{"id":169,"date":"2020-10-21T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-21T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/?p=169"},"modified":"2020-10-16T18:48:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-16T18:48:12","slug":"living-history-education-video-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/?p=169","title":{"rendered":"Living History – Education & Video Games"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For many video games are snuffed at as being cheap forms of entertainment. A way in which one might distract oneself. What isn’t often looked at is the potential for video games in teaching us something. While the concept of games utilizing creative computer technology to teach children or using Puzzle games to teach vocabulary or ‘train your brain’ to think quicker is not new. Games that emphasize entertainment teach valuable skills and provide a constant mental challenge. I cannot describe tersely enough the amount of complexity that goes into each game of League of Legends, or the practice and knowledge it takes to play the Witcher on the hardest difficulty, or how much planning and organization it takes to play Total War games. Of course, these things are not as physically demanding as real-world challenges, they offer a new world in which you must master and immerse oneself in to overcome new challenges. Many games are more easily overcome than others and can be beaten within a few hours. Other larger games such as The Witcher 3 can require dozens of hours just to make it through the main story. This doesn’t even consider some of the more serious grand strategy games by Paradox Interactive in which has so much depth and complexity I’ve barely put a toe into Crusader Kings 2 and am fearful of approaching Hearts of Iron.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I digress, today I like to deal specifically with History in Video Games. One problem of my degree and research is the unavoidable questions of “Who Cares” and “Why does this matter?” which both questions often lead to the same answer. One of the more intriguing things is how History has become a topic of popular media. Recognizing stories such as the Odyssey and the Illiad which is a form of oral history which has passed down through the generations to today, primarily as a form of entertainment. Movies have come out of these stories passed down, but now Video Games are taking up historical events in their own way. Franchises such as Assassins Creed take a fictional idea and places it inside historical contexts or games such as Total War which vary in their commitment to historical authenticity versus the need to create an entertaining game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To be fair it did come out 16 years ago, but those strange quadrupedal creatures that look vaguly like they have some sort of glowing force field were actually flaming suicide war pigs.

PETA would like to have a word with 8 year old me creating custom battles with thousands of these.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We have two options that I take intellectually with historical titles: Understanding that they cannot capture the history and thus should not be expected to; and that historical title engages otherwise disengaged people with history. While I’ve always been drawn to works of historical fiction, we’ve moved beyond the moving film and have created (loose) simulations of historical experience. Not only can we simply view history, but we can also now begin to interact with it. One of the coolest parts of Rome Total War is you can play the ‘What If’ game of history. “What if Spartans were able to unify Greece?” The only outcome of that is (known) world domination in Rome Total War, and yet what is so interesting is we can now take our notions of history (such as the invulnerability of Spartan Warriors from films such as 300) and question or apply them in a fun way. Combined with current systems in education I think the interactive applications of video games has a lot of potential to act in a process of reinforcing learning offered by traditional methods. Similar to how films and videos are shown in classes on science, literature and history, video games can act as another level of engagement and interaction with content. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rome Total War 2 came out 9 years after the flaming war pigs. sadly without the reintroduction of flaming war pigs.

Interestingly, a single flaming artillery projectile in Rome Total War 2 had more polygons in it than an entire battlefield in Rome Total War (1), including individual soldier models and all.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The primary concern thus becomes accuracy or possible cultural misrepresentation. The trouble is finding a balance between entertainment and accuracy. Yet even if rarely perfect the research required for games like these to take place is a gargantuan undertaking. The amount of effort trying to capture the culture of a society whose context is rarely comparable to our own is an unimaginable undertaking. It can be difficult to understand someone living in close proximity, but video games offer a place for which people are put into a voyeuristic perspective to observe and engage with historical narratives in a fun way. In fact, a lot of the (basic) global geography I know, came from Total War games. While I cannot remember a lot of the details or cities or rivers, but I know the general idea of Europe, and many of the major cities remained the same or similar. I knew the general gist of the various nations and their locations, nothing impressive, but for someone who’s expectation was often, can you make a map of Canada including provinces, territories and capitals, being aware of the location, and historic names of Instanbul, I think in hindsight is relatively impressive. I owe that to the ridiculous amount of time I spent playing Rome Total War and Medieval Total War 2 when I was a young lad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I was trying to find Byzantium from Rome Total War, but this imposter city, Constantinople, had replaced it in Medieval Total War 2
And yet today I still can’t find Constantinople.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Assassins Creed series directly places the player in control of a character who is actually walking through the streets of cities such as Damascus, Rome, Paris, London, and Boston at various points of history. Of course Assassins Creed should be understood as a work of fiction in Alternative History, but (I know at least for the first one) they made it so everyone the character assassinates died in the spot they were recorded dying in history. Now of course this is might be hard to confirm, but beyond that Assassins Creed (Total War has a similar thing) comes packaged with an encyclopedia-like function in that if you’re curious about learning more about specific characters outside the game’s content, they offer a short blurb of information for you to use (or not) to explore anything that might interest you. Assassin’s Creed 2 goes further and offers entries about other things from Da Vinci [who is co-opted into being a major character] to describing the role of courtesans or street performers. The knowledge encapsulated, while guided under a video game’s premise and biases, does give a player a lot of educational agency to explore new cultures and new histories by immersing players into an old world in a new way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We’ve seen the Superhero Landing… But have you ever seen the Assassin’s Landing?!<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

If you ever wanted to feel like Thor from Endgame after he gets Stormbreaker, Dynasty Warriors gives the player the reins of a hero from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a classical Chinese epic from the period following the fall of the Han Empire. I’m not well versed in the History of China, but I’ve been told that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is THE work of Chinese historical-fantasy that nearly every single Chinese boy will read. Dynasty Warriors packages it in a way that you could literally just play battlefield gods (Guan Yu is literally considered the God of War, look him up). It has had its problems especially when I first was introduced to the franchise with Dynasty Warriors 4 and they called Cao Cao ‘Cow Cow’ or his more, unfortunately, named son Cao Pi. This was a problem of translation as Chinese has multiple romanization systems and failed to communicate that the C in Cao translates to a Ts sound. Thus Cao Cao would be Tsao Tsao. Much less humorous, but if you slow down and pay attention, there’s an incredible story of political intrigue, conflicts of ideology, invasion of foreign lands, and the struggles of everyday people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting…

Lu Bu and his 1000+ Kill Streaks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Only so much can be portrayed in video games, and systematic limitations mean that you may have questions that can never be answered or solved. Questions such as “Who are these funny men in purple Pajamas so strong,” or “If it was this easy to rule the Roman Empire, they never would have fallen to some silly naked Gaulic savages,” or “How the hell does a Pope have kids, and why are they flirting with each other?” Yet the fact that those questions arise is what makes Video Games such an excellent form of media. This spark of curiosity is what had me originally interested in history, and ultimately the reason I went into getting a Bachelor of Arts in History. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many video games are snuffed at as being cheap forms of entertainment. A way in which one might distract oneself. What isn’t often looked at is the potential for video games in teaching us something. While the concept of games utilizing creative computer technology to teach children or using Puzzle games to teach vocabulary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[71,14,11,12,70,1,24],"tags":[74,5,72,7],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindofthelost.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}