Month: January 2018

One of the hardest things to do when developing historical video games is telling stories from the bottom up. It’s (relatively) easy to make a game about a war or a large scale conflict like a revolution because those concepts are simple to code. However, the more abstract aspects of a person’s condition are not so easy to build. Peter Christiansen mentions non-binary ethics as a way to overcome one facet of this, but I think the more important thing that video games struggle to impart is the emotions involved in historical stories. It is one thing to tell a player that “this event is sad” through audiovisual effects or have the character feel sad in the narrative, but it is another to impart those feelings onto the player, and I think that should be the goal of historical games, especially those that deal with stories of the marginalized.

A way to prevent this would be to move away from the more traditional video game genres for historical games, like FPS (first-person shooters), action adventure games, and simulation games. By default, all of these game genres aren’t really meant to be story-driven. But there are other genres, though perhaps less exciting, that could make interesting historical games, like RPGs, visual novels, and even point-and-click adventure games. These genres of games are built for world building and character study. One of my favorite games, Sunset, is a point-and-click adventure about a black maid working for a disgraced politician in the aftermath of a military coup, and another, That Dragon, Cancer, explores a father struggling with his son’s last moments with cancer. While not strictly historical, these games delve far deeper into the individuals and the world around them than a game like Verdun (which I’ve also played) can, with the bonus of telling stories that aren’t often told.

 

McCall and Chapman’s discussion really helped me think of video games in a different light. During this dialogue of authenticity, representation, agency and narratives, what struck me was when Chapman posed the question: “are [the characters] historically typical?”. To me, when historical narratives are ‘typical’, they often the leave out marginalized narratives because it was the elite who wrote these mainstream narratives. This leads me to wonder what an authentic narrative means. According to McCall and Chapman, an authentic video game would be showing players real and accurate experiences from the past. However, I would like to expand this definition of authenticity to being historically accurate and inclusive of all narratives, including the ones that are not stereotypically part of the general narrative. Although there will always be some bias to the past and incompleteness of some picture, it seems like depicting non-cliché narratives in video games would bring even greater value to the authenticity of these games.

On the other hand, video games are for entertainment. This brings me to another part of McCall and Chapman’s discussion where they talk about the different external pressures of being a game. When made for the consumption of the public, video games will be most engaging when the audiences’ perceptions and stereotypes of the historical past are reinforced. Typically, these perceptions and stereotypes don’t include marginalized narratives. Thus, I wonder: are there historical video games out there that have attempted to include marginalized narratives? How do they bring the entertainment element while being authentic?

Edit: Having read all the articles, it seems like Drama in the Delta would be the closest video game, or “playable space”, to what I imagined, as it includes social commentary of different lived experiences while being historically accurate.

In Mark Sample’s analysis of the game Drama in the Delta, he makes a point in the importance of distinguishing the video game from the museum. Drama in the Delta, he attests, obscures the difference to a negative end in its overreliance on ‘telling’ (captions) and ‘showing’ (photographs) versus active modeling. It’s true… playing this game would be virtually no different from walking through an exhibit on Japanese internment. And here arises a fundamental challenge of capturing historical memory in video games: how does a game designer utilize the characteristics of the video game, as its own distinct medium, to produce an experience that both (a) fulfills its potential in educative power and (b) is historically authentic?

I appreciate Sample’s reference to the idea of ‘procedural reality’ as the missing piece of Drama in the Delta. Indeed, video games possess the ability to bring an audience through a fully rendered world of physical spaces, signifiers, and emotionality–what museums and other mediums can’t do—and it is exactly this quality that allows video games to valuable sources of learning in their own right. Often times, however, creative license and the construction of procedural reality pose directly at odds with the goal of historical authenticity. Spontaneity and freedom of choice are scary things to give an audience when it comes to preserving a rigid narrative, after all. The crux of decision in the historical game design world, it seems, lies in the carving out of priority between maximizing learning potential and achieving alignment with a narrative. We get a glimpse of what Drama in the Delta and other educationally-oriented games of its kind privilege.

While reading the discussion of historical accuracy in video games, I was most interested by Mr. Chapman’s point about player agency. It seems to me that the need to balance between creating a game that is compelling for a modern player while still being faithful to the historical truth comes down to a question of how much agency a game developer gives a player. If a player’s choices determine everything in the game, it becomes a fiction written by the player within a vaguely historical setting. On the other extreme, removing all player choice preserves the historical accuracy of the narrative at the expense of the player’s agency. Since the point of video games is to be played, it would seem that a developer’s bias would be towards agency and away from historical accuracy. However, some developers still attempt to make their games somewhat historically accurate, and people still buy such games. I believe that this shows players willingness to cede some of their agency in order to participate in the grander historical narrative. Having the ability to literally play the past adds a level of enjoyment to a game that is absent when a game is not rooted in a historical context. I would even go so far as to say that in some cases historical accuracy is appreciated by players as much as agency and would be interested to hear what the authors opinions on that idea are.

I strongly agree with Adam Chapman that the more pertinent question that we should ask is not “is the game historically accurate?” but rather “is the game historically typical?” Player choice inherently nullifies the possibility for perfect historical accuracy as it is impossible to force the player to perfectly recreate events while also maintaining the game’s status as an interactive media form.

Therefore, it is imperative that video games are treated first and foremost as a medium of entertainment. However, their potential as a medium for historical information cannot be denied. The level of immersion that a player can achieve in a video game is unparalleled when compared to other forms of entertainment (e.g. movies, books) and this is entirely due to the level of agency afforded to the player. Even if these games are not totally historically accurate, they can serve as a jumping-off point to get people interested in certain periods of history.

The greatest danger with this approach, however, is the potential for the content of these games to be taken as indisputable fact. The level of dramatization of historical events in as depicted in Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty is certainly not trivial and gamers need to be aware of this fact. As long as these games are never claiming to be be-all, end-all sources of historical information they still serve the important function of introducing surface-level knowledge of important events and their historical contexts.

This is a response to the discussion “Historical Accuracy and Historical Video Games?” on the website Gaming the Past.

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

I thought that many of the issues discussed in this post were thought-provoking. I found the comparison of historical video games to academic history as representations of the past particularly interesting. Understanding the relationship between videogames and the past as one would traditional scholarly history allows us to think about authenticity in video games in ways that we might not consider otherwise. Given that videogames exist primarily as entertainment, historical setting and narratives in video games can seem, in some instances, to be implemented only as a gimmick that draws in more potential consumers. The idea that videogames, like scholarly history, can contribute to our understanding of the past or, as Adam put it, “say something meaningful about the past,” can allow us to more seriously approach video games as a source of historical interpretation.

To continue with the comparison of games and academic history as representations of the past, a game that attempts only to insert a “presentist” narrative into the past, or one in which historical setting is incidental to the narrative of the game or the gameplay itself, can be compared to positivistic history. Much like meaningful textual history, it is important that a game contribute some historical interpretation. This could come in many forms; it might need to, as Jeremiah writes, “offer defensible explanations of historical causes and systems”, or simply offer the player a better understanding of the past and its significance.

I take issue with McCall’s statement that “Exploring a historical setting as a fictional character will not help one understand what happened and why.” Perhaps the fictional character fails to add to the historical narrative the game develops, a poorly designed one might even obstruct it, but this model has many merits over the traditional means of teaching history: namely book learning and lecture. To state categorically that an interactive platform will provide no means of understanding history is hyperbolic and obviously false. An interactive experience as simple as walking through a 3D representation of a historically relevant location already provide a unique perspective that, often times, cannot be gained any other way.

Moreover, the “whys” of history–people’s motivations–are much easier to communicate when a person is actively participating in a simulation than when these influences have to be teased out of written documents. A ship’s manifest may have a wealth of information to divulge, but I have certainly had an easier time understanding the necessity of trade when navigating the geopolitics of a game like Civilization. Realizing that my empire is too large to be protected with my meager coffers really drives home the problems that confronted the Roman Empire as it began to crumble

Nevertheless, I do agree that perfect historical accuracy cannot be achieved by video games. Of course, most historians agree that perfect historical accuracy cannot be accomplished in any medium, so perhaps we need not hold games to so high a standard.