On Exploring Lore as Historical Consciousness in Ahistorical Games

First Post - On Exploring Lore as Historical Consciousness in Ahistorical Games

September 15, 2015

Over the past week, I delved into materials that Dr. Graham gave me to look at and attempted to start and narrow down my focus for this project. Our basic beginning point was fairly simple: what do we want to explore? From my notes, I recorded this from our discuss/his suggestions:

EXPRESSING GOOD HISTORY

public history

outreach

education (HS)

entertainment

argument/scholarship

Meeting w/ high school teachers - oral history of using video games in high school classes and going from there into the >conference mid-February and taking the lead on that. Fold that into final project on history of video games as used in class >and where to go from there.

ethics board approval to talk to teachers and use their material

How people play history games

let's plays, forums, etc.

There was a lot to work with from this. Before going into the two explicit options we had discussed, I spent some time thinking about how I felt about working with videogames and history from the standpoint of either public history or doing new scholarship. The one I immediately gravitated towards was scholarship - I find it a fascinating idea to be able to represent original research through the medium of an interactive videogame, and am uncertain if anything like that has been explored before. When thinking and trying to write about that, however, I felt like I hit a brick wall. No ideas came to me on how that was to be represented and how it was to be explored in this thesis project. So, for the time being I put that idea on the proverbial backburner and intended to ask Dr. Graham about that come our next meeting.

I then tried to turn my attention to the idea of exploring public history, and education, through videogames. This idea, though not as romantic as the idea of scholarship through videogames, has some viable legs. Looking at how videogames are created for specific educational or non-educational audiences, and how they are received by those audiences, gives us a window into the processes of historical videogames in their intended context. Additionally, speaking with high school teachers and students helps explore even more deeply into how videogames work in an educational context, and we could take that work straight into the Minecraft unconference we were going to host in October that is being pushed (tentatively) to February right now. From THAT, it would be straightforward enough to take all of that material combined, examine it, draw conclusions from it, combine it with solid game theory and the like, and propose techniques for building effective, engaging historical videogames.

From this idea, we would be looking at how students use videogames in the classroom. Not just playing videogames, but analyzing how others play them and building their own, engaging with historical material to construct an educational process within the game. I was excited for this idea at first - this fit with a lot of the Minecraft work I had been doing Winter 2015 for the Graham Research Fellowship, and would have the potential to find some very interesting original ideas to explore and put together into a rewarding thesis. Once again, I was interested in talking to Dr. Graham about this and narrowing down how to go about this.

Finally, I came to Dr. Graham's suggestion of looking at forums and Let's Plays to examine HOW people play history videogames. Initally, for this idea, I was unexcited. I thought that there would not be a lot of games to examine, because mainstream history games are not particularly known for doing good history, and non-mainstream history games do not have the following to engender a lot of online discussion to draw from. But then, I had a bit of an epiphany, and tried to take my thinking outside of the realm of historical videogames. After a brief stream-of-consciousness writing session in my notes, I wrote down this short summary of the idea.

SO a really great idea is engaging with made up histories, stories, primary documents etc. in videogames, such as rpgs where there is a lot of tertiary non necessary written material, look at gamer's engagement with that, and reframe it on the basis of HISTORICAL engagement. from there, develop ideas on how to build an effective historical videogame/actually build an effective historical videogame.

One of the most engaging parts, to me and to many others, is the lore of a videogame or videogame franchise, often a RPG or MMORPG, that comes secondary and often teritary to the goals of gameplay. This lore is unnecessary, at least directly, to advance in the game but retains an air of mystery often and draws gamers in through engaging them in a story which they must fill in the blanks. In games like Fallout, Bioshock, or Skyrim, when presented with this material, gamers can choose to construct a full narrative from many of these separate "primary" documents and have a fuller engagement with the plot of their game. My question is, can we draw parallels from lore in ahistorical games to historical material in historical games? Furthermore, can we draw connections between the historical consciousnesses that are derived from either historical or ahistorical games when players are presented with this kind of material?

I thought that this was a really interesting ideas that had a lot of potential to explore many different avenues and possibly come up with cohesive, usable answers for creating effective historical videogames that do good history. This was the idea I presented to Dr. Graham at our meeting yesterday, and he thinks it possibly has legs as well! We discussed directions to take it, and he gave me a great deal of initial sources/places to look for sources and inspiration that I have yet to delve into, but am excited to. (One can find the notes of that meeting in my notes folder under "thesis meeting 2".)

Throughout this week, but primarily during my day off on Friday, I will be trying to engage with these sources that Dr. Graham gave me and exploring the ability of this project to examine games effectively and to draw conclusions from looking at those games effectively. I will begin inital explorations of the wikis of some RPGs I am familiar with for lore material and also for behind-the-scenes conversations on those wikis, giving me a source for how lore is processed in a videogame and is separated from the gameplay experience to be represented online. Additionally, I will start thinking about what games I would like to explore for this project, and how I am going to choose those games, be it sales, online presence, etc. Two history games suggested by Dr. Graham, The Calm and The Storm and Europa Universalis, may be explored, as well as Dwarf Fortress, a game that spends its processing power on procedurally building story and history within the gameworld instead of on graphics. In short, I have a lot of work to do right off the bat of this project!

Feel free to peruse my notes on this topic thus far and continue to check back for updates if what I am working on interests you, and if you have any comments or concerns about this work, I would love to hear from anyone interested at my twitter, @rapickering. As digital humanities work is often designed to share research and solicit help and collaboration from the community, I would love to hear from anyone who finds this idea interesting or whatnot.

Ryan Pickering