Archive
GTP Dialogue with Vinicius Marino Carvalho: HPS and Beyond (Part I)
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?
Read more…GTP Dialogue with Eugen Pfister: (Part I)
This is the first in what will be a series of dialogues with game studies scholar Eugen Pfister. Like all GTP dialogues, we focus on discussing ideas as they seem to us rather than finely proofed essays. Eugen starts us off with a broader question about the appeal of history that will lead us to topics in historical games studies.
EP: So let’s start with that: I am very excited that we are now trying this here. I’ve been waiting for a suitable occasion to do something together for years. (J: Me too!) So let’s talk about our “stuff”: History and Games. This is in fact a particularly good time in my academic biography. I’ve been researching digital games and history for I think about ten years now: history in digital games, the history of digital games and now increasingly also the philosophy of history and digital games. From my school education in a French lycée as well as my university education in Austria, France, Germany and Italy, I was trained to search for a “gain in knowledge” and to develop a pertinent research question in advance of an investigation. In other words, research is supposed to make sense, to help us better understand ourselves in contrast to just describing what we see. Never stop asking questions.
Read more…Historical Game Design Theory and Practice: Dialogue with Luke Holmes, Part 2
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.
Read more…Historical Game Design Theory and Practice with Luke Holmes, Part 1
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.
Read more…Dreams of Darkness as a Historical Problem Space: A Discussion
Friend and HGS colleague currently working with Dream of Darkness, Tamika Glouftsis, wrote an insightful blog in April Can the Historical Problem Space framework help us make better history games? I was excited to see her thoughts, not least of all because I’m considering a book project specifically on using the HPS framework to guide game design for students (in the form of interactive texts, and physical boardgame design) a guide that, hopefully, would have value for teacher-designers and historical game developers too. So with that in mind, and the pleasure of exploring this topic for any synergistic insights we or others might developed, I wrote some interlinear comments to Tamika’s post to continue the discussion, and Tamika wrote some additional comment to turn this into a dialogue. So what we have is, we think, an interesting discussion of ideas and a continued exploration of how developers (in addition to those studying historical games) might use the Historical Problem Space framework (McCall, 2020) as an analytical tool for historical game development. Both Tamika and I welcome further conversations on this, so please reach out to us with questions and comments
Read more…The Debate is on: Historical Accuracy and Historical Video Games (Part 2)
For this second post in a series, Adam Chapman and I dig deeper, continuing to discuss the ideas of historical authenticity in historical video games and debating whether the games like Wolfenstein 2: New Order and Call of Duty: World War II are really comparably historical games when doing this kind of analysis.
For the first in this series go here
Jeremiah: In our last post you ended by asking the question: Does your separation into two types of simulation approaches help us determine when a game is an interesting and at least somewhat defensible model of the past or just a rubber ball?
Adam: Again, I think the answer to this is one of those ‘yes and no’ responses that we academics are so frustratingly fond of. For me, the idea of the realist/conceptual framework is to describe the style of representation of historical games. Does it attempt to show us the past as it claims it appeared to agents (realist)? Or does it aim to tell us about the past by mainly using abstraction (e.g. rules, menus, maps, text, charts, tables) and therefore representing discourse about that past (conceptual)? So for me, the framework is an effort to categorise the styles of representation we find
Discussion: Historical Accuracy and Historical Video Games (Part 1)
For this first post in a series, Adam Chapman and I begin to discuss, and hopefully unravel, the ideas of historical accuracy and authenticity in historical video games. What do we mean by these terms? Can games show accuracy and authenticity? Does it matter and, if so, why? We have authored this as a dialogue, each of us contributing a little text at a time and responding off each other. We welcome participation and will respond to comments.
Jeremiah: It seems a straightforward sort of question: “how historically accurate is that video game?”, whether it’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Call of Duty: World War II, Sid Meier’s Civilization or any of the myriad historical video games. Sometimes when we talk about historical video games, we use the term historically authentic to try to capture something different about the ways a historical game relates to the past it depicts. Either way, it’s not an easy question. But let’s see if we can unpack it.
What does it mean to be historically accurate in general? Does that mean that a medium (text, recording, image, video, game, etc.) represents or depicts events in the correct chronology and “as they happened”? If so, we’ve got a problem right there. It’s been quite awhile since mainstream historians have argued that historians can in any meaningful sense depict the past “as it was.” But let’s leave that aside for a moment. Let’s stipulate that historically accurate means presenting accurately in the medium the “historical facts”, the “generally accepted” view of events, the participants, the order they happened, causes and effects, that sort of thing,
GTP Designer Talks
Interviews with designers of historical video games. Posted here and on Spotify , Google Play, and Apple Podcasts.
Gaming the Past 