The word ‘realist’ itself, is highly polysemic and can cause confusion depending on who’s talking to whom. Alexander Vanderwalle et al.’s discussion of perceived realism in historical games addresses this point, although things can get even more complex if we’re willing to dabble into philosophy. 

2) I think the distinction underestimates the conceptual workload behind “realist” simulations, and the capacity of such simulations to convey these concepts experientially (e.g. audio-visually). This is something Alex Martire and my other archaeologist friends opened my eyes for. They taught me that reconstructions are not necessarily ‘reconstructionist’, in the epistemic sense, but can also be used as defensible (and scrutinizable) models. E.g. Martire’s Vipasca Antiga game, which allows us to toggle an overlay of the actual Roman ruins of Vipasca, so we can compare with the in-game reconstruction.

3) I also have misgivings about applying the framework for games that challenge Cartesian understandings of space and perspective. I haven’t matured this point yet; but it comes from a feeling I had reading Alenda Chang’s analysis of the influences of the shan-shui-hua art style on the game Journey. As I understood from her introduction, shan-shui-hua is a traditional Chinese art style that focuses on mountains and flowing water courses, often dotted with depictions of human activity becoming integrated, rather than competing with, the non-human elements of the composition. Notably, it also challenges some conventions of Western painting – for example, by exploring multiple perspectives and vanishing points.       

Although Chang says she’s interested in the style “less as an aesthetic regime than as a […]  paradigm of human-environmental relation” – i.e. as a way of “decentering” human action and agency – I think it is a great example on how visual and spatial aesthetics go well beyond representation. The visual organization of elements in the scroll (or, in the case of games, in the screen/game board) can be used to construct arguments and tell a story, even in the absence of words and complex interfaces.

The fact that Thatgamecompany was apparently aware of the genre, and made use of its principles in “Journey”, makes me wonder if there aren’t games (or even whole genres) that we’re ignoring or underestimating because they don’t conform to Western ideas of realism/conceptualization.

Your embodied/unembodied distinction is much ‘lighter’ on its epistemic claims (if I understood it correctly), so it sounds good to me! (again, see McCall 2024 for the Thersites article that sparked this dialogue)

My only question regarding it would be: what if we have a “matryoshka” of embodied/unembodied layers of agency? E.g. like the map of Paris in “We. The Revolution”, in which we have a bird eye’s view of the action, but that also exists diegetically as an object in Alexis’ possession? I know the game doesn’t take it this far, but let’s assume our actions as Alexis in the courtroom levels affected the map somehow – e.g. blood spilled over it would compromise its legibility. How would this hypothetically fit your framework?

Jeremiah: I understand your points about the epistemological attachments of “realist” and “conceptual” not always stacking up and being able to have different paths (realist not always being reconstruction). And I’m fascinated by where you’re heading with Chang’s analysis and this idea that space can be used as a form of argument. 

I do think there are many times where the epistemology and the game form do overlap, though, and that it was an important first step in historical game studies to establish that point. For me, realist and conceptual have been very useful terms, but I am not using them for the epistemic attachments per se. 

But some of that tension may be … well, not resolved, but side-stepped by this distinction between embodied and unembodied player agents in the historical space. I completely agree with you that the embodied and unembodied concept is light on epistemic claims, if it even makes any (I don’t think I have intended to do so). I’m really trying to get at the design choices for a hps gameworld that has embodied vs. unembodied: i.e. having an unembodied player agent tends toward different designs in game worlds agents than embodied.. I do agree that the choice of this shapes the resulting game a great deal, and I think Adam’s [Chapman 2016] point about what I would call the unembodied player agent sort of emphasizing a historical detachment is pretty useful. 

But to your question, how would the Historical Problem Space framework handle a “matryoshka” of embodied/unembodied layers of agency? Great question! One of the nice things about focusing HPS on practical design is that it tends to expand pretty readily. I’d need to think more about this but for me, a HPS analysis of the situation you suggested might try to sort out how many problem spaces are being articulated (and historically referenced) in the gameplay and what is the relationship between them. The effect you suggest might be a conceptual improvement.  Revolution (which I enjoyed and found fascinating: read my thoughts ) seems to have the problem of fragmenting problem spaces. There are too many and they seem too disparate. I think it has a cohesion issue that critics noticed. The blood on the map would at least provide the possibility of a more cohesively designed problem space because it would suggest that everything s contained in one overarching problem space, that of player agent Fidele’s as he strives to survive and overcome. 

Oh neat, can we talk about cohesion and functionality too? Those are definitely new points I wanted to throw out there. I don’t want to get overly prescriptive, but the functional requirements of code shaping games is real (just go listen through Soren Johnson’s podcasts for evidence — the one with Henrik Fahraeus and Jon Shafer is very illuminating). And cohesion, of course can be abandoned, but there is a lot of convention pushing for cohesive designs, so much so that I put out there that cohesion is shaping the histories.

Vinicius: We absolutely can! I agree with your pragmaticism. In fact, this is one of the greatest shocks I had when I started designing games for research. I’d start with a super audacious idea only to see it chipped away, play test after play test, until I was back to the same old tropes I attempted to subvert. (JM: So true: I have the same experience in my own historical game design!) And this is just my perspective as someone who doesn’t design games commercially. I can’t even imagine all the constraints professionals operate under (aside from the glimpses we occasionally get from the media or from scholarly works like Ylva Grufstedt’s 2022).

Now, cohesion is an interesting one. There’s sure a lot to be said about external cohesion – how a game fits within a franchise, genre, etc. – but on the matter of internal cohesion, you might be onto something when you say that cohesion is shaping the histories.

Vinicius: I once commented that the HPS (in your 2012 formulation, at least) resembled an informal definition of “game” in game theory. (Jeremiah’s note: I think that parallel between how I have defined a historical problem space and some definitions of game continues into my most recent work)  Vinicius: This comes as no surprise if we consider that games (and computer games, above all) are formal models, and formal modeling does require a great deal of cohesion. If, at the beginning of a simulation (or playthrough) we stipulate that the rules work in a given way, we’re not supposed to change them mid run.

This, in fact, is one of the main criticisms made against model-based history. It’s not just that models are simplifications or that we lack data to substantiate our assumptions (that can be remedied to some extent). It’s that, in human history, we’re always changing our minds and tweaking our systems as we go! Game logic, in this sense, is at odds with history …

Jeremiah: Just a quick thought here. As I’ve worked on my analog game designs for students this summer and worked on Designing Historical Games, my next Routledge book I, like you it appears, have run into this too, the idea that games and history are in tension. More specifically, games tend to focus on systems AND agency and history is ever-locked into a duel of sorts between longue duree systems and contingent events that seem to break, transcend, or rest systems.

Vinicius: … And this is also true of the histories we write. In historiography, we follow the hermeneutic circle. As we read our sources, we often find out the criteria we came up with to guide our reading must be tweaked or abandoned (which, sometimes, means we have to start over, change subject or ditch whole chapters). (NEW Jeremiah: which interestingly parallels the circle of designing a historical game that in some sense is consistent with the historical sources)

So, to return to “We. The Revolution”, maybe I was too conservative with my metaphor. I called the game a “Matryoshka” because it piles several kinds of (playable) historical agency onto each other. But, in addition to this, it’s likely the game struggled with cohesion because the French Revolution itself wasn’t a temporally cohesive event – and the developers struggled to abstract it appropriately. It’s noteworthy that the game’s issues mostly become glaring in later acts, when it ditches game modes and incorporates new ones on the fly.

This is a very roundabout way of saying I think this imperative of cohesion might be just the tip of the iceberg to a bigger epistemic issue. How ‘historical’ is the HPS when it assumes a steady state that doesn’t correspond to how history works (or how we ourselves think and write about it)? And let’s say a game decides to “honor” the messiness of history/historiography at the expense of cohesion (I’m not sure We. The Revolution did this for this reason, but let’s assume it did). Would the resulting game be a more defensible historical game – even if it turned out to be a worse game overall?

Jeremiah: Oh, cool, we are thinking in a similar direction! (and definitely making me want to play We. The Revolution again). So let me expand in response to your question. We’re both historians and history educators so we’ve engaged and taught about the tension between history and the causes of historical events (whether big labeled events or just the everyday happenings of human lives) as a series of more-or-less unique contingent events, each requiring the prior one or as an inevitable result of the world as it was. As a high school history teacher, I feel compelled to offer an example for readers 🙂 I also want to see if you agree with my explanation because I do not claim to have clear thinking on this topic at all.  A classic example in a World HIstory Class is the start of World War I. A contingency-focused approach might argue that, if the Austro-Hungarian ArchDuke Franz Ferdinand had NOT been assassinated on June 28th, 1914 the first World War would not have happened inevitably: the events that ultimately caused the outbreak of war depended on the Assassination as an event; they were specifically caused by it. The counter-argument is that there were enough underlying factors that a World War started in Europe WOULD HAVE HAPPENED ANYWAY even if the Archduke was never assassinated by nationalist Prinzip.

Now this tension and uncertainty is, as I understand it, usually cast  in terms of whether all historical events are contingent on the prior ones or whether some events are inevitable. We should note that this in itself can be a problematic division. But let’s link this to what you have been saying in the past about structures in human societies. For me when I teach causes, I usually suggest that the tension is actually between contingent events and systems. Because a systems look at the past–which, correct me if I’m mistaken here, Vinicius is usually associated with Social Science approaches to the past often tends to have a hard time explaining change because change often appears (though I’m sure it isn’t really) opposed to change. So, for me, the tension is between seeing history as a series of uniquely contingent events (which, btw sort of lends itself to Great Person history) or as a set of systems within which agents act and events occur. 

Does this seem reasonable to you?

Vinicius: I’m glad you brought contingency up – that’s a topic I love, and I have a lot to say about that! However, the epistemic issue I mentioned is a tad different (albeit related): systems don’t exist in static form. As far as triggers to systemic change go, Gavrilo Prinzip is an uniquely visible example, but every member of a system (even non-human ones) to some extent changes it by the very act of participating in it.

Language is probably a good example: every individual has an idiolect, which gradually influences (and is influenced by) local dialects, until we realize we’re not Latin speakers any more, but rather users of Portuguese, Romanian, French, etc. (And, possible unlike WWI, while it’s probably inevitable that languages drift apart, it wasn’t inevitable that the old Latin-speaking world would break up into these particular languages).

Contemporary politics might be another example. No single contingency (e.g. the rise of Trump) is responsible for the global rightward drift in political sentiment. We’re likely dealing with a bunch of local resentments, amplified by the global communications network, that gradually turn political culture into something else. 

This is a great strip by SMBC that illustrates the conundrum well, I think. The author is talking about individual action, but it works just as well for historical structures. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/economist-2

So, I’m saying that Games (and formal models in general) provide us with a snapshot of that system at a particular moment in time. But how robust this picture is when we’re dealing with moments before or after our photograph is taken? 

Jeremiah: Got it! So are you essentially wondering whether the nature of historical games insofar as they are historical problem spaces, are fundamentally snapshots of systems in a moment in time and whether they can  speak to/account for the changes over time that all the individual components of the world systems and their contingent actions can bring to a system? It’s an excellent question and an excellent point. My grad school period included a lot of talk about social science methods and the idea of structure and the problem of accounting for change in a world with strong systems. In the Roman Republic, for example we were coming out of the 1980s where “Why did the Republic Fall after working so well” (debatable of course) which gets to this: how do we represent distinct moments in time before and after. It’s definitely an issue. A historical problem space is often like a snapshot about a moment in time and because it emphasizes a main historical agent (a player agent) working in systems, in a sense it does not model change as well. To me that is about contingency too. Anway, it’s hardly static, with agents all doing their things in the world system. 

To me this connects to the problem of representing stand out historical events in a game (ones we name and date and attribute significant changes to). It is quite difficult, I suggest, to include events in an hps and thus also in a game in a way that makes them feel like true events: contingent moments that change. It took me a while to see this: the games I made for students and the games they played for my classes were almost always about systems that changed very little (nothing happened the moment after the snapshot, to use your turn, that was not already happening in the photograph). Then I started investigating how existing historical board games use events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most games that use named events provide ways to ignore the event altogether and get some other bonus from playing a card, or make it so that a particular event card can trigger, get reshuffled and trigger some more. I think that speaks to this problem too. Perhaps a new thing to list when we talk about biases of the medium of historical games.
So does this affect your appreciation of HPS and it’s usefulness? What about, by extension, historical games, which as you know I’d argue ALL have historical problem space?

Vinicius: Well, my answer to the first questions is a very confident “yes” – for no other reason than because, as we’ve been discussing so far, most history games fall into this category.

We might question the inherent incompatibilities between these systems and the historical discipline. But, at the end of the day, this is what these games are, and if we want to understand, describe and use them critically, we need a framework.

(There is ONE possible exception to that statement. But I think I’ll save that for later because it’s not strictly speaking an objection to the HPS, but a new way of looking at games that kind of flips the table on how we think about agency in ludic systems).

Jeremiah: Cool! Stay tuned for Part II, readers