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This post is in response to McCall and Chapman’s blog post.

I agree with the sentiments raised by McCall and Chapman, namely that video games cannot be “historically accurate” or “historically authentic” but can still be valuable by creating discussion around the historic events they depict as well as their representations of history. These arguments make sense given the examples of games McCall and Chapman mention (Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, and Civilization), but I think that by graying the lines between games and simulations we can come to a better historical experience. The primary purpose of AAA games is not to provide an immersive historical experience but rather to provide entertainment. Thus, whenever a design decision comes up in which developers must decide between historical accuracy and playability, they will tend to choose the later. McCall and Chapman mention that the more freedom the player has, the less constrained the game must be and so the harder it is to ensure historical accuracy. I want to push back on this a bit by posing the scenario of a historic open-world game. A game of this type would allow the player to perform almost any action. This would allow players to feel immersed in history while still providing the level of interactivity they desire. Think of it as many simulations packaged together which the player can explore freely. Each simulation can have a semi-rigid structure and limited options to increase historical accuracy and authenticity, yet the player still has freedom and choice.

I definitely agree with the majority of the thoughts and ideas stated in “Discussion: Historical Accuracy and Historical Video Games?.” I don’t think that a video game can be completely historically accurate in the sense that it represents events exactly as they happened in the right chronology.

I do believe, however, that video games may, in some cases, be great tools that can enhance one’s understanding of the past. I also think that for some people it can be an even better tool than textbooks, historical artifacts, etc., due to the fact that some people really just don’t like to read things about the past off of a page from a textbook. For these people, playing a video game with some sort of historical accuracy in which the player has some sort of agency can be much more engaging and a much better tool.

Video games can also provide a better contextualization, as a video game has the potential to provide a complete visualization of the world and setting in which the history took place. While this visualization may not be completely accurate, it provides a sense of completeness and allows the players to think about the world in different ways. By also playing an active role in the events of a game, people can almost place themselves in the world created by the video game and try to feel and understand what life may have been like in such a setting.

I agree with the article’s point that historical video games, by definition, diverge from true, completely accurate history. In order for the people who are playing the video games to feel immersed, there must be some cause and effect element of the player’s choices. These choices, when implemented in narrations or simulations of actual historical events, cannot be 100% accurate because the choices often take the history off the factual path.

However, I think that historical video games present a massive advantage in terms of teaching people how to understand the mood and tone of an age in history. After playing games like “Assassin’s Creed,” my biggest take away was not any of the historical events that may or may not have been perfectly accurate, but it was the tone of the age. The weapons, enemies, town’s, and even the common folk walking around all helped immerse me into the game and taught me a little bit about how life was vastly different in the past than it is now. In the article, Adam talks about the environment of the game having a lot of information in them, and I completely agree. I think that is one part of historical video games that may be overlooked.

Sure, precise facts about historical events are important, but perhaps they are better suited for a different media outlet where player choice is not as integral, and we can still learn a lot from historical games.

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.