Theory, design, research,and use of historical games in and beyond history education. Look here for links to current research, lists of available historical video games, reviews, and essays on a variety of topics connected to historical games. Created and maintained by Jeremiah McCall (jmc.hst@gmail.com; @gamingthepast.bsky.social; @gamingthepast@hcommons.social) , teacher, historian, game designer, historical game studies person, and author of Gaming the Past, Second Edition

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Discussion: Historical Accuracy and Historical Video Games (Part 1)

December 26, 2017 4 comments

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,

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Categories: dialogues, Theory and Practice Tags: , , ,

Mid-December History and Games Links

December 16, 2017 3 comments

When I began the cycle I wasn’t sure if I’d have enough in a month. Amazing what pops up as we all work on history and games. Don’t forget to send links my way for the mid-January links page.

Historical Video Games

  • Ambition: A Minuet in Power  is currently on Kickstarter.  According to its designers: “Court, snub and seduce your way to the top of society. Extend your influence, uncover the intrigue of the coming revolution, and ensure that you end up on the winning side of history.”
  • Arté: Mecenas – Made for art history and world history classes, Arte: Mecenas places the player as a Medici banker developing business and patronizing Renaissance Art.
  • Games by Colestia on itch.io – A set of small games about historical and real world topics. Post/Capitalism I found powerfully provocative and simple in its argument.
  • Command: Shifting Sands –  “Traces the history of many Arab-Israeli conflicts: from the sidelines of the Suez crisis, through the lightning Six-Day War… all the way to the historic Osirak raid and the epic air battle over the Bekaa Valley.”
  • Curious Expedition – A game about 19th century European exploration and Imperialism. The designers have offered their game for free to interested educators (info@curious-expedition.com)
  • Field of Glory II: Immortal Fire – The expansion to Field of Glory II focused on the Greco-Persian wars
  • Oriental Empires – Turn-based strategy focused on ancient Chineses civilizations. As I noted in my tweet, I’m not fully comfortable with the title, but this seems to be a legitimate (and well-received) strategy game.
  • Venti Mesi – “A collection of playable stories about Italian Resistance and Liberation from Nazi-Fascism.”
  • Way of the Defector – Assume the role of a defector trying to escape North Korea and reach safety

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Categories: link lists

Arté Mecenas – Review

December 13, 2017 2 comments

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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Categories: reviews Tags: , , , ,

Attentat 1942 – Review

November 24, 2017 3 comments

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 Attentat CaptureHeydrich, 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.

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Categories: reviews Tags: , , ,

Mid-November History and Games Links

November 20, 2017 1 comment

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

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Categories: link lists

Historical Twine Talk at VALUE Workshop

September 5, 2017 Leave a comment

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.

 

Interactive Texts

Jeremiah McCall (me) – Path of Honors Project

Rachel Ponce – Surviving History: The Fever

Neville Morley – Might and Right, the Athenian Version

Max Kreminski – Epitaph

Categories: Uncategorized

History Respawned Podcast with Me on Twine

August 27, 2017 Leave a comment

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.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

The Problem of Historical Choices in Twine Game Design – A Response to Neville Morley

August 17, 2017 Leave a comment

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.” 

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Categories: Twine, Uncategorized Tags: , ,

Student-designed historical Twines posted 5/10/17

May 9, 2017 1 comment

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

Categories: Uncategorized

Meaningful Choices in Twine, History & Counterfactual History (PoH Notes, Part 2)

April 9, 2017 Leave a comment

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.

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Categories: Uncategorized