Sign in to follow this  
Rob Zacny

Episode 267: Revising History

Recommended Posts

Jon Shafer returns to the show to talk with Rob and Troy about revisionist history. Everyone thinks the Spanish Conquistadors were jerks, but let's not forget the behavior of the waffling Belgians. Also, where are all the World War I games? 

 

Listen here.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Conrad's Heart of Darkness is certainly a powerful literary document exposing a wretched chapter in Belgium's history, but of course as Americans we have to be careful when pointing out other nations' histories of genocide... we're certainly hurling stones from within our own glass house.

 

That being said, eff Belgium, they are incredibly lucky the U.S. didn't finish that game during stoppage time in the 2nd half!

 

This topic flows nicely from Bruce's Vietnam game series where he was asking the question about how interpretation of that conflict informs how a designer makes a game about the Vietnam War.

 

Volko Ruhnke (I feel like I reference him every other comment I make on 3MA episodes, sorry, I can't help myself!) solves this problem in the COIN series by having the event cards have different effects depending on which faction ends up using the card, which is an elegant way of showing how a particular event in history is going to have different meanings to different parties.

 

In some ways tabletop games have an advantage over computer games at tackling this problem since the tabletop space permits a level of abstraction that would feel weird in digital games where there is so much more reliance on representation, camera angles that imply a particular point of view instead of multiple views, and a specialization in conflicts that tend to be fairly black and white instead of morally ambiguous (this last point counts as an important strike against the portrayal of the Eastern front in Company of Heroes 2).

 

As Jon said, how strategy games handle the issue of revisionist history is not easy since they are a web of systems. In a lot of ways, the video games best suited to tackling these issues are games in the immersive sims tradition where typically you are exploring dead worlds. After all, it makes more sense to think of history less as "stuff that happened in the past", and more as what continues to endure. The immersive sims genre is all about piecing together stitches of the past to tell a story. Why not make it different competing stories? I would totally play a Bioshock game set after World War I where the player is trying to figure out what really were the causes of the conflict, what were the different leaders doing, and who is lying about what?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So longtime listener, first time caller... etc etc.  In fact, ended up finding this forum and creating an account just to offer some positive feedback on #267 :).

 

Rob, you were curious about how this show would be received, but personally I *loved* this episode.  Examining the assumptions behind the interpretations of history presented in strategy games is a rich but unfortunately rarely explored topic.  You & Troy struck a nice balance of humor and insight, and Jon was an excellent addition.  I hope you'll do more shows like this in the future, examining the frames and assumptions that cut across individual strategy games.  

 

One possible idea that was triggered by #267's discussion is to look more deeply at how institutions are portrayed in historical strategy games.  The group talked about how historical strategy games typically focus on the role of leaders, often putting the gamer in the position of the "Eye of Sauron" (to use your phrase) who can command the entire army from Corps to Squad level with a single focused will.  The claim was made that institutions don't make for interesting choices, and thus games will always have difficulty portraying their historical role.  I'm not so sure.  The development of specific historical institutions (the Prussian General Staff, the Venetian Arsenal, the Royal Navy Admiralty, perhaps DARPA in our own time) have been critical to the success or failure of their sponsoring states.  I think there are rich grounds for exploring how games could better model how elite institutions develop (the willingness to anger existing power structures and entrenched interests inside a state, the placement of innovative thinkers in positions of power, the conscious shifting of societal prestige & economic rewards towards members of the new institution at the cost of the former "winners", etc.), and how that could be built into existing games in a way that still makes for interesting choices, yet shifts the balance towards a more historically accurate blend of individual leaders and long-term development of institutions and cultures.   

 

Moving to World War I strategy games in particular, I'd highly recommend "Commander: The Great War", by Slitherine Games (http://www.slitherine.com/games/ctgw_pc).  Came across it by chance late in 2013, but it ended up pulling me into one of those epic "gamelock marathons" where I was reading multiple books on the side to learn more about what I was playing, then playing long hours to try out what i was reading in the books.  That's historical strategy gaming at its best, and I learned an enormous amount about WWI through playing through the 1914-1918 scenarios from both the Entente and Central Power perspectives.  CGTW covers the Western and Eastern Fronts equally, along with the naval war and the underlying economic/production struggle.  With the recent patches, it's one of the best strategy games I've played in a long time, and could make a terrific topic for your next episode.  (Note - I have no relationship whatsoever with Slitherine or Matrix).

 

Cheers,

 

Chris 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hi all

 

I agree that this was an excellent episode. You guys wondered about the mainstream perception of WW1 in Germany. Obviously there is the stab-in-the-back-myth propagated by many after WW1 and used by the national socialists in their propaganda: Hard fighiting soldiers were betrayed by communists and Jews who plotted Germany's downfall. Of course this is not the mainstream anymore.

 

In school, WW1 is not even half as important as WW2 and especially national socialism. We talked about Nazis in History, Politics, Art, Religion and German Language and Literature classes. WW1 was discussed in History only and is presented as (1) the result of a desastrous combination of international treaties and (2) a war of attrition which the Germans lost. We hardly talked about the role of command, and only a little about technology. The focus was on what started the war, including a general enthusiasm about the war when it began, and the end and consequences of the war, in particular the Treaty of Versailles and the French occupation of the Ruhr area.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Very good episode, I too loved this episode and would really like to see more.

 

On games about the WW1, well while not exactly about the WW1 Valkyrie Chronicles It´s a jrpg/tatical game, the player does take the role a commander of a militia unit of "Gallia"(a neutral country) which is under attack by the "East Europan Imperial Alliance" (somekind of Prussian empire) which is already at war against the "Atlantic Federation" (the allies), the game draw the visual strongly from WW1 (mainly the uniforms) while the plot is somewhat WW2. It´s worth to mention that it does mention themes such prejudice and persecution in a rather well way, with the Dracsen, a people which is often target of hate and at one point, the player does even go free Dracsens from a concentration camp.

 

To be fair there is a lot of anime and manga which is either around WW1 (and some featuring it, but in a rather fantastic way) or imagine a alterntive story where the Meiji Restauration didn´t happened or even Perry didn´t go (or was kicked out by giant robots, I swear there is a anime about this) so Japan wouldn´t join in either the WW1 or WW2.

 

I guess one reason why we see so few games about WW1 is that it´s very hard to proper model the change in way battles where fought, from the early large scale movements to the trech warfare, add to this the difficult to proper represent the number of troops and terrain size, without going to using hexes, counters, ect...which make doable, but I guess some game developers due the desire for more graphical kind of game would avoid it.

 

But on a curious note, Call to Power II, and I don´t know if was a accident or designed that way, did make its WW1 units have very high defense but lower attack, in fact their attack was lower that the Victorian age units! This often could let to stalemates as attacking anything was very hard and often cause several losses. But most time this became quickly a frustration, as you end bringing in your old Victorian units to see if anything changes (small note, there wasn´t a WW1 tank in the game).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah, I also recall World War I getting glossed over in history class in school. To be fair, it's much more difficult to summarize WWI compared to WWII in a general history class. Like, the causes of WWI are still fairly contentious, and reasonable minds differ about which countries are really to blame, whereas the nickel and dime version of WWII is fairly easy to comprehend, and reasonably close enough to the more nuanced version.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The conception, perception, deception of history in itself, is a fascinating topic?

The fragility of sources, the search for methodology, of how we try to understand, preserve, (re-)imagine, betray 'history' ... and what is says about us (most often, even more than about the topic?).

If nothing else, this podcast was a window into some general believes of the podcast's hosts, which helps to understand their thinking better, next time, when the subject is more narrow, focused on a specific game. It also underlines some common ground. Sometimes, basic things have to be said out loud (the history we know, written by the winners, based on lies, based on biases and chauvinism, etc, etc.).

 

And on top, thinking about these subjects, which are so complicated enough in themselves, in the context of video games - made it even more interesting.


 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Great episode.  Love the back and forth discussion on history and the difference perspective can make when trying to tie it to gaming.  I was hoping some could post the link to the first podcast John Shafer mentioned during the show as I'm having trouble tracking it down.  He said it was Hardcore History, but I couldn't find anything with that title that had been released recently.

 

Thanks and hopefully we can see more episodes like this in the near future.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Great episode, I really enjoyed it. As mentioned above, it goes well with Bruce's Vietnam series. It's funny how "America saves the day" is both kind of a joke but also informs so much of our understanding of history through both classrooms and popular media. 

 

I think the podcast John mentioned was Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. I just started listening myself and while I like it, I've gotten a bit bogged down in the most recent episode. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

As Jon said, how strategy games handle the issue of revisionist history is not easy since they are a web of systems. In a lot of ways, the video games best suited to tackling these issues are games in the immersive sims tradition where typically you are exploring dead worlds. After all, it makes more sense to think of history less as "stuff that happened in the past", and more as what continues to endure. The immersive sims genre is all about piecing together stitches of the past to tell a story. Why not make it different competing stories? I would totally play a Bioshock game set after World War I where the player is trying to figure out what really were the causes of the conflict, what were the different leaders doing, and who is lying about what?

 

Not only are games webs of systems, they are also layers of abstraction. It was really interesting to hear Jon brush up against that when talking about games and stories. Good game design seeks out abstraction and stuff like the Black Legend is a powerful abstraction, to have persisted for so long. It explains the difficulties of early contacts with the Americas, it explains Spain's "failure" to remain a world power despite its empire, and so on. It doesn't even matter that it's wrong and based from top to bottom on mischaracterizations at best and lies at worst, it simplifies a massive chunk of the world and its systems for certain games and therefore is hard to ignore.

 

To bring up another example, a person named "pac" on the Paradox forums has been campaigning hard against what he calls Paradox's racist, elitist, and Eurocentric model of the early modern period in the Europa Universalis series. Being a medieval historian of the crusades and the Mediterranean, I thought he had some points but was overall exaggerating, before he convinced me to read a few critiques of the "European miracle" like those by J.M. Blaut. I just finished the last of these, Eight Eurocentric Historians, and now I almost can't bear to look at EU4, so thickly does it lay ahistorical, even nonsensical, advantages on Europe in order to simplify the events of the next four hundred years into something the game can pretend to simulate. It's not surprising that Paradox chose it to be that way; they've said outright that they do their research via Google and Wikipedia, and the Wiki article for the "European miracle" doesn't actually include any discussion of criticism or controversy. There's no context for them to question the entirety of Western historiography.

 

Honestly, I feel that until developers start hiring historians to consult on their games, "video game history" will have as much meaning and quality as "video game writing" still sadly does right now.

 

I think the podcast John mentioned was Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. I just started listening myself and while I like it, I've gotten a bit bogged down in the most recent episode. 

 

I hear you. I enjoy Dan Carlin for the proselytism, but I recognize in him a willingness always to prefer something interesting to something true, which is too familiar in me myself. His "Fall of the Roman Republic" series especially was more entertainment than fact.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

About Bioshock Infinite - I recommend Wolfenstein: The New Order to everyone instead, who can endure a First Person Shooter gameplay.

This game was really surprising in the 'world-building' sense. It does revisionist history - 'What if Germany won the World War II?' - in a frightening and very convincing way!

 

You find notes throughout the game, giving you hints on what happened after 1945, which gives you shivers. The Nazis finished building the atomic bomb, etc. The game architecture also reflects Albert Speer's visions of a Nazi Utopia. I guess Robert Hariss' novel 'Fatherland' does the same trick. I still have not read it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The only WWI games that I recall are "WWI Medic" by Bay 12 Games, and "Knights of the Sky" on the Amiga. There was also a 7-day FPS called "1916 Der Ubenkannte Krieg" that does well to convey the horrors of trench warfare (there were still velociraptors in the 20th century, right?) I've just had a look on the Google Play store to see if there are even any small Indy strategy games, but there's nothing! Just some kind of Risk clone with a WWI theme.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Heard good things about Commander: The Great War. It is on my ever expanding list now that I have time to play games again. 

 

Hi all,  new poster here but been listening to the podcast for about 18 months now and love it.

 

Troy - CTGW is a great game, very elegant and a breeze to play.  Playing it on the iPad is a lot of fun.  However, please, please when you guys cover WW1 games -as I believe you are intending to do soon - do not miss out Strategic Command The Great War (with the Breakthrough expansion).  It's a mighty fine game with an awesome map that very neatly captures the feeling of WW1 and often is compared directly (and favourably) to CTGW.  In fact, I've been waiting for you to do something on the Strategic Command series in general - the WW2 stuff is really cool and the series has been around for 12 years now.  I think it would be a real coup to get Hubert Cater or Bill Runacre on the show, particularly given they have a brand new title in the works.  I note that you've mentioned the games in passing before, just not focused on them.

 

Out of interest, have you played Ageod's La Grande Guerre? 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This may be my favorite episode.

I really enjoyed Troy's Reconstruction example of revisionist history. I grew up and live in Virginia. The most I knew about the Reconstruction up until a week ago was that there were carpet-baggers, share-croppers and that there were some racist voting laws called "Jim Crow". So when Merus posted this article:

http://weeklysift.com/2014/08/11/not-a-tea-party-a-confederate-party/

in the Ferguson thread of these fine forums, it really rang true to my experience learning history in the South and my education just feels shameful. Hearing Troy give his summary was a pleasant coincidence.

I don't know much history or play many strategy games so I can't be of much help, but don't worry; I have partial information and opinions.

I haven't played much of it yet, but I bought Postmortem: One Must Die because it sounded like the basic idea was to go to a party on the eve of a civil war between industrialists and aristocrats, talk with people to determine how you felt about the political tensions and then choose an asassination target to tip the scales. I'm not completely sure that this description is accurate, and it promotes a very simplistic view of war if true, but I think it's an interesting scope of agency for a war game, especially because the complexity of opinions, maybe even the culture of member of the fictional society are what are informing your choice as a player.

I would also say that the drafting portion of Civilization 5 where you are picking a bonus based off of your personal biases and then see how it plays out in a historical simulation is an interesting game in itself. I imagine that a game where you are forming coalitions in a volatile, political environment based off of their alliances and abilities could make an interesting war/politics game. I think that this is close in spirit to what the Double Fine prototype Dear Leader is trying to accomplish (though I believe it focuses on internal pressures more than ones outside the nation's borders). As a player you are mostly making decisions of who your cabinent-members are. I'm using these examples because I believe that a way to have an alternate perspective on war, politics, or states is to literally have an alternative perspective. The role that a game puts you in and the abilities it gives you are a major portion of its rhetoric. In a game (as Jon Shafer's description of how Sid Meier defines games) about war where you play as the military leader, you are saying the war is won by military leaders. If you played as a diplomat, then the war is won by diplomats. If you play as a housemaid, then wars are won and lost by housemaids.

I'd also like to point out that one of the ways that strategy-games have informes my understanding of history and my politics is the abstracted rhetoric embedded in the mechanics. Some basic examples of this are how sharing borders affects the way I perceive other nations, the massive advantage of having a port, and the enormous effect that the creation of a world-congress has on my diplomatic methods and objectives in Civilization 5. Of course all of these mechanics are absurdly simplified, but it does allow me to see current events and history in more of a systems-understanding and less of a linear one.

Great episode.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm way late to the party obviously, but I just wanted to say this was a fantastic episode, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness and interest in a nuanced conversation that respects the balance between mass media and actual academic history and ongoing conversations among historians. It's above-and-beyond what you typically find on the internet and in the media and it's much appreciated.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this