Archive
Arté Mecenas – Review
Arté: Mecenas™ portrays the rise of the Medici and the interconnection of art, patronage, spirituality, economics, and politics in Renaissance Florence. Purposefully designed and marketed for students in art history surveys or general surveys of early Modern Europe, the game is accompanied with statements of learning objectives and a fair number of teacher support materials. These details help the game be integrated more smoothly into a teacher’s existing curriculum. The game also offers an instructor’s portal that enables the teacher to monitor students’ progress through the game.
The stated learning goals of Arté: Mecenas, are really more game goals rather than a list of the cognitive skills and knowledge the student will hopefully acquire and develop. Still they give a reasonable overview of the understandings the game designers hope students will acquire.
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Attentat 1942 – Review
With this post begins a regular practice of blogging at least monthly, in addition to the mid-month review of links. I’d like to fill this space with reviews of historical video games that have good prospects for use in history classes from middle school through college. With that in mind, it is my pleasure to begin with a review of Attentat 1942, (Steam Page).
Note: I received a review copy of Attentat 1942 at the developers’ initiative. I also played through the game once; clearly multiple playthroughs will bring different experiences
Attentat 1942, (Steam Page) is an intriguing historical adventure game developed by Charles University, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. The prologue, in full motion video footage from the Second World War, tells the player the story of the historical 1942 assassination of Reinhard 
Heydrich, a primary actor driving the Holocaust and the Nazi governor of the protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia, the territory that included Prague after it came under Nazi control. The assassination of Heydrich by Czechoslovak paratroopers, while a blow on behalf of the resistance, resulted in the brutal execution and deportation to concentration camps of several thousand in the protectorate.
Mid-November History and Games Links
Starting with this post, I will post at least once every month a list of things new (to me at least) in the world of historical games – Games, Commentary, Scholarship, and even some more tangentially related news and scholarship. I’m not going to be too strict about when such material came out, so if you have things from earlier in the year that you would like to have posted in mid- December, let me know. I’ll figure out a better way to organize this, I hope, but for now, I just want to get the ball rolling
New Historical Video Games
I’m deliberately not including the AAA predominantly first/third person shooters; they get plenty of press already. These are the interesting indies with a marked preference for games that might be useful in a class-setting
- Attentat 1942 by Charles University, Czech Academy of Sciences Play and learn about the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia from video eyewitness testimony in the role of a modern young adult reconnecting with the past.
- Arms Race – The Cold War Era
- Civil War: Battle of Petersburg – A war game that looks to have been an mobile app first, but has reasonably positive Steam reviews
- Mare Nostrum– Mediterranean naval battles “from the dawn of history to the Roman Civil Wars”
- Numantia by Reco Technology A turn-based strategy game based on the second century BCE Spanish – Roman wars.
- Train Tycoon coming in January 2016 Preview Article by Samuel Horti, PC Gamer
- Empire Architect
- Bronze Age HD Edition
- Field of Glory II
Historical Twine Talk at VALUE Workshop
On September 5th, I had the pleasure of talking about Twine and history with attendees of the VALUE projects’ “Interactive Pasts Workshop: Interactive (Hi-)storytelling,” following my video presentation, Crafting Interactive Histories:
Twine and Choice-Based Interactive Historical Texts.
Link to the Video
Path of Honors Project
Writings
Chapman, A. (2016). Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice. London: Routledge.
Dening, Greg, Performing cross-culturally,” Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (December 2006), pp. 1-11
McCall, J. (2011). Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History. Routledge.
McCall, J. (2012). Navigating the Problem Space: The Medium of Simulation Games in the Teaching of History. The History Teacher 45 , 9-28.
McCall, J. (2012). Historical simulations as problem spaces: Criticism and classroom use. Journal of Digital Humanities 1.
Short, Emily — To many great essays to link to at her blog, but here are a few.
- https://emshort.blog/2010/06/07/so-do-we-need-this-parser-thing-anyway/
- https://emshort.blog/2014/10/29/writing-in-collaboration-with-the-system/
- https://emshort.blog/2015/05/24/framed-invisible-parties-and-the-world-plot-interface/
Interactive Texts
Jeremiah McCall (me) – Path of Honors Project
Rachel Ponce – Surviving History: The Fever
History Respawned Podcast with Me on Twine
In early August 2017, I had the pleasure of joining Bob Whitaker and John Harney on History Respawned, a podcast and sometimes YouTube video on history and games. We discussed Twine as a tool for history and in history education, and a number of other topics involving games and learning in history.
The Problem of Historical Choices in Twine Game Design – A Response to Neville Morley
Neville Morley (@NevilleMorley)and I (@gamingthpast)have been exploring the ramifications of Twine for developing interactive historical texts. My main ongoing experiment is the Path of Honors project, an interactive text about a fictional Roman aristocrat going through the very historical process of pursuing an aristocratic career. I call this sort of interactive text an “every person” approach in that it focuses on a historical situation but has a protagonist that did not exist, in an authentic set of circumstances. Neville is working on Might and Right, an investigation of the Athenian treatment of the polis of Melos in the Peloponnesian War. Neville’s text is what I would characterize as a “specific agent” approach, in that the player takes the role of Cleomedes, an Athenian general who was, in fact, in a command position at Melos in 416. A very quick bit of historical setup, quoted from Neville’s Twine:
The small island of Melos in the Cyclades, halfway between Athens and Crete, was originally a Spartan colony, and so had refused to join the Athenian alliance. Officially the Melians remain neutral, but in recent years their leaders have sided openly with Sparta. Now the Athenians have sent an expedition of 38 ships and 2,000 troops to demand the island’s unconditional surrender.
Neville has finished a version where the Athenian player, as Cleomedes, determines the fate of the Melians.
In a recent tweet I made a light-hearted, yet serious, attempt to propose a rule about historical game development in choice-based work that I jokingly titled, McCall’s Rule of Good Choices in a Historical Game: “The Designer must provide situations where there is more than one viable choice, and the historical choice cannot always be the only viable choice.”
Student-designed historical Twines posted 5/10/17
At the end of the day on 5/10/17, I will post (on my Philome.la Twine site) a selection of Twine interactive history texts, designed by my ninth-graders at Cincinnati Country Day School during the third quarter of this 2016-17 year. The designers’ names have been replaced by their initials. I am very pleased and excited to post these as excellent examples of historical Twines and hope they will inspire similar projects at other schools and more discussion about Twine as a history pedagogy. For now, I want to include a few caveats that I think are important to appreciating the examples.
- These were selected from among the best projects. Best does not mean 100% historically accurate (whatever that means anyway) or always grammatically correct/stylisyically elegant. Please remember: these are 14 and 15 year olds
- They were the product of a quarter-long research and design project (see the specs and rubric I used) that began with a short research essay on their historical figure and scenario
- They were revised after an initial grading for a revision grade
- I asked the students to do one more proofread before posting
Let me know if you have questions or comments, particularly if you’d like to try something like this in your own classes!
The List of 2017 Interactive Histories
Hatshepsut’s Rule
The Assassination of Caesar
Mary, Bloody Mary
The Siege of Paris, 845
Meaningful Choices in Twine, History & Counterfactual History (PoH Notes, Part 2)
Path of Honors (here at my Twine site on philome.la) is an experimental interactive history that I am designing in bits and pieces. The plan is to model an aristocratic Roman as he played the game of politics and sought to win election to offices and gain prestige and dignity for himself and his family. PoH is skeletal right now and will likely take years to finish. In the meantime I hope it will provoke conversation and suggest what historians could do with the interactive medium of choice-based texts. Lucas Coyne, a doctoral student in U.S. History at Loyola University in Chicago, sent me a list of terrific questions about Path of Honors (play here). Their depth and breadth encouraged me to write and post the answers as pieces on PlaythePast. For questions 1-3, see this essay. Here is question #4: I’ll answer more soon.
4) Lucas: In one article on [Path of Honors], you wrote: “The designer must provide situations where there is more than one viable choice and the historical choice cannot always be the only viable choice.” Then, how do you deal with entirely ahistorical outcomes? Should those be primarily avoided, or should there be some acceptance of counterfactuals based on our understanding of the underlying things going on? (I realize the structure of PoH limits this, but I’m interested in the general sense)
I‘ve spent a lot of time thinking about your question and coming up with different responses and false starts because asking what choices were available to a historical agent is at the heart of counterfactual history and the very issue of agency/free will in humans (the latter I have been teaching in a philosophy elective this season, which makes me less certain than normal about such things). Some other time, hopefully we can explore those issues. In the meantime, I’ll focus on PoH and choice in PoH, since that’s what inspired my comment.
Path of Honors — Thoughts behind the design of an interactive history
Path of Honors (here at my Twine site on philome.la) is an experimental interactive history that I am designing in bits and pieces. The plan is to model an aristocratic Roman as he played the game of politics and sought to win election to offices and gain prestige and dignity for himself and his family. PoH is skeletal right now and will likely take years to finish. In the meantime I hope it will provoke conversation and suggest what historians could do with the interactive medium of choice-based texts.
Lucas Coyne, a doctoral student in U.S. History at Loyola University in Chicago, sent me a list of terrific questions tabout Path of Honors (play here). Their depth and breadth encouraged me to write and post the answers as pieces on PlaythePast. These are the first three: I’ll answer more in upcoming weeks.
1. Ideally, what is the audience for this project, particularly in its completed state?
Path of Honors is an attempt to do several things in the realm of developing an interactive historical text using Twine. The first was simply to get myself more acquainted with the specifics of the tool so that I could better Read more…
Meaningful Choices(Twine Developer Diary)
(this essay was originally published 10/18/16 on Playthepast.org)
This is the third in a series of posts intended to get readers thinking more about interactive text as a tool for history education and how students might be enabled to design their own researched, text-based historical simulation games using the interactive fiction design tool, Twine. The first post discussed the differences between Twine and Inform. Last week’s post was a Teacher’s Diary, recounting the set up of the Twine project in a high school senior history elective.
A little something different with this week’s post. I have placed the current, very incomplete and very rough start to Path of Honors, the Twine interactive history I am developing as my students create their own interactive histories for our Roman Republic Class. http://www.philome.la/gamingthepast/path-of-honors-experimental. If you do have a chance to try it and want to comment, go ahead and comment on this post
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GTP Designer Talks
Interviews with designers of historical video games. Posted here and on Spotify , Google Play, and Apple Podcasts.
Gaming the Past 