Playing with the Past

Digital Games and the Simulation of History

Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, Andrew B.R. Elliott, Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, Andrew B.R. Elliott

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623568245
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios de medios

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

1

Introduction: To Build a Past That Will “Stand the Test of Time”—Discovering Historical Facts, Assembling Historical Narratives

Andrew B.R. Elliott

University of Lincoln

Matthew Wilhelm Kapell

Sierra College

What’s in a name?

The book you now hold in your hands went through a number of iterations before it, and the ideas contained within it, began to grow into something book-shaped. Not least among our concerns, almost from the outset, was the title, which went through several suggestions until we settled on Playing with the Past. What is more revealing than what we eventually decided as the title for the collection, however, are the reasons for which we disregarded others, since they speak volumes about the book’s main concern: the relationship between video games and their complex, changing, and multifaceted association with history. Digital History (one early option) seemed implicitly to suggest that our central argument was that video games could do history in a similar vein to Marc Ferro’s early claims that cinema could act as a historian—which was not necessarily the point of this book.¹ Video Games and Historical Engagement not only loses the (in our view, important) nuances of “playing,” but also unwittingly suggests an overwhelmingly academic approach to the subject, one which plays on stereotypes of the historian as a fusty, fussy pedant who emerges from dusty archives to scowl at all things popular with the audacity to demean their noble pursuit. Such a stereotype of course no longer fits the modern history department (if ever it did), but more importantly, the specificity of the title betrays an overly academic approach implying that the only way of engaging with the past is by traditional academic study, an image of historical inquiry that no longer holds in an era in which subscriptions to dedicated history channels, visitors to genealogical websites, and box-office receipts for films set in the past are soaring.

Video games and history

So it was, then, that we settled on Playing with the Past, and the volume you hold in your hands; a title that encapsulates several of the major issues with which this book is engaged—what is “the past” and how does it relate to “history”? How do we “represent” both of those ideas? Actually, many of those themes came from an already classic 2005 article by William Uricchio, discussing the simulation of history through video games. There he observed that the opportunities for mediation through play pose new and difficult questions about narrative authority and representation. “What happens,” he asked,

if we push the notion of mediation beyond language, to the domain of game, enactment, or simulation? Does this allow us to slip out of the well-critiqued trap of representation? And if so, where does it land us?²

Amid a world of SIMs (Simulations), first-person warfare games, strategy, MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online games) and MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) in which players can influence the outcome of past battles, campaigns, and even entire civilizations, such questions about the means by which history is delivered to new generations gain increasing importance. When history can be simulated, re-created, subverted, and rewritten on a variety of levels, new questions arise about the relationship between video games and the history they purport to represent, questions that traditional historical approaches cannot properly address.

It is, then, the issue of representing history, and the wider questions about the representation of history, that this book aims to address by looking at several major issues concerning the ways in which digital games approach the past. One such issue is the conception of history not as an academic or exclusive field of study (what Rosenstone famously terms “History with a capital H”³) but as “the past,” a more inclusive and inviting concept that embraces all aspects of our history and implicitly refers to its relationship to the present. Another important term is, of course, “playing,” which has largely been replaced in Game Studies with the more technical term “ludic.” That term, from the Latin ludus, has come to mean “play,” and we choose to use it this way even though it also carries with it the implication of spontaneous or aimless play that does not fit neatly with the notion of playing the “historical games” studies here. However, we use the term since it recognizes both the ludic nature of digital games—the sense that games are not designed as artifacts only to be looked at or understood narratively like films or television, but to be played, thus their ludic nature obliges us to understand them differently—but it also recognizes the importance of play as a human activity, which according to Huizinga, has the ability to “promote the formation of social groupings,”⁴ and which Suits, building on Caillois, suggests as being “the voluntary effort to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”⁵ It is this conception of play—and that built up in later studies of ludology—which is of significance to our understanding of engagement with history.

When we talk about playing with the past, however, or engaging with history through games, it is first and foremost important to be specific about precisely what is meant here. Questions about the ways in which video games can have a serious impact on learning have already been addressed before in a variety of ways. Steven Johnson, for example, offers an important defense of popular culture’s ability to encourage critical and complex thinking, based on what he terms a “sleeper curve.”⁶ Recognizing that although much of the mainstream discussion of video games is dominated by violent games like Quake or Doom (or, recently, Grand Theft Auto), he argues that in fact the “two genres that historically have dominated the charts are both forms of complex simulation: either sport sims, or GOD games like SimCity or Age of Empires,” the kind of games that, he argues, “require the most thinking.”⁷ Thus, he continues, “in this age of attention deficit disorder and instant gratification, in this age of gratuitous violence and cheap titillation, the most intellectually challenging titles are also the most popular.”⁸

In fact, research into games’ potential for education has broken significant ground over the last decade, reaching a tipping point in recent years, as indicated by James Paul Gee’s classic What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, as well as David Williamson Shaffer’s How Computer Games Help Children Learn, alongside Kurt Squire’s work on Civilization III and learning about history, which we discuss below.⁹ Likewise, judging by the number of students passing through our offices recently who want to do research on history and games, as well as the enormous response to this collection, all of the indications hint that, if anything, this scholarly interest is likely only to grow. In this book we aim to build on this existing work and to approach what is an old question (about historical representation in modern popular culture) from a new perspective, using a methodology drawn from both of our earlier works on the depiction of history in popular culture—that is from the perspective of history rather than that of games studies proper, on the grounds that this approach raises new questions that take us away from discussions about accuracy or nostalgia, which have dominated some of the earlier work in this area.

When we ask about how games engage with history, it seems to us that we need to specify precisely what we mean by these terms:

1 First of all, what do we mean by history? What kind of history?

2 What do we mean by games? Can games be treated as one and the same thing in their relationship with history? Do different kinds of games engage with history in different ways?

3 What about intentions? Before trying to evaluate whether games can teach history, we also need to establish whether a historically themed game is even trying to do so in the first place.

So in beginning to ask these sorts of questions, a number of parameters emerge. Of critical importance here is what kind of history, or indeed what kind of historical engagement, we are talking about. Jerome de Groot, for example, in his excellent study of public history, has a somewhat pessimistic view of the potential for historical engagement through video games. Commenting on the ludic uses of the past in general, he argues that: “Game shows, pub quiz nights, and board games present history as a set of facts which are correct, the right answer. [. . .] Historical knowledge in these manifestations is the command and recall of a set of facts–generally dates, leaders, events or places.”¹⁰ Even in the video games sector, which emphasizes play over knowledge recall and thus should better fit his arguments about public history, he argues that their “underlying ludicness, [. . . have] little innate value outside of the game structure.”¹¹ For our purposes, however, these two claims—one about the use of facts, and the other about processes that we might otherwise call historical contingence—both emerge as interesting and debatable issues, and consequently form the starting point for our discussion.

To reduce it to its most basic elements (and, in fact, to remove the idea of history as an academic practice altogether), we can see that when it comes to public history, the notion of history covers two contradictory ideas. As J.L. Gorman writes, “History is an ambiguous word . . . it can refer to the historical past itself, to the subject matter about which historians write. Second, it can refer to the study of that past, to the practices and writings of historians.”¹² Thus, on the one hand we have the study of the past as a series of facts and movements, and on the other we have a concept of the past considered as a whole, in which those facts, movements, and events have combined in a certain way to lead us to the present day. The first is a type of flat “names, dates, facts, and figures” conception of history, while the second is the narrative produced from the first—whether by a professional historian or not.

Historiography, or the history of history

In fact, a great deal of ink has been spilled over the last half-century describing the historiographic issues that this sort of division engenders. Historiography, though a term often restricted to scholarly use, is in fact a straightforward idea that recognizes the fallibility of the historical record and tries to separate out the historian from the history she or he retells.¹³ In one telling (and oft-cited elsewhere as well as in the following pages) description of historiography by E.H. Carr, the divisions outlined above between facts and processes are already there, lurking beneath the surface meaning. In a key passage from his now-classic What Is History?, Carr claims that

History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions, and so on, like fish on a fishmonger’s slab. The historian ...