Introduction

History games represent and reference the past in very different ways. In any Assassin's Creed (Ubisoft, 2007-2022) game, for example, the player agent, the main character, embodied in the gameworld and visible onscreen, navigates urban and rugged natural environments. The player agent leaps and climbs, runs and rolls in graceful parkour through cities like ancient Athens at the end of the Periclean age (Ubisoft, 2018) and medieval York (Ubisoft, 2020). These peregrinations are punctuated every so often by skillful assassinations or duels with one or many enemies. History in an Assassin's Creed game, consequently, focuses on the power of the great individual triumphing through skill and taking part in the grand plots of the powerful. Furthermore, the practice of history, what history is in an Assassin's Creed game, is the antiquarian recreation of verisimilar geographies and architecture to make a three-dimensional playspace for the player agent's gymnastics. Indeed, the interest in reconstructing a material world can be found in the focus on the various types of gear and paraphernalia the player agent has to choose from, a panoply that has exploded with variations in the more recent versions.

This materialist great person history looks and plays very differently from a 4X game like Civilization (Microprose, 1991-1996; Firaxis, 2001-2022). Here, an unembodied player agent, an experimenting deity of sorts, makes sweeping decisions that affect an entire population on an earth-like map, engaging in diplomacy, exploiting resources and directing turn-based combat by controlling tiny units. The individual, when they are not ignored altogether, is treated as a minion controlled by the whims of the player agent. More important are the sweeping powers of the state and processes like geography, technological development and religion to impact large numbers of lives in a single decision. Where the overarching narratives of history change very little in Assassin's Creed, an entirely different and counterfactual universe is constructed in Civilization games.

Neither of these game experiences particularly resembles the choice-based text and beautiful still images of When Rivers Were Trails (LaPensée & Indian Land Tenure, 2020) where the player agent is a Native Anishinaabe displaced by US land allocation policies and forced to find a new place to subsist in the western states—for it will not truly be home. Unlike the triumphal victory of the master assassin unmasking plots and plotters or the grand domination victory of the evolving civilization, history in this game is the story of the marginalized given agency in the face of cultural catastrophe. The player character is a witness to the stories of Native peoples from many different cultures, preserving those stories as they attempt to preserve their life in the face of displacement. Despite all the player agent's efforts, however, they do not overcome triumphantly as the assassin and the god-like leader of the civilization do in the other games. Ultimately, they are unable to do more than subsist—an attenuated victory at most. These are all history games, but they seem to approach their historical content from different focal points situating the player agent in the historical setting very differently.

Definitions

There are two main definitions of history games in the developing field of Historical Game Studies (Chapman, Foka & Westin, 2016), one stricter, one broader. Strictly speaking, one could define historical games as those set in a historically documented place and period (MacCallum-Stewart & Parsler, 2007). More broadly, one could define a history game as any game that draws upon or refers to history or discussions about history (Chapman, 2016; Lawler & Smith, 2021). The stricter definition is certainly useful at times for conceptualizing comparisons between games and for considering educational applications of history games (McCall, 2020). For the purposes of this article, however, we will use the broader definition and widest application. This enables a broader, more inclusive picture of history games and related research.

Types of Historical Games

Some scholars have subdivided history games into categories, based on differences in content or structure. Uricchio, for example, offered an early suggestion that history games come in specific and abstract varieties (2008) based on whether the game content deals more with a specific historical event, like one of the many digital wargames—like the many on Napoleon or the Battle of the Bulge—or a longer, more abstract process as found in a game like Civilization. Chapman (2016) offers a structural distinction between two overlapping but distinctive approaches to simulating the past: the "realist simulation style" and the "conceptual simulation style".

Games designed in a broadly realist simulation style are games that tend to have an embodied player agent in a three-dimensionally rendered world where action takes place in real time. These games tend to focus the player on the current moment in game time and purport to show players the past as it looked and sounded. Often, accordingly, this approach is characterized by a focus on verisimilar graphical representations of the game world. Realist games tend to circumscribe the effects of the player agent's actions so that they do not seriously change the narrative arc of the historical content. So, for example, the successes and failures of the player agent assassin in an Assassin's Creed game do not change the overall narrative of history.

On the other side are those games that employ a conceptual simulation style. These tend to represent the historical world with abstractions, symbols and icons. They present history more through their rule sets than their audio-visual qualities. Instead of offering a visually verisimilar 3-dimensional world reconstructed in great detail, like Battlefield 1 (DICE, 2016) or Call of Duty: World War 2 (Sledgehammer, 2017), conceptual style approaches, like that in Civilization, use game rules to represent historical processes. So that, for example, the importance of natural and strategic resources and the impact of geography are illustrated to the player who must work in a gameworld bound by rules representing these things and relationships. Such games often organize time into discrete units through turn-based gameplay. They also tend to be more sandbox-like in their approach to historical narrative, allowing the player to take part in sweeping counterfactual histories. Games like Humankind (Amplitude, 2021) and Through the Darkest of Times (Paintbucket, 2018) and, as mentioned, Civilization show a considerable focus on conceptual design style (Chapman, 2016).

Games for Learning History and Aiding Academic History

The educational value of history games and effective pedagogies for employing them are another important area of study for history games. Indeed, published research on the learning applications of history games stretches back to at least the mid-1980s, arguably farther than the purely academically focused side of the field (McCall, 2016). Important work on using games in formal history education has emphasized treating the games as interpretations to be critically analyzed (McCall, 2011, 2016, 2022; Wainwright, 2014, 2019). Other scholars have investigated the learning opportunities and potential pitfalls for independent players. Games appear to be able to significantly influence players' perspectives about the past and excellently enable putting oneself in the place of historical actors (Beavers, 2020; Elliott, 2017, 2020; Houghton, 2016). Yet it is not clear that, without purposeful guidance, the critical analysis needed to interrogate a game history instead of taking it at face value, occurs for players in informal learning contexts (Beavers, 2020; Gilbert, 2019).

In addition, some are investigating the potential for history games to act as serious articulations of academic historical arguments. It has been suggested that games can best serve academic purposes by becoming more like historical monographs (Spring, 2015). Others argue that a more medium-sensitive approach is possible; that games can remain games yet serve academic purposes; and that the frameworks that make the games useful for pedagogy may well apply to using them for academic discourse. In this light, game mechanics might function as historical arguments, so that, for example, the game systems in games like Civilization, which advance claims about the past, serve to advance academic historians' claims, not just game designers (Antley, 2012; Carvalho, 2017; Clyde, Hopkins & Wilkinson, 2012; Houghton, 2016; Spring, 2015). Further, game modding can be seen as a mode of debate where developer historians take the fundamental rulesets of a historical gameworld and select, excise and modify details ranging from physical rules to individuals of importance in the game (Houghton, 2021).

Research on Historical Games

Much of the earliest analysis of history games focused on the Civilization series, which still receives considerable focus (Chapman, 2013; Chapman, Foka & Westin, 2016; Ford, 2016; Koebel, 2017; Owens, 2011; Poblocki, 2002; Politopoulos et al., 2017). Assassin's Creed games have also been the subject of many article-length studies (Hammar, 2017; Mendes & Cruz, 2021; Politopoulos et al., 2019; Seif El Nasr et al., 2008; Shaw, 2015). There are several volumes devoted to history games set in the ancient world (Draycott, 2022; Rollinger, 2020), medieval period (Heinze, 2012; Kline, 2014), Early Modernity (Winnerling & Kerschbaumer, 2014) and the First World War (Kempshall, 2015). Finally, some analyses focus on Nazism and the Holocaust in video games (Chapman & Linderoth, 2015; Pfister, 2018; Pfister & Zimmermann, 2021).

Considering the accuracy proper of any particular game plays only a small role on the academic side of Historical Game Studies, though it finds some traction among those interested in teaching and learning history with history games. Indeed, the historical accuracy of a game, though a useful simplification in pedagogical contexts, clearly means different things to different people. Some focus mostly on the visual material parts of the game: an accurate game represents the appearance of the material world in a way that is consistent with the historical evidence. Others consider whether the game seems to be consistent with the narrative they have read in a historical book or whether the underlying coded models effectively illuminate past systems (Copplestone, 2016). In general, some scholars have moved from questions of accuracy to the "authenticity" of a game: which may be loosely defined as any given person's often-malleable perception or feeling that a game gets the history 'correct'. Authenticity in history games continues to be an important concept for investigation (Kempshall, 2015; Lorber & Zimmermann, 2021; Salvati & Bullinger, 2013; Shaw, 2015; Wright, 2020).

One of the critical questions for those studying history games, however, focuses not on whether "a given product deviates from the historical record, but rather for what reason it does so and what effect this might have" (Kapell & Elliott, 2013, p.8; see also Chapman, Foka & Westin, 2016).

Some scholars study the real-world contexts that influence game histories. Studies of production processes, for example, illuminate how political economies, cultural structures, hegemonic discourses and institutional practices shape content. (Grufstedt, 2022; Hammar, 2020; Penix-Tadsen, 2019; Wright, 2022). History games often tend to encourage pro-Western and pro-Colonialist perspectives in addition to advancing a hegemonic discourse centered around the white young adult male (Apperley, 2018; Ford, 2016; Hammar, 2020; Mir & Owens, 2013; Mukherjee, 2021). The imperialist logics – for example, the importance of mapping, often naming and subsequently controlling geographic space through a military presence—are often regularly replicated and encouraged in games of empire like Civilization and the Total War series (Creative Assembly, 2006-2021; Mukherjee, 2015; Poblocki, 2002). Nor is the medium free from the tropes and conventions of other media, as it can be heavily shaped by, for example, conventions like those of cinema (Wright, 2022) or the economic system in which the games industry operates (Hammar, 2020). Still, it is not the case that player communities must passively accept digital colonialist hegemonic, capitalist narratives; rather, they negotiate through counterfactual play and discussion of these hegemonic views (Apperley, 2018).

It has been argued by a number of researchers that history games are their own form of history, a form of public history that both developers and players participate in (Chapman, 2016; Chapman, Foka & Westin, 2017; Kappell & Elliott, 2013; McCall, 2018). Furthermore, these scholars do not consider game histories as inherently inferior to text histories, however much others may regard those texts as truly normative. They are simply considered different. And so we should, Chapman asserts, recognize history games as made by "developer historians" (2016, p. 15) working in a newer historical medium than text and film.

To analyze history games as a special form of history, two distinctive, yet compatible structural frameworks have been offered, with both considering how a history game's form shapes the historical record it draws from.

Chapman's Analysis of Ludic Structures

Chapman's (2016) framework offers a broad series of formal ludic categories, structures that influence how games organize and present historical content and concepts. He explores the variety within these structures, notes correspondences across categories and considers their ramifications for how these games serve as history.

The structures of simulation and epistemology are closely linked. So, realist simulation style games also tend to reflect a historical reconstructionist epistemology where players are shown a singular interpretation of what the past arguably looked, sounded and felt like. Conceptual style games, on the other hand, reflect a historical constructionist epistemology where the procedural logics of the game rules advance arguments about historical systems, causation and change rather than a definitive version of history. For Chapman, this style of game "tells us about the past without purporting to show it as it appeared" (2016, p. 70).

He also explores the ways that time structures are organized and employed in history games. Some focus more on realist time where a 1:1 relationship exists between game time and real-world time; others on more discrete time structures—like, for example, a turn-based time when an action by the player takes seconds to execute but reflects years, decades or centuries in game time.

Game space, another structure, can take the form of "narrative gardens" (Chapman, 2016, p. 101), a fixed space developers have arranged purposefully to convey a strong narrative, as it does quite often in realist games like Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty. Game space can also take the form of a "space as canvas" (Chapman, 2016, p. 104), a space that provides resources to a player who then organizes and arranges them to complete the space (and, in doing so, preserve a narrative) as in strategy games like Civilization. Sometimes, the approach a developer uses in one structure corresponds to choices in another structure to cumulative effect. So, the realist simulation approach often employs the realist time structure and narrative garden space to present a reconstructionist type history: history as it looked to those who experienced it. Conceptual simulations on the other hand often move away from realist time to discrete time—most easily recognizable in turn-based games—and tend to use "space as canvas" to deliver a history that is constructionist in epistemology.

Chapman (2016) also devotes a considerable amount of attention to the construction and delivery of narrative structures in history games. He distinguishes between three types of narrative frameworks that integrate the framing narrative (narrative that cannot be changed by gameplay) and the ludo-narrative (narrative generated from gameplay). "Deterministic story structure" (p. 131) emphasizes a "fixed framing narrative". "Open-ontological story structures" (p. 129) on the other hand emphasize the ludo-narrative constructed in the course of gameplay and rely on a minimal framing narrative. Finally, "open story structure" (p. 129) lies in between with significant amounts of framing narrative interspersed with ludo-narrative. These narrative structures also have ramifications for whether a particular game is more reconstructionist or constructionist in its historical epistemology.

McCall's 'Historical Problem Space'

McCall's Historical Problem Space framework (HPS) (2012a, 2012b, 2020), on the other hand, offers a different set of formal structures. Emphasizing player agent choice in a gameworld, the HPS framework focuses considerably on how game designers use these structures to represent contextualized decision-making in the past through gameplay. It also attempts to unify the formal parts of the historical game space into a holistic analytical understanding of the medium. Drawing from historical film studies (as does Chapman), particularly from the critical point that each historical medium is different and needs to be understood on its own terms as to how it portrays the past (Rosenstone, 2004, 2008), McCall also asks how does a history game specifically portray the past? According to McCall, the fundamental feature of history games as a medium is that they structure and present their historical content as one or more historical problem spaces. They present a history with the following components (McCall, 2012a, 2012b, 2020):

• A player agent representing some form of historical actor, ranging from specific historical figures to historical archetypes to historical collectives. The player agent has a set of designed goals—i.e., crafted by designers. The player is no passive subject, of course, and can always choose to ignore or subvert the designed goals in games (cf. Sicart, 2011). But still, designed goals are important, for they shape the designed historical problem space and its structuring of historical content.

• A virtual gameworld. Often, gameworlds refer to a specific historical location, whether it is the battlefields of Europe in Call of Duty: WWII (Sledgehammer, 2017), the shores of Ancient Greece in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft, 2018) or the neighborhoods of interwar Berlin in Through the Darkest of Times (Paintbucket Games, 2020). Sometimes, they point not to specific historical locations but to archetypal terrains, such as the randomized terrain and resource maps of Age of Empires: Definitive Edition (Tantalus Media & Forgotten Empires, 2020) or Civilization. Either way, the gameworld encompasses and contextualizes the player agent and designed goals.

• The gameworld contains any number of gameworld elements consisting of non-player agents, resources/metrics, tools and obstacles. These operate primarily functionally, assisting or constraining the player agent as they pursue the designed goals.

• If the player agent chooses to pursue the designed goals in the gameworld, they make action-choices, form strategies and adopt behaviors. These action-choices in the world represented by the medium distinguish history games from other historical media like static text and video (McCall, 2012b).

Ultimately, this entire problem space is often heavily informed by genre conventions (McCall, 2012b, 2020). For example, Valiant Hearts (Ubisoft, 2014) is, in terms of genre, very much a puzzle adventure game not unlike the point-and-click adventures of the 1980s and beyond. Accordingly, the conventions of the puzzle adventure genre shape the presentation of historical content about the First World War. Accordingly, a machine gun nest might be circumvented through solving a puzzle finding the missing stick of dynamite and plunger detonator to destroy the position. Poison gas spewed from pipes is stopped by rotating wheels in the proper sequence to block the plumbing. Providing medical aid to a wounded soldier takes the form of finding materials hidden in the gamespace or put out of reach by puzzle obstacles. As a result, Valiant Hearts is not just any type of ludic history, but very much a puzzle adventure type of history.

The ludic structure of a historical problem space shapes and presents the historical record in ways that may not fit our understanding of the past (McCall, 2012b, 2020). To list a few of McCall's observations:

Player agents tend to be viewed as rational goal-seekers, consciously clear in their purposes and goal-seeking. Historically, of course, agents may be anything but conscious rational goal-seekers, and we can often only guess at their motives.

Though it is not always the case, player agents in history games tend to be more powerful and have access to more information than their historical counterparts.

Similarly, ludic history tends to be teleological in focus. The gameworld functions systemically and designers establish goals whose fulfillment shape gameplay (so long as player agents choose to strive for those goals). Accordingly, a player agent, particularly in strategy games, can make choices and trade-offs for an end state that may take years, decades or centuries of game time to arrive. Games in the Civilization series offer excellent examples. The most successful players often consciously make choices early in the game—about technology to research, for example—to position themselves for a victory several hundred game turns (thousands of game years) later.

The action-choices available to the player agent are necessarily circumscribed by the gameworld goals and elements. Agents in the world often have access to environments full of space, resources, agents, tools and, consequently, choices that are simply beyond what a history game's player agent has. Where the world may offer many possibilities, the gameworld necessarily offers a finite set, and a set shaped by the logics of the designers.

Non-player agents are often portrayed instrumentally and without significant agency. Often, though not always, the player-agent focused on by a game is a powerful decision-maker, historically hegemonic as opposed to marginalized. Both issues involving agents can perpetuate a bias in historiography that the field still labors under. It is worth noting, however, that games from smaller, independent designers have recently made significant strides in centering on historically less powerful agents: When Rivers Were Trails, Through the Darkest of Times, Attentat 1942 (Charles Games, 2017) and A Plague Tale: Innocence (Asobo, 2019) for example.

To the extent, however, that a game can be defined as something approaching a rule-based conflict with a variable and at least somewhat quantifiable outcomes (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003), history games all present the past in the form of problem spaces for players (McCall, 2012a, 2012b, 2020).

Conclusion

In short, history games, whether they are defined more strictly or broadly, are a mode of history. For history is the selected representation of aspects of the past, and history games serve this function. Whether specific or abstract in their historical treatment, whether realist or conceptual in their simulation style, they do the work of history. And so, it is important to consider how game histories can be leveraged both for pedagogical purposes and, potentially, to advance academic historical arguments. Since history games are not designed in socio-economic, political and cultural vacuums, it is also important to understand how these contexts shape the historical messages and focus of history games. And finally, it is important to understand how game structures shape the historical content that a game presents, in other words, how they do history.

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Author Information

Jeremiah McCall holds a PhD in Ancient History and is a teacher, historian and historical game studies scholar residing in Cincinnati, Ohio. His book Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History (Routledge, 2011, with a second edition slated for the fall of 2022) is a foundational work for teaching history using video games; as is his website, https://gamingthepast.net/. Despite his busy teaching and writing schedules, he still manages to play more video games than you'd think he'd have time for.

Citation Information

McCall, J. (2022). History Games. In Grabarczyk, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Spring 2022 Edition). URL: https://eolt.org/articles/history-games/

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