Gaming the Past

Today was my second day of having my 10th grade students play the Grizzled. As I’m pretty sure all teachers know, end of year we often get exhausted and careless about details, kids and teachers. The 10th graders are bright and capable Honors Students. I have analyzed a number of historical games with them this school year so they know the deal. Or so I thought. But the understandable exhaustion was setting in and I saw it. If I didn’t shape up, we’d lose the analytical parts of playing the game, hardly fitting for the capstone game of the year. I knew I needed my students to get into the granular analysis of the historical problem space of the Grizzled and its implementation in pieces and mechanics. Then they could discuss and take notes and we could all discuss, and the hoped for learning happen.

Recently (past few months) I started talking more explicitly to these kids about the idea of whether a given historical game has defensible models. I have used that term since my first writing in 2010 and in Gaming the Past, First Edition (2011). But I have not always taught it consistently to my students. After my draft musings on defensible models and defensible problem spaces from March, it clicked that the question of whether a game has defensible models is an outstanding way to debrief a class on a historical game. That did not fully click until today. The debrief went beautifully, in large part because I used the concepts of defensible models and the Historical Problem Space framework to guide the debrief.

Recall my proposition that a history game has defensible models to the extent that one can support with valid evidence that some agents existed in a place like THIS (i.e. like that this game represents), and had goals like THIS, in a world system like THIS, and were able and did at times make action-choices like THIS to achieve those goals. In other words, a game is defensible to the extent it models a valid-evidence-supportable historical problem space.

So the debrief works simply by running students through each of these questions and discussing them, then asking what the main point of the game is and returning to whether that HPS component is defensible. To get the most granular analytical thinking about the game, I nudged students toward explaining how the game’s mechanics and pieces modeled each part

• Who are the agents in the game and how are they represented in game mechanics and aesthetics (and in boardgames pieces)? Did some people like this exist? In what ways does the game selectively include and exclude historical agents? Why? What is the impact on the overall game history?
• Did they exist in a worldspace like that modeled in the game? What setting and time? In what ways/features does the game mechanics (and/or pieces and mechanics) model this? In what ways does the game selectively include and exclude historical worldspace? Why? What is the impact on the overall game history?
• What are the goals in the game? Did some people like the game agents in a worldspace and setting like this pursue goals like this? In what ways does the game selectively include and exclude historical goals? Why? What is the impact on the overall game history?
• What are the action choices in the game for the player agents? What are the actual game mechanic choices. In a boardgame what are the playing pieces and how do the rules/mechanics allow the player to play them? Are these analogous to supportable action-choices that some historical agents could make? Which action choices are the most analogous? What kinds of thoughts or feelings or behaviors are encouraged by the action choices?

This worked really well in analyzing the game as a history, especially as my students took excellent notes because they get to bring their game notebook to their history exam. I’ll add more detail to this post later, but wanted to get it out there.