Gaming the Past

Disclaimer: I have advocated and used the criterion of what I call “defensible models” of the past for evaluating historical games for 16 years in print. Based on some recent interest in my network, I decided to write this VERY QUICKLY AND WITHOUT PROOFING and post this immediately on finishing it. It is a discussion piece, not even remotely a polished essay. I will revise and add in response to community feedback and get it into a more polished piece. Would love your feedback.

Improvement notes from first round of colleagues on BSky 3/25/26

• The jargon-free approach is helpful and educators and folks outside of game studies and HGS struggle all the time with this.
• But who am I arguing against – To Vinicius Marino Carvalho I suggested Deconstructionist history is one of the bigger lurking problems to practical educational approache
• Give some examples of games where there are “inaccuracies but defensibility to illustrate
• .The concision of “Some agents like this” is helpful. Maybe spell out the logic. What does a history game model? Historical problem spaces. So does it do that defensibly?
• Don’t negate or oppose discrete fact not-picking, “consume” say Nikhil ? And it’s a very good point. How could one critique model with no discrete facts?
• Address that the level of abstraction is a factor in all of this. At a high enough level of abstraction HPS becomes more defensible often.

We Should Move Beyond Evaluating a Historical Game Primarily on Whether it Portrays a List of “Facts” Historically Accurately

When I first started shifting from my independent work on video games and history education into the fledgling community of Historical Game Studies fostered by playthepast.org which was launched under founding editor Ethan Watrall’s guidance in 2010 I began as an educator and historian approaching games. I suggested in The Happiness Metric in CivCity:Rome and the Critique of Simulation Games (September 2010)

Asking whether a historical simulation game is accurate as if that were an all-or-nothing quality seems to me to be missing the point—the accuracy of any historical interpretation is not something that can be determined with any certainty. One historian’s common sense convention is another’s faulty construct to be dismantled. One generation’s conventions are the next’s biased assumptions. What really matters in historical interpretations is the extent to which any particular one is constructed based on the strongest, most defensible readings of evidence and the best supported and culturally sensitive understandings of human behavior. So, a far better criterion than accuracy when critiquing a historical simulation game is whether its core gameplay offers defensible explanations of historical causes and systems. So for example, it is not a question of whether a civilization building game allows a player to develop nuclear fission in the 17^th century, but whether the game reasonably models the factors, including constraints, that lead to the development of such technologies. This focus on defensible models of causation is absolutely critical when one’s interests, like mine, center on using simulations as models to aid student (most often high school, but middle school and college as well) in understanding historical systems and learning to critique interpretations of the past. Let me be clear on the term interpretation here. We do not access the past directly nor do we present the past directly; we can only access and construct interpretations. This is true whether the interpretation comes from the Roman historian Livy, the modern historian McCall, or the game designers at Firefly. In this light, so long as a game’s core gameplay is historically defensible, any, even many inaccuracies serve as highly useful targets for getting students to launch evidence-based critiques. Evidence-based critiques is the operative term; simulation games should be critiqued using abundant references to the contents of valid sources of historical evidence.