Gaming the Past

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.