Category: Gaming and History

In my classes so far, I’ve had many discussions over the “historical accuracy” of a variety of mediums, spanning from the musical Hamilton in a history class, to the movie Gladiator and other movies and TV shows based on the Romans in a classics course. There’s a reason my professors created space in their very limited time frame  to touch on modern depictions of the past. While a “fun” assignment, it also lead to engaging discussions on modern portrayals of historical events, the historical narrative it follows and/or undermines, and benefits and drawbacks of having something not entirely historically accurate consumed by a wider audience who is not necessarily aware of how accurate it is or isn’t.

One of the takeaway from these discussions tends to be that regardless of historical accuracy, the story is still valuable to the public because it engages people, leaving those who want to learn more a reference point to see what things are historically plausible and what was artistic liberty etc. It’s foolish and a bit patronizing to assume that the audience to these stories aren’t aware that liberties were very likely taken. It’s historical fiction, as you say, and games and/or narratives that approach their historical setting should be regarded as such.

An enormous challenge in creating a historically authentic video game is simulating the contemporary ethics and value system. When the game is set in a historically traumatic situation, the stakes are even higher. A conscientious developer must represent a person’s available choices and their consequences, forcing the player to use an unfamiliar ethics system. Yet, the developer must preserve the player-character’s agency to engage the player.

The ethics system is foregrounded in Crusader Kings II, as reviewer Peter Christiansen notes. I was particularly fascinated by the nuanced way the developers incorporated the seven sins and virtues, enriching the immersive experience and educational value. However, you play a head of household: the epitome of traditional history. What might happen if developers explored history from below? How would a peasant’s available choices fit into the game’s ethical framework?

Verdun and Drama in the Delta focus on less enfranchised characters. In Verdun, a World War I soldier dies for rushing out of the trenches alone and, conversely, a squad does better after playing together for longer. This teaches the player to work together and shun personal glory, as trench warfare did. According to Mark Sample’s review, Drama in the Delta restricts the player’s path, but the historical situation provides ample opportunities to simulate agency within a restrictive society. Hopefully these developers rise to the imaginative challenge of refining the games’ ethics systems as much as Crusader Kings II in order to deepen players’ experience of being a traditionally disenfranchised actor.

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.