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Debriefing in History class with Defensible Models in history games: A quick report
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.
Read more…9th Grade Game Design Lab at Cincinnati Country Day School
I finally get to share this and I am so excited! Next year I will be co-leading a Ninth Grade Design Lab for all incoming 9s at Cincinnati Country Day School! Here’s the nutshell. All of our ninth graders will collaborate in small groups to research and design a boardgame on a contemporary modern world issue/problem (different issues for different groups and tbd).
The boardgame will be designed using the Historical / Agential Problem Space Framework for game design that I have written about for years and will share even more widely in the upcoming Designing Historical Games for Classrooms Designing Historical Games for Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Educa. As the groups learn essential skills for research, collaboration, and game design, they will also develop Makerspace skills under the expert guidance of co-leader Jamie Back and develop their skills at presentation. Note the focus on skills: this Design Lab is about the process, about developing future durable (as I think is the “in” term) skills that will serve the kids in life, high school, and college.
When they have finished designing and engineering the board game, they will give a presentation on the real world topic and their game-based analysis to our 6th graders and have them play the games and provide critical feedback, an empowering moment for 6th and a great vertical connection to make between our Upper and Middle Schools!
I am so very grateful to get to put into practice my agential game design pedagogies, that I have used in my own classes here for years, to an entire school program that I think will be truly a transformative educational moment for our 9ths. Let me know if I can gush some more on details 🙂
This week in history games / game histories at Cincinnati Country Day School
In my part of the amazing Cincinnati Country Day School this past week.
– Students in Honors 10th Modern World History and 9th Grade Ancient World History submitted their playtest analysis essays where they assessed: 1) how effectively their researched game design fit the historical problem space they had researched and 2) The results of the second round of playtests they ran and 3) The next steps for the penultimate revision
– An amazing independent study student finished their research and began conceptualizing the final 15-20 minute video-essay they will craft comparing the Iliad, Ancient Historians on the Homeric Period and Warfare, Troy the Movie, and A Total War Saga: Troy (videogame) as different media histories of “The Trojan War”
– Two amazing independent study students for next year come closer to solidifying their proposals. One will craft a Twine complete with recorded sound effects illustrating how the soundscapes of Victorian lives differed by social positions. The other will develop their Shogunate historical boardgame into a full historical game with Print and Play.
All of these works are developed with strict attention (that’s my job, of course) to rigorous historical research and analysis.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of all the amazing things students did last week (I didn’t even mention the applications for senior peer mentors are in now!)
Oh and shameless self-aggrandizement moment — look who got into the curriculum guide!
Pre-Order Page is up for Designing Historical Games (August 17th, 2026)
The Possibilities of an Agential Problem Space Framework
This is a quick post just to start a conversation and/or further work. It might be useful to notice all games with worlds can likely be helpfully be analyzed as Agential Problem Spaces, building off of the Historical Problem Space framework for analyzing (and thus thinking about designing) historical games–analog, ttrpg, and digital.
In origin, I proposed the Historical Problem Space Framework to point out that the ways Historical games characterize any given part of their history content cannot be considered independently from that parts functional role in the game’s historical problem space. https://www.playthepast.org/?p=2594
And that developed into a full framework that is still developing (even into current book project, Designing Historical Games for the Classroom). Bottom line, though, is that systemically functional nature of games about worlds–regardless of whether those worlds are fictional historical etc.
https://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/mccall
So any game with a world (and inhabitants if that’s not understood) can be analyzed using something like the Historical Problem Space framework. I really have not had time to explore this in detail, but I’m going to start referring to it, for consistency and connection to HPS, as an Agential Problem Space.
Now, I’m a historian and a history teacher and a historical game designer and a historical game studies academic. I do NOT have ANY substantial grounding in (post Roman) literature or literary theory. So when I speculate next, why seeing games as agential problem spaces might be useful, it is based on my perspective in all those areas listed in the last paragraph
So since HPS is also a theory for how games shape historical content maybe? an Agential Problem Space framework for literature-based game studies interested in how game designer present a world in their game that is
1) based on a literary / text lore corpus
2) purporting to be the “real world” or a “real historical world”
Because then an Agential Problem Space can help with terms and tools for seeing how a game medium shapes literature and lore and perceptions of the world into a game, which basically means a medium that is structurally like an historical game. ???
I also think an Agential Problem Space framework might? be very helpful for teachers in other disciplines than history, not least of all lit & lang (but any subject that purports to represent the world: science, social science, etc.) As an approach to how they & their students could design world-based games in their areas?
What do you folks think?
New set of print and play prototypes for history classes
In a flurry of posting productivity on Gaming the Past, I added a new project this morning. The prototype (still in need of work but playable) for Rhetoric and Revolution. This is a card game about the political competition around drafting the 1791 constitution. (#3 on the page). As always, please send me any and all constructive feedback. These are early works-in-progress. But the 3 listed have all been tried in some form or other with students and can be a good learning activity (so long as your class reflects and criticizes them at least a little!)
https://gamingthepast.net/tabletop/jeremiahs-prototypes/
Paradox Europa IV Universalis Educator Guide is Out (and Free)
I’m very pleased to share Paradox’s Educator’s Guide for Europa Universalis IV (that I wrote) is now available for all. EUIV is a challenging game & I spent considerable time breaking down exactly how I’d use it in history classes in hopes the many interested educators out there will give it a try.
It’s a 3 part guide: Logistics, Student initial play guide, and historical problem space analysis of EUIV. The focus is on the game as history so interested educators can decide what parts they want to focus on and what aspects of the history are more and less problematic in the game.
Hopefully it will be of some use out there. I enjoyed the challenge, and I am very glad to have a worked example out there for educators about how to use the historical problem space framework for teaching. Of course, as always, just reach out if I can help you further or reach out to Paradox.
Gameworld Space and Action-Choices in Historical Games (HPS framework)
Just a quick reminder/introduction. The Historical Problem Space framework is a set of terms and concepts I’ve been developing over the past decade+ to help all intersections of educators and academics analyze historical video games in away that is holistic and recognizes that historical games are both functional as working computer programs (and, to a lesser but still useful extent, analog games) and as cohesive designs. This means any particular historical phenomenon in a game is functionally and cohesively connected to al the rest of the game design.
The framework continues to develop but my most recent core writings on this are:
The Historical Problem Space Framework: Games as a Historical Medium (2020)
Gaming the Past: Second Edition (2022)
And there are links to other articles and talks about HPS on this page
Greetings to all who, like me, find themselves fascinated by historical games,
Not infrequently I find my thoughts well ahead of my writing on the Historical Problem Space framework for historical game analysis (https://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/mccall) (Yes, I’m that sort of person who thinks about games and history games a significant amount of the time) Today I was working out a lecture on 4x games so that my students will have some genre understanding when looking at Colonization and Imperialism (the 4x games — but of course the historical phenomena too). I’ve been referring to the different kinds of action-choices a player agent can make in gameworld space.
I have listed and briefly discussed some of the core action choices a player agent has available in a gameworld space. I thought I had perhaps listed them all in the 2020 article, or perhaps in GTP 2.0 but now I’m thinking the core action-choices in gameworld space should be (helpfully, I hope) set out in one places until I can work them into a published article or book.
So, a quick reminder, the gameworld space is the space in which the player agent (the main playable character) pursues the goals (if they choose) that the developers have set for them and, while doing so, encounter the various elements in the space (a.r.t.o s = non-player agents, resources, tools, obstacles etc). The player agent makes and takes action choices in order to (if they choose) attempt to achieve the goals the developers have designed for the game. The “problem” in the historical problem space design that is standard in historical games, is to solve, avoid, overcome, utilize etc. the elements (a.r.t.o s) in the gameworld space that are keeping the player agent from the designed goals or can help the player agent.
Gaming the Past, Second Edition, Is Published
Gaming the Past, Second Edition, is out with Routledge! I am so very grateful and excited to have had the chance to revise significantly and add to the first edition work that came out over a decade ago. If you’re interested in reading more about my bibliographical road to Gaming the Past First Edition and the decade between it and 2.0, I’m working on a series of posts about my time in historical game studies as one of the earlier academics.
— Jeremiah McCall
18 Years in Historical Game Studies: A Biographical/Bibliographical Musing Part 1 (2005 – 2012)
Gaming the Past, Second Edition, is out today with Routledge! I am so very grateful and excited to have had the chance to revise significantly and add to the first edition work that came out over a decade ago. I thought perhaps it is a good time to reflect a little on my time and work in Historical Game Studies and in teaching history using video games as tools. Here’s a first post to see if it’s of interest to anyone else.
— Jeremiah McCall
Though I experimented a little with interactive learning in history in my graduate years finishing my PhD on Greco-Roman History with Nate Rosenstein at the Ohio State University (2000), I did not work with making and integrating actual physical games until my first history teaching position in a secondary school. Hoping very much to add life to my ancient history courses (high school) I made a couple of physical game prototypes: One a simulation of Roman politics in the Republic and the other a simulation game of ancient warfare. For students, the interest these games brought to the areas we studied was palpable, and I knew I wanted to do more with games in history education. This process continued when I came to Cincinnati Country Day School and had access to laptop computers. I experimented with some board games like Diplomacy and continued to work on designs for tabletop prototypes–many never reaching a truly playable state. I was struck along the way with the amount of research I had to do to make a historical game. Inspiration–get students to design games as a way to encourage them to study a historical topic in depth. This led to my first “Historical Simulations” senior elective at CCDS, in the winter and spring of the 2004-05 school year. While the course was focused on having students design their own historical tabletop games I was also struck by Civilization III as a potential model to play and study. So, in addition to the design part of the class, I had students play Civ III and compare it to the first chapter or so of Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies. This experiment with Civilization (III) caught the attention of friend and colleague Kurt Squire (now UC Irvine) who invited me to speak at the Education Arcade in May of 2005. I was part of a panel discussing the use of Civilization III in the classroom. There’s still a video of the whole panel to be found on Youtube (and me considerably younger with a great deal more hair.)
Read more…
GTP Designer Talks
Interviews with designers of historical video games. Posted here and on Spotify , Google Play, and Apple Podcasts.
Gaming the Past 