Gaming the Past

Disclaimer: I decided to post this immediately on finishing and I wrote it quickly. It is a discussion piece, not even remotely a polished essay. Would love your feedback.

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.