Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History

In Empire Total War, the player assumes the role of leading a seventeenth- century European power during the era of imperialism. Players quickly learn that not all nations have the same motivations. While England begins with its defensive island position and in possession of overseas colonies, the Netherlands sit above multiple hostile nations on the continent. They then must determine what course to take in the following areas: Immersed within context, players learn how a nation like England may utilize its colonies to keep economies afloat in the face of mounting challenges in Europe.

For example, why not raise taxes on far-away colonies to finance pressing wars at home? Players are tasked with devising profitable trade routes among accurately placed historical trading ports in northern Europe. As the player amasses trade wealth, they can begin to build their own commercial ventures, influence and participate in local governance, and hinder competing traders via less-than-respectable methods. Attempts at ground- level historical representation are not new; many historians write micro histories concerning one person or a small group of people. These historians attempt to answer the large questions of historical inquiry by focusing their study to the smallest possible point, whether it is an individual, family, event, or place.

In the same fashion, simulations like Patrician can introduce large questions by way of small focus: We, however, draw a distinction between games like Call of Duty to which this criticism applies and games such as the Civilization series. Civilization offers a significantly greater degree of historical context, going so far as to provide a literal encyclopedia of relevant knowledge. Further, the leniency of historical circumstance enables a broad exploration of historically important concepts. While a loose argument could be made for the subjective experience of evaluating state decisions, we concede that the experience of subjectivity is thin at best.

While the historical context of concepts is entirely inaccurate Native Americans may implement a democracy in CE , the nature of the simulation allows for the widest possible experience with and implementation of a vast array of concepts. Consider a player who elects to play the Greek civilization and chooses Alexander the Great as the leader. The player goes on to build several cities, develop amicable relations with some civilizations, engage in war with others, discover technologies and the new systems or tools they enabled, and go through alterations in the form of government.

All of which are simulated concepts relevant to understanding similar real historical events. Geopolitics, for example, studies how geographic location in relation to other states, especially in regard to resources, economies, and demographics, affect politics. During gameplay, the player is confronted with geopolitical decisions: Unknowingly, the player is evaluating complex geopolitical tensions modeled after the real world.

These simulations provide a unique opportunity for students to experience and play through historical thinking, rather than passively receiving historical representations. While we present a few cases to emphasize the practicality of current games to accomplish these objectives, the above examples only scratch the surface of the potential for games to cultivate experiential understanding. A video game acts as more than a medium for entertainment, it provides the tools and information necessary, within a controlled environment, for players to generate rich conceptual knowledge through simulation.

Such rich concepts are required for the comprehension and creation of historical knowledge. Consider the various conceptions of politics the study of who gets what, when, and how ,24 the study of power the means by which one entity may cause another to make choices it otherwise would not make ,25 or the study of economics how scarce resources are allocated among competing demands that exceed supply.

Much historical interpretation will rely on the various, sometimes competing, concepts of these and many more subjects to represent our past accurately. While none of these concepts may be explored completely, games do provide the most dynamic, engaging, and natural means of learning them —through the act of play. We are Homo ludens, a playing creature. Play socializes us, educates us, and satisfies us at all ages.

During play, the systems and simulations embodied in particular video games foster learning through action within the system but also through the critique of it. For example, critical consideration of Civilization reveals a bias toward representing all of history as inevitable and constant scientific advancement and social progressivism. Playing Patrician, a person might wonder what enabled merchants to trust one another in an era with little government oversight to secure and stabilize trade.

With any simulation, the structure necessitates a reduction in complexity to enable player interaction with core concepts, and still be fun. Simulations fail to address all possible aspects of the actors and events they portray. Nevertheless, that absence affords room for critical thinking and critique, as any particular representation of history must invite. Historiography can draw on a diverse and evolving toolset, often utilizing concepts from related fields. Modern economic studies influence the www.

Studying the causes of stability and disunity in modern governments informs the historical interpretation of revolutions and civil wars. New philosophical, sociological, and psychological thinking improves how the motivations of individuals and societies are understood. All these fields can contribute to the historical challenge of explaining where we have been and how we arrived at where we are. Video game simulations can cultivate in players the multidisciplinary knowledge necessary for investigating, understanding, and critiquing representations of the past.

In an era when many possibilities exist for integrated multimedia learning, the relevance of video games should be recognized and capitalized on as a vehicle for historical knowledge. Notes 1 Media as varied as movies, television, and comic books faced similar questions about negative effects on consumers. An Exploration of Television and Its Audience. New York and London: New World Library, Emphasis in the original. Carr, What is History? Books for Library Press, , Gooch, History and Historians: History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century.

What Could Have Been. Fall River Press, , 4. Scientific Inquiry in Qualitative Research. Princeton University Press, Prentice Hall, , 45— MIT Press, , Who Gets What, When, How. Works cited Bachrach, Peter and Morton Baratz. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd ed. Fall River Press, Peter Smith Co, Books for Library Press, Games cited Call of Duty: Paradox Development Studio, Paradox Interactive, Creative Assembly, Sega, Mojang Studios, Notch Enterprises, Gaming Minds Studio, Kalypso Media, Maxis, Electronic Arts, Now, I am not so sure. These things did happen, and though they left no significant traces in the real world, the nature of video games means that they could happen again.

Video game time has something like a present tense with a progressive aspect.

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Because games can be replayed, they provide opportunities to rebuild, or to rewrite, their diegetic and their extradiegetic histories. A saved-game file is old: I have been slowly making my way through Shenmue 2 Sega, for many years, and when I go back to my game, I am certainly picking up and working with something old. Almost any used console memory card or computer hard disk has a few old saved-game files on it, their narratives suspended and their outcomes undetermined. For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.

For the first time the image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty. A camera works via a process of photographic transcription; the events depicted in a conventional film once occurred in front of a camera, and a film is a physical index of their having taken place.

The images with which we are confronted in video games, on the other hand, are computer-rendered representations of coded geometries. Until we boot up a game and play it, these worlds exist only as code; they are realized as spaces through our play, and the form that that play takes affects how the game world is depicted.

Thus, while a photograph is a technological www. Games as physical artifacts instead precede the depictions they enable. In marginally narrative games like Pac Man Namco, , the appearance of a player avatar in the virtual world implies a world with preexisting boundaries and rules that can be discovered through navigation of game spaces. In games with more complex worlds, such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Rockstar, , a past may be manifest in the textures of the diegetic world: The details of the game world, and of the events that transpire there, work to obfuscate the fact that this rendered environment, in its present state, did not preexist the player turning on the system this time.

Enacted flashbacks are a major part of the structure of Eternal Darkness: The Sands of Time Ubisoft, is staged as one long flashback that is both recounted through voice narration and enacted through gameplay. In his discussion of cinematic history, Pierre Sorlin writes: The positivist history of cinema. This is where I see the main divergence between history and cinematic history. The latter, unlike the former, cannot be a memory in absentia.

Materially they still exist. Their physical permanence emphasizes the unbridgeable distance between what is no longer—the past—and what still exists. This voice is a tool that allows its user to, among other things, bend the representation of time, whether for convenience or dramatic effect, or to signal points of major importance in a narrative.

Continuity editing emphasizes relative invisibility over noticeable temporal articulations. A Biography in which the title character, who has had a centuries-long shifting perceptual and physical relationship with the flow of time, snaps suddenly into the present: Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head.

Ten times she was struck. It was the eleventh of October. It was the present moment. No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. But we have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already.

When the present moment catches up with Orlando, it comes as a shock to her, and to the narrating voice, which has to regain its composure and restate its intentions. Holding a half-finished novel in our hands, we hold its unknown conclusion, so that even www.

The story cannot change as it goes along, as it is a construction that was assembled in the past. Each is a photograph of something that happened before. In our comprehension of film, too, our understanding of events in the diegesis is filtered through their presentation to us, as Edward Branigan observes: We may not assume that the story will reach a decisive conclusion, but we can reasonably expect that at some point during the next few hours, the telling will end. We may not know where a film is going, but we know that it is going, and we know that its destination is determined before we join it on its way.

A game may have a rough narrative structure, and most games with stories have single narrative conclusions toward which players progress, but the details of that progress are dependent on the enactive decisions made by the player of a game. Not all video games are contained on cartridges, nor in arcade cabinets, nor on discs. Even if a game has only one possible narrative ending, how we get there is entirely up to us, within the parameters of play that the game allows.

He is told that he must battle sixteen zoomorphic colossi, and that killing them might bring his late beloved back to life. The environment seems empty of life but for Wander, his horse, the colossi, and a few small fauna. A tall abandoned temple sits in the middle of the map, and smaller moss-covered shrines can be found throughout the landscape.

As Wander makes his way through this world, he encounters occasional evidence of a long-ago forgotten www. The narration of Shadow of the Colossus is apparently chronological, and the game never explicitly reveals the origins of these structures. These clues to the ancient history of the game environment encourage us to wonder about the nature of the world in which we find ourselves and to hypothesize about the processes that have shaped it.

In other words, they cue historical thinking. A chief appeal of the massively popular Grand Theft Auto games, especially those released since Grand Theft Auto III Rockstar, , has been their immersive urban and occasionally rural environments, which are much more densely populated than is the landscape of Shadow of the Colossus. The emphasis in the Grand Theft Auto games has been less on investigation of the remnants of the history of the virtual world than on adapting to and functioning in a dynamic environment. If Shadow of the Colossus provides the option of speculating about the history of the diegetic world, San Andreas asks us to be everyday historians, recognizing patterns, positing causal relationships, and making pragmatic decisions based on the predictive capacities that these inferences grant us.

Everyman does not wish to learn the whole truth or arrive at ultimate causes. Dropped into the world of a video game, we must adjust first to its control scheme as Adam Chapman describes in Chapter 4 , then to its physics model, then to its modeled environment and cause—effect simulation, to the behavioral patterns of its non-player characters and environmental threats, and finally to the specifics of the goals that the video game sets for us within its virtual environment. Anybody who plays a game is engaging with history merely by adapting to the unique behavioral demands that games put on their players.

Video games that model the passing of time in their worlds as independent of character action add another level of complexity. Shadow of the Colossus and the Grand Theft Auto games, and environmentally complex games like them, can create an impression that time is always passing in their virtual worlds. There are always radio broadcasts going on in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for instance, whether the player is listening to the radio or not.

It is manifested in the structures and the processes of virtual worlds. We engage with historical thought from the moment we pick up a controller. The Sands of Time Games often fill in their narrative backstories through clues, character recountings, and cutscene enactments.

Approaching the War/Game Nexus

This is the reason why time in games is almost always chronological. The Sands of Time, a game that engages with history on many of the levels that I have mentioned here, is built around an interactive flashback structure. The player is free to move the prince about the balcony, but an attempt to move him through the curtains and into the room cues the game to backtrack and tell the story of the events that led to this point.

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• Digital Games and the Simulation of History?
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The backstory is filled in through interactive action along with occasional cutscenes and voiceover narration by the prince. Through its creative scripting, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time allows its players to engage with historical and causal structures in ways that remain rare in video games. The freedom to move backward and forward in time can affect the way a player moves through space.

A trial run is possible, for instance, to see if a gap can be jumped. If the leap proves impossible, the player can merely reverse time to before the jump. The possible future becomes past, and the player is free to try to find another way across the gap; pragmatic historical thought can become a form of contingency planning.

The Sands of Time deals with history on still another level, one that blends the diegetic and the extradiegetic. A nearby crank can then be turned, opening a gate that was concealed behind the wall. By passing through the gate, the player can enter the world of the original Prince of Persia. That game is hidden, in its entirety, within the palace of The Sands of Time.

The game The Sands of Time establishes a temporal connection between itself and the original Prince of Persia, refers to its own lineage in video game history, and gives players who were familiar with the original game an opportunity to play it again in a new context—to engage in the strange combination of nostalgia and reenactment that attends the revisiting of old games.

Nostalgia for old games is, in a way, like nostalgia for places that are old to us, in that we can long to go back, both in space and in time, to something we knew, something we experienced, earlier in our lives. With old films, we can revisit a nested set of times in the past—the time of filming, the time depicted by the film, our own experience of previously viewing the film—that is relatively crystallized in its forms.

To play old games is to revisit else-wheres and else-whens, and also to reactivate prior enactive conditions; in addition to elsewhere and else-when, video games provide access to an else-how. My younger self did, in fact, guide the hero Link on a journey through the land of Hyrule to fell the evil king Gannon many times, taking a number of different routes to get there and learning something a little bit different each time.

But what if we could retry the past, knowing then, as the saying goes, what we know now? Old video games—and perhaps all video games—collapse the past and the present tenses; most relevant is their progressive aspect, their persistence in reality, and the persistence of their realities, realities that we have the option of revisiting. To go back and to try again, whether through the diegetic manipulation of the sands of time in Prince of Persia or through blowing the dusts of time off from a long-untouched game cartridge, is to revisit an elsewhere and an else-when, to wind back an else-how and to ask: The Modern Library, , Hugh Gray, What is Cinema?

University of California Press, , Keith Reader, Paragraph, vol. University of Wisconsin Press, , Edinburgh University Press, , Cambridge University Press, , Stephen Vaughn, The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of History. University of Georgia Press, , 25— Vintage International, , University of California Press, , 9— University of Georgia Press, , 20— Vintage International, , 10— Narration in the Fiction Film. University of Wisconsin Press, Edinburgh University Press, , 66— The Modern Library, Games cited Eternal Darkness: The Legend of Zelda. The Sands of Time.

Shadow of the Colossus. Civilization and the Ecological Approach Adam Chapman University of Hull H istorical video games are one of the prime points of confluence in the attempt to give traditional game structures more meaning and depth and many are amongst the most successful popular histories of recent years. Whilst historical theory can provide a lot of answers, using traditional methods also risks reducing these games to nothing more than poor facsimiles of our other forms.

Such a closed perspective ignores the unique aspect of this new form of historical expression and the precise reason why it is so popular in the first place: Accordingly, we need a broader theory of action—I propose the ecological approach of my title—to understand how historical video games seek to explore past action by offering opportunities for present action. Consequently, in this chapter I will use the ecological approach to digital games in order to illustrate some of the potential of games for making arguments about history.

Roman, English, Chinese from prehistory to beyond the present day. The ecological approach The ecological approach originates from the work of James Gibson and has been developed in its application to games by Linderoth. These offers are called affordances and. We do not only adapt the environment [often through the use of tools], we also reveal information about affordances through action. For example, buttons afford pressing. Second, and most relevant in a historical context, the game affords the player normally through an avatar particular actions in affecting the historical game world and the screen will produce a particular normally audio-visual perceptual information in response to the actions of players.

In video games these affordances are determined by developers with a desire to create fun-to-play products, by the limitations of the commonly available technology and also the pressures and conventions of the video game form as it has developed. However, the actions of the historical agents depicted within and thus the affordances of the player are in some way determined referentially. So, for instance, cavalry can move further, faster than infantry but cannot cross deep water as ships can. In this way, the affordances of historical video games make particular arguments about past action and afford particular opportunities for historical meaning-making and discovery to players.

Despite the obvious abstractions of the historical actions into gameplay actions, we can still potentially learn what actions according to the games historical representation were afforded particular historical agents or groups and why these actions were useful or necessary, by what is afforded us as players. The basic material of history is our human ability to transform ourselves collectively, itself a function of our incessant collective efforts after meaning and value.

Though the affordance of posting itself is available to the individual, it is only meaningful as communication because it is part of a shared system of affordances by the collective. Other games, though less focused on this aspect, can also do essentially the same thing. Civilization makes a similar argument: Thus, whilst agriculture affords an individual the opportunity to survive efficiently within their environment, it affords an entire civilization population growth and urbanization.

Civilization also demonstrates that sharing these newly realized affordances can occur rapidly and efficiently within human groups because this knowledge can be mediated. The game demonstrates the role of social and cultural structures and institutions in extending the availability of these affordances within a given society. For example, a barrack affords the training of veteran troops. The institution functions as a knowledge tool that rapidly reveals new affordances.

Thus, by focusing on the transformation of affordances in its gameplay, Civilization makes basic arguments about cultural diffusion. Approaching Civilization from an ecological perspective can also allow us to reflect upon how we construct particular historical identities for collectives, in terms of their shared altered relations to the environment.

For instance, in popular history at least and in the Civilization series the Celts tend to be grouped together as one culture because of their similar languages and iron working. But in reality these were many different cultural groups e.

Within the game, some affordances are often characterized as intrinsic to the civilization and are given to the player as bonuses. Civilization accordingly makes an argument for the intrinsic affordances of particular cultures through what is immediately afforded the player that chooses them. Therefore, Civilization also argues for an understanding of historical affordances as determined environmentally by what the game environment affords the player.

However, it appears from work by Squire that the second tends to be more widely recognized by students and thus perhaps all players. Also, importantly, the game represents sources social groups, institutions, sub-collectives, and technologies , which it depicts as enabling these affordances. By doing so, the game also argues the importance of the division of labor where skill does not have to be distributed evenly in the development of collective affordance. For example, though fighting with swords may benefit a whole collective, blacksmiths and warriors may be different roles performed by different people.

Civilization manifests this in its many different unit types. Civilization emphasizes this and accordingly, the importance of understanding collective action, in terms of the larger movements of history. The tech tree is an excellent representational tool in this context because it takes as its very basis and superbly demonstrates how certain affordances afford the discovery of others, how new affordances make old ones obsolete, and how the relationship between the organism and environment is rarely stable and thus dependent for humans at least on technology and the adaptive discovery of new affordances.

This is particularly important because the environment is also made up of enemy civilizations whose affordances are also constantly adapting. Screen capture courtesy of Trevor Owens and Rebecca Mir www. What is unique is that they do so in a form that uses a, arguably, naturalized descriptive rhetoric of historical action by affording the player as a civilization actions within a challenging interactive experience.

Again, this is done within an environment with sufficient pressure to encourage us to learn the significance of what particular elements afford if we are to win. In Civilization the abstraction of performatory action becomes less important because the game does not try to represent the historical actions of singular agents but collectives; there is therefore, often no direct equivalent for the player actions to abstract from. Civilization also functions as a knowledge tool that extends the affordances of the player by giving them some of the affordances of the academic historian.

This only really works because being a historian is an exploratory challenge rather than a performatory one though many tired historians might disagree.

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6. Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History;

However, in all historical video games, but particularly those like Civilization, the player is given an actualized share in authoring within the virtual story-space. This is because, as Reynolds argues above, the final historical narrative remains uncertain until the game is played and the player configures it from the mass of historical elements that make up the virtual story space. This indicates a subtle shift from receiving historical narratives toward producing them. Thus, in Civilization, the player is given a structured representational environment virtual story space , within the bounds of which they are free to rearrange and configure various elements.

This is structured in that much of the groundwork is already done and the boundaries of the story space established. Therefore, the player is equipped with the knowledge tools of underlying theory work, methodology, pre-selected evidence, ideology, epistemology, and a theory and network of causal relationships perhaps best indicated by the tech tree.

These tools and choices are commonly the reserve of those who are experts in differentiating this information: For instance, let us look at the last of these practices counter history, or counterfactual history. Sometimes these thought processes even become full and valuable narratives.

Civilization provides a system whereby these variables and their causal links are already accounted for and yet in which multiple stories can be told by players. In these ways Civilization can function as a knowledge tool, extending the player some of the affordances of discourse that are normally the reserve of the historian. It does this by providing a structured causal network of selected and interpreted evidence, thus creating a shared virtual story space that still allows the player to playfully configure historical narratives and counterfactual scenarios.

Conclusion The ecological approach gives us a solid theory of action with which to analyze historical video games because it allows us to explore history in terms of the actions through which the game cannot help but operate. Thus, in return, the approach allows us to see what particular titles afford both as games and histories. Naturally, therefore, the ecological approach also emphasizes that meaningful historical representations can be produced and received in experiential forms like video games.

The analysis here using the ecological approach has allowed us first to explore how historical video games produce meaning within a compelling ludic framework that challenges players to differentiate historical information as it relates to particular actions. Second, it allows us to examine how games as action-led texts are well-suited to making ecological arguments about the past, can represent macro-affordances as systems of collective action, and due, partly to the focus on fairness make arguments that focus on environmental factors and the transformation of affordances through technology or tools.

Lastly, the ecological approach shows how the video game perhaps uniquely can extend the affordances of players and afford them some of the discursive practice actions of the historian. Each of these aspects is dependent upon particular game structures that there is simply not enough room to discuss here. However, in each there is the presentation of opportunities for players to take historically meaningful action.

Games therefore represent past actions through present ones and it could even be argued that this is perhaps the most natural form of rhetoric to describe past action. Lastly, using even different actions to represent action infers a somewhat lesser degree of abstraction than using spoken or written language. This means that the video game as a form may be better suited to some kinds of historical representation than written history and of course vice versa.

It could then well be that video games will provide new and interesting ways to explore our relationship with the past and that the Gibsonian ecological approach will prove crucial to both understanding, and perhaps even creating, these games that represent the past. From this perspective we can approach historical video games as texts of action, skill, and challenge and simultaneously systems of representation, exploring how these representations are constructed audio- visually, and importantly, ludically.

Notes 1 Historical games here are defined, not by their ludic game genre e. World at War has now sold over thirteen million copies worldwide. Think, Design, Play 4 Gibson and Anne D. Oxford University Press, , However, it is not necessary to relinquish the word when using a postmodernist perspective as I do here whereby the flaws of representation are always consciously acknowledged and the term is used to imply the subjective and constructed relationship between historian, history, and past.

It should also at this point be noted that we can only really talk about opportunities for action that exist within the games for a typical player but of course the ability to perceive or utilize these depends on the capabilities of individual players. Reed, Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, , 8. Games such as chess, poker, and monopoly emphasize this type of challenge. This is even more important in realist games such as the aforementioned Brothers in Arms.

Works cited Atkins, Barry. Civilization come esempio di barbarie storiografica? Storie Virtuali, Fantasie Reali. Guns, Germs and Steel. Oxford University Press, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Linderoth, Jeffrey and Ulrika Bennerstedt. The Future of History. The Study of Sociology. Games cited Brothers in Arms. First and foremost, we would like to thank the authors and anonymous reviewers who have made this special issue possible.

In addition, we would like to express our gratitude to Jessica Enevold for organizing and seeing through the extensive double-blind peer review process and to Espen Aarseth for constructive and critical feedback on the submitted manuscripts and the present editorial. A final thank you goes to Christian Beyer for formatting the final manuscripts.

We acknowledge such critical advances, but would nevertheless like to highlight the role a delimitation of games and play from more serious activities has played in actual attempts to define games. For our part, we are in agreement with for instance Payne , p. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.

John Hopkins University Press. The Ontology of an Indefinable Object.



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