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Hi everyone,

On one of the recent Idle Thumbs Podcasts, the crew briefly discussed Oregon Trail, which got me thinking about the use of history in video games more generally. I wrote this essay on the topic for a history website associated with my university. I'm new to Idle Forums, but I've heard from a friend that they are filled with intelligent folks that are into video games. I'd love to have everyone's thoughts on the essay or just on the use of history in video games.

Do you ever play a game primarily because it deals with a certain historical topic or time period? Do you ever feel like you learned something from a historical game? Do you think the gaming industry is capable of producing historical content that is just as compelling as a historical novel or period film? What are your favorite historical games?

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I love it when I get a sense of history in games. Not just fake history, as in the Elder Scrolls series, but especially the real thing. For instance, I enjoyed and read the historical notes in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, which certainly illustrated a few points on the Borgia family. I would enjoy the Samurai Warriors series more for its accurate historical context, if it didn't make such an unorganised mess of it.

But those are two games that are really enhanced by tapping into a rich, historical context. More games should.

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Do you ever play a game primarily because it deals with a certain historical topic or time period? Do you ever feel like you learned something from a historical game? Do you think the gaming industry is capable of producing historical content that is just as compelling as a historical novel or period film? What are your favorite historical games?

Indeed! But only if it's accurate, otherwise it may as well just be entirely fictional. (Of course, if it's an unusual game setting, that's pretty cool in its own right.) I really enjoyed driving around LA Noire, because of how accurate the roads were -- although I thought the game itself stunk. I heard a rumour that Assassin's Creed recreates ancient cities accurately, but I can't seem to find any evidence that that's actually true.

I'd love to spend time in an accurately historic world. I think gaming is the perfect tool to learn about how things were in the past.

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I've read a lot that speaks of Ubisoft priding themselves in having the major assassination targets be accurate to the time and location of death. (If not the cause and circumstances.) The general layouts of the cities are also allegedly quite authentic, albeit scaled, but with major landmarks accurately represented.

It all gives the impression that there are some big history buffs working on that series.

It definitely puts that series into a weird position though, with how much it muddies everything in its sci-fi conspiracy. Can you really say you've learned anything from a game that blurs the line so much between fiction and real history?

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I've mostly given up looking for games that depict historical events accurately. You take all the preconceptions and biases people have regarding the past, squeeze them through the restricted informational sieve of most video games, and you don't get much back. At best, you get the fuzzy history of the Age of Empires games. At worst, you get every other game set in the Middle Ages. Vikings!

Now, games with historical verisimilitude are something else entirely. I've always praised the movie adaptation of Name of the Rose for capturing the feel of living in medieval Europe. Games have a lot harder time capturing that, because they require the active involvement of a player who is typically educated and self-aware, but I've found a couple that hearken to different priorities and worldviews than our modern sense of positivist progress. Crusader Kings II often leaves me obsessed with finding the right wife to bear my sons and sustain my political alliances, with little else matching my despair when the wrong child is heir. King of Dragon Pass sees me raiding other tribes even when it's probably the wrong decision, just because that's what my people expect, and I spend the winter agonizing over what sacrifices to which gods will ensure prosperity in the coming year. Both of them don't really contain historical events, but they feel more historical than the goofy shout-outs of the Assassin's Creed series anyway.

Indeed! But only if it's accurate, otherwise it may as well just be entirely fictional. (Of course, if it's an unusual game setting, that's pretty cool in its own right.) I really enjoyed driving around LA Noire, because of how accurate the roads were -- although I thought the game itself stunk. I heard a rumour that Assassin's Creed recreates ancient cities accurately, but I can't seem to find any evidence that that's actually true.

I'd love to spend time in an accurately historic world. I think gaming is the perfect tool to learn about how things were in the past.

Speaking as an expert in these things, Acre in the first Assassin's Creed was as accurate as they could make it, though they're forced to do a lot of guessing beyond the harbor and the Templar quarter. They fudge Jerusalem a bit more, except around the Old Quarter. Damascus is largely an invention. I can't speak for any of the cities in the second game, since it's outside my period, but I know my advisor was pleased by how much of Venice looked. Probably the most accurate city was in Assassin's Creed: Revelations, if only because they had access to the Byzantium 1200 project when recreating Istanbul.

I've read a lot that speaks of Ubisoft priding themselves in having the major assassination targets be accurate to the time and location of death. (If not the cause and circumstances.) The general layouts of the cities are also allegedly quite authentic, albeit scaled, but with major landmarks accurately represented.

It all gives the impression that there are some big history buffs working on that series.

It definitely puts that series into a weird position though, with how much it muddies everything in its sci-fi conspiracy. Can you really say you've learned anything from a game that blurs the line so much between fiction and real history?

Funny story, my advisor is one of the bigger names working on crusades studies in America, so Ubisoft approached him with an offer to get on board the first game. He was interested, because he's a huge dork like that, but they just wanted to put his name in the credits in exchange for $500 and four copies of the game. No creative control or anything.

So yeah, I don't really know what to say about the game's accuracy. The one guy I know intimately, William of Montferrat, is portrayed horribly as Richard the Lionheart's right-hand man, rather than an octogenarian Italian who came to the Holy Land to see his grandson Baldwin V and die where Jesus lived. Others might have fared better, but I take it all with a grain of salt now. By and large, games are only interested in the appearance of historicity.

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It really is an interesting point. Games do seem mostly interesting in the the appearance of historicity, history as the emperor's new clothes. But that raises an interesting question: how would a game incorporate history in a way other than merely visual/contextual trappings? Can you incorporate history in a meaningful way?

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I think you can incorporate history into video games two ways. Either you recreate a historical moment down to the last detail and let the player explore it from their own modern perspective, or you try to create a situation where the player must consider and make choices in an appropriate historical mindset.

The problem is, both of these approaches take a massive amount of work and can easily produce games that are not fun if not handled correctly. See at least half of the "accuracy" mods for any Total War and Paradox game. "Magna Mundi" in particular was a great idea, making the player-as-ruler balance atop the tottering edifice of state, that was just miserable and boring to play in practice.

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I've mostly given up looking for games that depict historical events accurately. You take all the preconceptions and biases people have regarding the past, squeeze them through the restricted informational sieve of most video games, and you don't get much back. At best, you get the fuzzy history of the Age of Empires games. At worst, you get every other game set in the Middle Ages. Vikings!

Now, games with historical verisimilitude are something else entirely. I've always praised the movie adaptation of Name of the Rose for capturing the feel of living in medieval Europe. Games have a lot harder time capturing that, because they require the active involvement of a player who is typically educated and self-aware, but I've found a couple that hearken to different priorities and worldviews than our modern sense of positivist progress. Crusader Kings II often leaves me obsessed with finding the right wife to bear my sons and sustain my political alliances, with little else matching my despair when the wrong child is heir. King of Dragon Pass sees me raiding other tribes even when it's probably the wrong decision, just because that's what my people expect, and I spend the winter agonizing over what sacrifices to which gods will ensure prosperity in the coming year. Both of them don't really contain historical events, but they feel more historical than the goofy shout-outs of the Assassin's Creed series anyway.

Speaking as an expert in these things, Acre in the first Assassin's Creed was as accurate as they could make it, though they're forced to do a lot of guessing beyond the harbor and the Templar quarter. They fudge Jerusalem a bit more, except around the Old Quarter. Damascus is largely an invention. I can't speak for any of the cities in the second game, since it's outside my period, but I know my advisor was pleased by how much of Venice looked. Probably the most accurate city was in Assassin's Creed: Revelations, if only because they had access to the Byzantium 1200 project when recreating Istanbul.

I think most video games do a poor job of presenting history, but I would argue they do a better job of presenting history than either books or films - or they at least have the potential to do so. When you have historical context in a novel, for instance, it usually comes through this jarring bit of dialogue where one of the characters explains to another what's going on in a paragraph or two. With films, most of the context comes through a quick few paragraphs at the beginning of the movie or through the same dialogue device you see in books. Though most history video games are about murdering dudes, first and foremost, they can provide a large amount of context through visuals or through in-game encyclopedias. On top of that, some games, like Oregon Trail, actually have you acting out historical events or realities. I think that sort of hands on activity with history, outside of a museum or primary source work, is rare.

I was on the fence about Crusader Kings. Your description makes it a must play.

That's good to know about Damascus. I think the game that has done the best job of recreating a city, as ThunderPeel mentioned, was LA Noire. Really incredible work.

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I think you can incorporate history into video games two ways. Either you recreate a historical moment down to the last detail and let the player explore it from their own modern perspective, or you try to create a situation where the player must consider and make choices in an appropriate historical mindset.

I think you're right about this. I would lean toward "recreate a historical moment" because having to play with "an appropriate historical mindset" is usually not fun. When you're playing a game, you don't want to repeat history, you want to make your own.

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I think you're right about this. I would lean toward "recreate a historical moment" because having to play with "an appropriate historical mindset" is usually not fun. When you're playing a game, you don't want to repeat history, you want to make your own.

Sometimes it can be fun. For example, several strategy games, two of which I mentioned in my first post, do a good job of encouraging you to roleplay a historical society or culture in a way that's not always logical but certainly feels authentic. In Crusader Kings II, it doesn't matter if my son or my brother inherits, because I keep playing either way, but of course it's got to be my son, I've groomed him for the throne, he'll be a perfect ruler, he has to have it.

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(I have not yet had the time to read the essay.)

I think Mafia did a fantastic job at making you feel like you lived at the beginning of the 20th century by tuning the gameplay mechanics accordingly. The guns were inaccurate and had terrible recoil, the cars were so underpowered that you could barely get on top of a hill, and the police had very limited opportunities in calling backup. Many people probably found these touches somewhat frustrating (I personally loved them), but I think that problem can be overcome by fine-tuning. I would like to see more developers incorporate history into the gameplay in this sort of way. For example, the medicine in medieval times was probably very dissimilar to ours and it would be nice to see someone try to convey that in a game (someone probably has already). People were struggling to find a satisfying explanation for various natural phenomena and many aspects of science were based on superstition. For once, a scheme hatched by your trusty scientist could turn out a complete failure.

On a larger scale, certain behavior is always expected of people. The decision to divide The Name of the Rose into chapters based on the different "phases" of the daily life in the abbey made sure that the reader was always aware of what was expected of the protagonists at that moment. The fact no one gives a fuck about you climbing walls, running on rooftops, and being a complete dick in Assassin's Creed makes it hard to accept that you live in a 15th century (or any other century for that matter). This is obviously a poor example because the game would be frustrating as hell if the people alerted the guards the moment they see you acting strangely. Still, I think restrictions by expectations would help the player feel like he is living in historical time and not just historical city with modern rules. Of course these systems would have to be logical and carefully explained, so that the player would not feel like time-traveler who got lost.

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The guards DID get alerted when you acted strangely, right? If they see you on rooftops they'll say "get down" and 5 seconds later they try to kill you. That's a little harsh but at least they say something. Really, though, how SHOULD people in the 15th century react to someone being on the roof? I'm not even sure there's a uniform set of reactions for people TODAY; it seems a little tough to predict what people would've done back in Assassin's Creed times and then get mad at the game for not properly modeling that.

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Yes, that was a pretty poor example, written in haste. And I was not "mad at the game" by any means; I even explained why I think it wouldn't work.

I didn't remember that people alerted guards if you were acting strangely (did they really?). That, as opposed to the constant "he must be late, and she must be beautiful", would indeed be the behavior I would expect from a 15th century person* when he/she sees someone parkouring on their beloved church. I obviously don't know how people would have reacted to that sort of thing back then, but it shouldn't be impossible to find out (though literature) what kind of behavior was expected of people at a given time and what kind of reaction "abnormal" behavior caused. I suppose a better example of the potential of incorporating people's attitudes and expectations as gameplay elements would be religion. Heresy, for instance, had severe consequences, and it would be interesting to see religion used as a penal system for preventing you from being too much of a dick in a video game. This, too, has probably been done already — I don't play enough video games.

* From a 21th century person, as well, but to a lesser extent. Again, not the best example.

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I didn't remember that people alerted guards if you were acting strangely (did they really?). That, as opposed to the constant "he must be late, and she must be beautiful", would indeed be the behavior I would expect from a 15th century person* when he/she sees someone parkouring on their beloved church. I obviously don't know how people would have reacted to that sort of thing back then, but it shouldn't be impossible to find out (though literature) what kind of behavior was expected of people at a given time and what kind of reaction "abnormal" behavior caused. I suppose a better example of the potential of incorporating people's attitudes and expectations as gameplay elements would be religion. Heresy, for instance, had severe consequences, and it would be interesting to see religion used as a penal system for preventing you from being too much of a dick in a video game. This, too, has probably been done already — I don't play enough video games.

The guards do attack after a certain amount of time. This was a big problem in the first Assassin's Creed game - one of the many reasons that game isn't nearly as fun as the subsequent releases in the series.

I think incorporating religion into a historical video game sounds very interesting, but I wonder if a commercial product could get away with that without insulting anyone. Assassin's Creed has generally been pretty good about respecting people and cultures.

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The guards do attack after a certain amount of time. This was a big problem in the first Assassin's Creed game - one of the many reasons that game isn't nearly as fun as the subsequent releases in the series.

I think incorporating religion into a historical video game sounds very interesting, but I wonder if a commercial product could get away with that without insulting anyone. Assassin's Creed has generally been pretty good about respecting people and cultures.

You know, except for the hilarious "This game was developed by a multiracial team of many creeds etc etc bullshit" screen at bootup.

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You know, except for the hilarious "This game was developed by a multiracial team of many creeds etc etc bullshit" screen at bootup.

Yeah, I can't help but grimace every time I see that text.

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I don't see what's wrong with it. When the first game in your series is literally about a secretive group of Muslims who exist to kill people, and you set it during one of the most volatile times when it comes to Christian-Muslim relations and when it comes to the Middle East, and when the bad guys in your game are a group of Christians, I think maybe you'd want to take some proactive steps to ward off the calls for your blood by everyone you could conceivably piss off. And have you looked at the credits for the Assassin's Creed games? The development team actually IS stupendously multicultural. It's almost breathtaking to see how many people from all over the world go into crafting the experience.

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That's just UbiSoft Montreal, right? The other teams that worked on Revelations were Ubisoft Annecy, Ubisoft Massive, Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft Singapore, and Ubisoft Bucharest. Not to mention "multicultural" doesn't mean "also includes black people."

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What's wrong with it is them trying to absolve themselves preemptively and it just comes across as skeezy. It's even worse because they actually cover a lot of subjects from the period with, excusing obvious artistic license, a fair bit of delicacy and sense.

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