"Historical" Games of the 1990s and their Implications on Historical Consciousness and Thinking

October 27, 2015

It's been quite awhile since I've posted an update on here. I misjudged how other school responsibilities would play out while doing this thesis and so hadn't scheduled enough time for myself to write updates and do proper research and writing on the topics I want to explore. But, as it's now reading week, no more! Time to catch up and get some material out for the world to read on my conceptions of historical consciousness through videogames.

As I discussed in my last post, I am looking towards analyzing the lore gamers engage with in games such as Dwarf Fortress and Fallout 3, and how an engagement with the "historical material" succeeds not in passing along historical facts, but developing historical thinking skills as discussed by Peter Seixas and others. By looking at causality and contingency, and filling in the blanks through narrativizing the history as real historians do. I want to analyze this both from a procedurally-generated viewpoint (Dwarf Fortress) and a written AAA game (Skyrim, Fallout 3, etc.). Doing so will allow us to understand how a good videogame works to create historical consciousness which in turn can be harnessed to create good history through games.

At the moment, there are hundreds of videogames one might classify as "historical." Videogames have often been touted as the next best thing in educational technology, but this comes in varying degrees. This blog post, at the suggestion of Dr. Graham, is going to examine a couple of games that represent themselves as games that teach history, through placing themselves in historical contexts and presenting facts to a player as they play the game. At this point, I submit that these games do not do good history. Indeed, they misrepresent the possibilities of historical exploration and analysis through videogames by giving players games whose mechanics are entirely unrelated to the subject matter being explored. They engender as much historical thinking as a platformer videogame where you have to do equations to defeat baddies teaches mathematical concepts.

The three games that I am going to briefly explore are all PC games from the 1990s or earlier, using Dr. Graham's suggestion of Cross Country Canada as a jumping off point. The games are Cross Country Canada, the widely known Oregon Trail, and Where in TIme is Carmen Sandiego?, part of the hugely successful series based around the titular character. I chose to look at games from this period for their historical material and effectiveness as opposed to more recent games with more powerful graphics for several reasons. The historical agendas in more recent games are more subtle and at first glance look more akin to what would inspire historical thinking. The accurate representation of physical locales and events allowed by powerful next-gen graphics allow for a simulation-like engagement with the past that I believe is an important way videogames interact with history, but one that allows them to overlook historical thinking concepts such as contingency and causality with more ease. Also, specifically the Assassin's Creed franchise, with both next-gen graphics and a cult following praising the series for its "good history," is a subject I wish to tackle in a future post once I have had some time to engage with the game itself and look more into my research on some other levels. For now, these three games from the 1990s allow for a quick look at what is NOT good history within videogames. Quickly though, I will give a quick reference to Peter Seixas' historical thinking concepts as the lens I look at these games through.

Historical Thinking Concepts

Excepted from my notes, this is what historical thinking represents according to Seixas...

"http://historicalthinking.ca/historical-thinking-concepts

in onder to think historically (think critically about history, uses and abuses) students must...

  1. Establish historical significance
    • the past is everything: what is significant for study / remembering?
    • depends upon persepctive and purpose: WWI significant, but regional history, local history, social history, etc.
    • significance through larger trends and stories that reveal important things for us TODAY
  2. Use primary source evidence
    • read historical sources (primary docs) different than a textbook: evidence vs. information
    • w/ evidence, must question it, make inferences, consider context
  3. Identify continuity and change
    • history not a list of events, look for change and continuity where other factors suggest there has been none
    • change over time through progress/decline (questionable in my eyes...)
  4. Analyze cause and consequence
    • what are the long/short term causes htat led to long and short term consequences of any one event?
    • causes differ on one event, based on historical scale it is approached with.
  5. Take historical perspectives
    • understanding the social, cultural, intellectual, and emotional settings that shaped people’s lives and actions in the past
    • the past is a foreign country
    • comprehension of vast differences between us and the past: situate events in context
  6. Understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations.
    • two things: what responsibility does today have in connection with historical injustice ie. residential schools, holocaust, etc
    • also, ethical judgements about historicla actions
    • converse to historical perspective, which is placing events in context
    • can't really do that for nazis, slavery, etc.
    • learn things from the past that help us face ethical issues of the present"

From my analysis of these games, I don't especially find any instances of good historical thinking. Neither do I encounter any historical consciousness being formed through techniques of historical thinking. These games are superficially historical, and I will explore this in the following paragraphs.

CrossCountry Canada

This is a game that, when suggested to me by Dr. Graham, brought a host of strange memories back to me from my days at Westmount Public School's computer lab, where this bizarre game from 1991 resided on the school's network for anyone fearless enough to attempt. CrossCountry Canada is a pseudo-text-adventure designed as a journey around Canada in an 18-wheeler, from which the player attempts to deliver goods from certain parts of the country to other parts of the country within a specific time frame. While figuring out (with no real help from the game) where to find each elusive product, the player must eat, sleep, and fill their truck with gas regularly, or else havoc shall ensue. There is no real method for a player to figure out what obtuse text commands are necessary to get around (I remember as a kid trying to play and getting nowhere, because I couldn't figure out how to turn on the truck...), and the concept itself is distinctly "edutainment." No kid of that time period would have seen this on the shelves of their local Blockbuster and thought to bring it home for a weekend to try and deliver industrial goods from one part of the country to another, but regardless this game seems to hold a special place in the hearts of Canadians with experience in the public school system, as seen here and here.

Perhaps the historical element important to this game is it's historical place in Canadian public memory, as the history explored throughout the game is not worth exploring in many ways. The game attempts to teach players about Canadian geography, history, and the like all through driving on nondescript highways throughout all the provinces and territories looking for commodities. As a game to teach history, it fails miserably where it does actually attempt to do anything effective. The brief information that can be found on road signs along stretches of highway can be considered history, yes; and the process of driving around all of Canada can help conceptualize the size and scope of the country and use that to frame the history. But there is no attempt to create any sort of historical consciousness in this game for students: it is merely a visual tool to look at the geography of Canada and learn a couple of facts about different regions along the way. Not only is this game a bit of a disaster when it comes to gameplay, it is also a fair bit of a mess when it comes to imparting knowledge to students.

Oregon Trail

Oregon Trail has achieved meme-status as a videogame of the early 1990s. Its place as a educational videogames for American students is well-known and there are too many internet jokes about dying of dysentery than I care to look at in this piece. However, compared to CrossCountry Canada, this game has a lot more historical material and attempts to situate itself effectively in a historical context: the great westward migrations of the 1840s of the United States. The game shows and allows you to take a route that would have been used by people (just like you, the player!) in their own journeys, and historically appropriate things go on around you as you play. When fording a river, your wagon can become flooded and you will lose your supplies, your children can get dysentery and die, one can interact with some locals and learn some history through that, and, as I'm sure was the case in 1848, making it all the way to Oregon is pretty difficult. So, at first glance, this seems to be a solid historical game that teaches history effectively.

However, this is not the case. Within Oregon Trail there is still no sense of historical consciousness being engaged with. Like Cross Country Canada, this game does not engender any good historical thinking to its players about how the game world in which they are playing works, and how that corresponds to the real history the game attempts to portray. Yes, there is causality in the sense that if I ford a deep river some of my family will drown, but there is no attempt within the game to explore why I am going to Oregon, why people get dysentery, or in general subjective experiences of the trail and the weighting of said evidence. It allows us to explore (very narrowly) an admittedly nationalistic portrayal of a certain moment in American history in a gamified way. This game could be a journey across any land mass with the relabelling of locations and supplies, and in no concrete, meaningful way relates to the westward migration and the experiences of people who participated. The game simply gives facts about the Oregon Trail and does not in meaningful ways explore historical consciousness or historical thinking as Peter Seixas has explored.

Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?

Released in 1989, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? was part of the Carmen Sandiego franchise that was wildly popular at this time, spawning tons of point-and-click type video games and books, TV shows, and comparable merchandise. This particular iteration of the series was ported into a TV show with an insanely catchy theme song. These games were fun click-and-point mystery games with an educational twist, taking place around the world or the USA typically and giving little educational snippets in between the supposed action. Within this particular sequel, chasing Carmen Sandiego through history became the theme, and instead of exploring regional issues, the game explored historical contexts by using the ChronoSkimmer to travel through history searching for baddies. (Strangely enough, you are only allotted a certain number of "hours" to use your time-travel device. This huge logistics issue is overlooked throughout the gameplay.)

A lot of different history is explored very briefly throughout the game, and the clue-based nature of the mysteries led kids to search for answers to the mysteries in their included encyclopedias: specifically the New American Desk Encyclopedia that acts as both a form of copy protection for the game and a way for players to continue reading about the history they explore within the game. It's a clever add-on that allows for more in-depth historical engagement than the game would otherwise have. Still, the engagement with historical thinking is superficial at best here. Once again, the historical content is simply grafted onto an already succeeding franchise model and used in the same way as the ahistorical versions of the game are. It is basically a dressed up quiz game, and in many ways is less historically effective than Oregon Trail or CrossCountry Canada. Those games are situated in their respective historical contexts and use that to attempt and explore a certain viewpoint of their location. Where in TIme is Carmen Sandiego? does neither of these things but instead uses the time travel gimmick to fit many different easily digestible historical tidbits into one game. No historical thinking on contingency, causality, or the like are explored whatsoever through this title, though in comparison the other two games do have more value than this in the sense that they are historically situated and attempt to represent that historical context in an educational way.

...

In conclusion, these are games that are not doing good history, and this is easy to tell because of the nature of the history they try and bestow to the player. The material they carry that can be considered historical in these games feels tacked on and unnecessary to the game mechanics: furthermore, it doesn't engender any sense of historical consciousness, or try to instill critical historical thinking skills. I will admit that these were easy games to critique, but it's important to point them out as what they are at the outset of this so as not to accidentally conflate good history games with bad ones like this. Furthermore, by working away at dispelling ideas of these kinds of games being truly historical, it makes it easier to dispel ideas that games like Assassin's Creed are particularly historical in diverse ways. I look forward to maybe exploring that in a future post.

It is easy to classify a game as doing bad history, though: the trouble will be to find games that worth being considered good history. The next several blog posts will talk about some important things to my work with Dwarf Fortress and other games with lore: archival theory, procedural game generation and what goes on behind the scenes there, the narrativization of DF and other games, and the general historical consciousness I am assuming emerges from these games. I will also continue to spend time actually playing Dwarf Fortress, getting a feel for the mechanics of the game and how players react to them in narrativizing their losses, and I also need to start looking towards exploring other games: that gives us a solid foundation on which to consider lore and how communities around that historical world compares to DF's game world's histories and the communities that emerge around that. Thank you for taking a look at this material: as always, feel free to follow/contact me on Twitter at @rapickering.