Now is your chance to become a part of this blog!

We have always been excited about inviting in new contributors. With that said, we are starting a new push to bring in some fresh ideas and new perspectives. The blog has lost a little steam and I think the best way to move forward is to get some new folks in here who care about games and the past to kick things off again.

The Mushroom Kingdom Needs you, as does Play the Past. Image from Mario Propaganda Posters.

Who Should Blog for Play the Past?

Anybody who wants to write about some aspect of history and the past (broadly construed) in games (broadly defined). Currently we all have an academic bent and humanities backgrounds. Some of us are graduate students, some are professors, some are K-12 teachers, a few of us work at Libraries and Museums. With that said, I would love to have folks get into this from different areas of interest and approaches. For example, social or computer scientists, game developers or writers, folks deep into modding communities, etc.

The only hard and fast requirements are:

1. That you are  interested in games and the past
2. That you have interesting things to say about games and the past and can put them into engaging blog posts
3. That you aren’t a jerk, and are excited to be part of an environment characterized by generosity, creativity, and (as corny as it might sound) kindness

Why Blog for Play the Past?

1. People will read your work: Over the last year Play the Past has gotten between 4,000 to 13,000 unique page views a month. Those are great numbers for something as arcane as a bunch of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and classicists opining about history and video games.
2. People will talk about your work: There are a lot of great comment threads on many of the Play the Past posts. This is a great place to workshop your writing.
3. You own your work: You don’t get paid, but aside from being cool with letting your posts live here on the site you own anything and everything about work you put here.
4. This is a great place to hone your writing: Many of the authors have used Play the Past as a platform for incrementally and iteratively building essays for journal articles or book chapters.
5. Becoming a better writer is about the habit of writing: I’ve found that putting an idea on the calendar and forcing myself to come up with 300-1000 words on it is a great technique for pushing me to work things up and push them out there. Being a regular contributor is a great way to get into the habit of writing and writing for an audiance that gives you feedback is one of the best ways to hone your craft.

Pitching for Play the Past

If you are interested in pitching posts to us here is a quick rundown;

• Send a 50 to 100 word pitch for a post to us on our contact page. Wait for us to get back to you with any input.
• Write your first post (something between 300 and 3500 words, make sure it has some pictures in it.)
• Send us your post and await some input/feedback
• If you do a few good guest posts for the blog we will then set you up with a regular slot. Ideally, we would like each blogger to be posting something once a month.

What’s Play the Past about again?

Collaboratively edited and authored, Play the Past is dedicated to thoughtfully exploring and discussing the intersection of cultural heritage (very broadly defined) and games/meaningful play (equally broadly defined). Play the Past contributors come from a wide variety of backgrounds, domains, perspectives, and motivations (for being interested in both games and cultural heritage). More information on all of our current contributors can be found here. A full rundown of our community and commenting policy can be found here. Sound like something you are interested in? If so, point your browser here and drop us a line.

My research is based on creativity in teaching and learning elementary social studies. My teaching involves helping students as they create products for elementary social studies teachers, non-profit organizations, and cultural institutions that work with elementary school audiences. Because elementary teachers have limited amounts of time for social studies, if they teach it at all, they need powerful direct experiences that allow them to introduce a topic and provide some context for it, a game or activity that helps the students learn a concept, and a debriefing in which the students ask questions and teachers reinforce student learning. All of this must occur in a block of about thirty minutes or the teacher will determine that it takes too much time. The balance between the needs of the teacher for accountability, the needs of the students for a direct and interesting experience, and the needs of historians to render an authentic account of events is the place where I find the most professional challenge.

The start of the game, with Morgan in Mauckport, Indiana

Introduction

When evaluating a game the needs of the teacher, student, and historian bring into play areas for criticism, but the constraint on play within the schools is the greatest challenge. Understanding the constraints helps to understand the circumstances for the design. Lack of time, interest in the subject matter, and understanding of the subject matter all prove to be challenges for using games in educational settings. Hopefully, children would find that the game is interesting enough that they desire to play it when they get home and share it with their peers and family members. The opportunity for the future of learning about the Civil War through gaming is the option of extending the learning offered through the school day or the cultural institution into off-school time through play.

Teachers use curriculum that help to set the context, provide learning extensions, define the debriefing, and provide for assessment support some games. Teachers accustomed to debriefing students after an educational experience;occasionally museum and cultural personnel do the same. The prospect of games emanating from museums without this prospect of debriefing gives museum marketers and those trusted with defending the museum’s brand pause to be cautious. Games that raise controversial issues or deal with multiple perspectives have no way to ask the player to debrief thus raising fears that only safe topics should emanate from an institution. This leads to a greater fear that cultural institutions may tend to self-sensor in order to be safe at the cost of interesting their audience or asking their audience to critically engage with issues.

The Role of the Historian

Historians contribute to the process of designing a gaming experience by providing three important aspects of the design sequence: fact checking, process identification, and curriculum collaboration. Fact checking is, of course, a historian’s greatest role to insure that the design team gets the story correct. Everyone wants his or her story to be told well with rich details that provide depth, with multiple perspectives to show sophisticated thinking, and substantial context to document its importance. The rest of the team brings talents from art, computer, education, music, and telecommunication backgrounds, but they may not share the understanding of the historical events or the commitment to getting details accurate. Historians are in a well-placed role to select enduring issues that each generation wrestles with and resolves within a democratic society.

The player must decide the priorities for this raid

Since games are best at helping the player to understand processes, the historian has an important role on the design team in identifying the process to be explored through the game. It is very easy for the historian to be distracted by the allure of a great story, but he or she must remain focused on tracking the best process that generalizes from the past to a game format. Ideally this process is something that the student will work with in the real world of civics or something the student will work with in their daily life. It is very difficult to get a multiple player game to show differing perspectives due to the lack of balance created by characters of divergent power expressed through wealth, race, and gender. The historian must communicate the idea of a process from the past, while allowing students to glimpse the stories of other people and how they relate to society.

Finally, the historian’s role in curriculum creation should not be overlooked. Connecting the most recent scholarship on a topic and understanding the historiography on the subject supports the educators as they strive to select the most important elements as they design units, lessons, and assessment tasks for students. These three ideas involve historians at the beginning, middle, and ending phases of game design and game production. As the historian shares information with teachers and students they begin to understand how this story is connected to other events and circumstances. The historian’s ability to generate excitement for exploring the past is contagious as the teacher and students pass this game to their peers and families.

Opportunities and Challenges

Visitors to museums and historic sites and school students can engage in interactive history-themed games to learn historical, geographic, economic, or civic processes. Students take the opportunity to learn prior to visiting, on site, or when they return from the site or school. More importantly they have the opportunity to play and replay the games before sharing the game with their friends and peers. As a marketing tool these games can help a historical site establish followers who become interested in the content prior to making a pilgrimage to the site. Every year teachers start from scratch with a new group of students to create interest in content that may seem distant, abstract, or remote.  Games offer teachers or museums the ability to make students and visitors experiences content material as immediate, concrete, and present.

The game summary screen

Teachers must deal with inherent challenges in incorporating gaming experiences into their classrooms or selecting them for use in museum programs. When teachers select educational games for the classroom, the games must be keyed into academic standards, and they must have measurable knowledge outcomes in subjects such as history, geography, economics, or civics. Next the teacher has a finite amount of time for play; for example, the Morgan’s Raid video game was designed so that teachers could introduce the Civil War one day and the following day the students could play the game with a minimum of instruction – in less than twenty minutes. This leaves the teacher with ten minutes for debriefing and questions. Sound effects even though important to students can be turned off so that the classroom does not become deafening. Accurate content must be delivered that is interesting enough that students will want to replay the game. Because of the age of the students, teachers will not select games where students are rewarded for killing people.

Interactive History

Narrative-driven solutions are not appropriate for games, but the phone application is very good for telling a story in short movies. Video is very narrative-driven and allows the flexibility of looking at multiple perspectives from a single phone by referring to multiple quotations from primary sources and examining different characters present on a battlefield at the same time. This allows the perspective of the North, South, and non-combatants to be understood as point-counter point. While I have not seen a counter factual history produced as an application, I am sure that it would be easy to speculate about what might have happened at a site if events had been slightly different in the form of an application. For example, if the Iron Brigade had not held at Gettysburg on the first day, the South might have swept over the Union position at Cemetery Ridge early in the day allowing the South access to the high ground.

A more interactive approach for classroom students would be for them to gather evidence from the battlefield to provide evidence of their construction of knowledge. They can take pictures with their cell phone, record information from docents, and narrate their understanding of events. Visitors do this type of collecting of information all of the time; for example, I wanted to see where all of the Indiana troops had fought across the battlefield at Gettysburg. I could have taken photos of each one of the battlefield markers after finding its location on a battlefield map anddownloaded it to my smart phone. I could then havetaken pictures of the text on the markers, which led me to find amazing stories that I had never heard before incised by the veterans who erected the monuments.

The Power of Place is the Real Thing

In learning a concept people need first enactive experiences, followed by iconic experiences, and concluded with symbolic experiences. A virtual experience like a game or video never takes the place of a direct experience, but it does allow a greater audience to become attracted to the site. A site visit is an enactive experience while a game works at the levels of model building allowing a student or visitor to create a mental model of how the process works. Many teachers in the elementary or university classroom attempt to skip directly to the symbolic level leaving their students unprepared for important basic experiences prior to accumulating massive mounds of symbols. Without the foundation of place, knowledge is built without the benefit of experience.

Complex Historical Processes

Games are an integral part of the interpretive experience and educational experience. Just as we would not rely merelyon quotations from journals without using other methods in our galleries or our classrooms, we do not rely exclusively on games to teach the entirety of a curriculum or to carry our interpretation. A comprehensive curriculum or interpretive plan exploring multiple perspectives prior to and after game play is imperative to insure that complex historic figures do not become one-dimensional heroes or villains. The design of games requires the designer to look at the fundamental process that exists in history to distill the element of fun. A clean and elegant design is the goal, but a complex historic process is just a complex process if the game element has not been rendered from it. A good game never tells a story even if it is a simple adventure story; a good game always examines a process and engages the player in decision making. The visitors/students engage in games designed to meet their needs and move them to the next level of their understanding by considering where the members of the audience can make decissions.

Historical Context

The gaming experience builds historical context by starting with the landscape of the period and recreating the built environment through architectures including both facades and interiors. Interiors communicate the values and economics of the home front from interior design to artifacts and include art and music. When constructing the personalities that inhabit this space, clothing, grooming, historical photos, and written descriptions from primary sources all build human qualities into the characters. Historical context is, however, window dressing for a well-balanced game, but for the designer and developer of a game for school or historical sites it must be accurate and as well researched as any scholarly monograph. Overture, intermezzo, and finale sequences all help to set the context of gaming situations.

Panelists were asked to consider a series of questions, I’ve picked these two to serve as prompts for reflecting about games as a mode for presenting historical interpretation. First, “How can historical sites get game designs that are more interactive and narrative-driven, more grounded in the contingencies of history?” and second, “How can we design games that engage the visitor/student without reducing complex historical processes to a simple adventure story, or complex historical figures to one-dimensional heroes or villains?” In both cases, I think the challenge to historians is to let go of narrative and start by asking themselves different kinds of questions. Questions like, what are the interesting decisions we should present a player? Or, how would one model the forces at play in a given historical incident or moment?

There is an explicit tension between composing traditional historical narrative and presenting complexity and contingency. Historical writing creates and presents stories, largely through linear and chronological text. Instead of scripting out a story games enable historians to map out decisions and relationships as models which can in turn create possibility spaces in which players generate narrative through interacting with models that can be created to surface and feature complexity and contingency. That is, to think far more about the individual decisions, the available actions, and the discrete unit operations that come together to enable the generation of narrative in game play. I think the challenge is to think about designing systems, about designing mechanisms, and not about plotting out stories.

I will briefly talk through how they play out in a rather straightforward simple flash game created nearly a decade ago.

Jamestown Adventure, Counterfactuality and Meaningful Decisions
Jamestown Adventure falls just slightly on the side of actually being a game, being somewhat of a digital Choose-your-own-Adventure. Created over a decade ago, in 2002, this small Flash game you get to make a series of decisions, posed as questions, about colonizing Jamestown. Each question embodies a different part of a model for understanding Jamestown. You are asked where to land, how to interact with natives, how to allocate your colonists time between hunting, fishing and looking for gold, and what crops to plant. At each step in the decision process, you have the opportunity to ask a colonist, talk to a native, or consult the primary source, (the text of the town charter). At the end of the game you get a quick report on how your colony fared in terms of health, wealth, food supply, and morale. The report gives you a sense of what actually happened and provides a comparison of your decisions with those of the actual colonists. You end up finding out if you did better or worse than the Colonists.

Making a decision about crops

The whole game takes about ten to twenty minutes to play, making it work great for a classroom activity.The game is straightforward, but in it’s simplicity it incorporates some really valuable properties. Here are a few different components of a very simple game that I think are powerful values for thinking about designing games for public history.

The game is entirely about meaningful player decisions: The mechanics of the game are very simple, it’s basically an animated chose your own adventure. Importantly, it doesn’t attempt to bolt on a rhythm game, or a shooter game, or some kind of interaction. It simply presents a set of decisions for a player to make and takes you to the resulting outcomes. While a game like Sid Meier’s Civilization brings together much more sophisticated means of simulating and presenting a model of the past, even something as simple as this choose your own adventure style game is potent in modeling the contingency and complexity of the past.

The decisions model interrelated historical forces: Deciding how to organize labor, what to plant, where to establish the colony, and how to interact with natives bring to the foreground the extent to which social policy, culture, geography, and economics interact to create different historical situations and outcomes. In short, the decisions the player is presented with clearly bring to the foreground distinct and interrelated forces that shape how history unfolds.

Primary sources are ready-at-hand resources: You do better at the game if you click to consult the charter, which shows highlighted relevant parts of the document to you. At any moment a player can decide to take a look and see if actual historical records offer insight into making better decisions. This is how the game overcomes the limitations of counterfactuality. The historical record is itself a resource for toying with the model of the game.

Distinct historical actors present competing situated perspectives on the best course of action: The straightforward ability to consult different individuals who represent different historical perspectives gets you to think about different perspectives and evaluate those perspectives in making decisions in the game. Players decide when the perspective of a native or a colonist might help them make better decisions. At each decision point the colonist and the native and the charter present distinct and conflicting information on what the best course of action is and the player is poised to chose whose advice they value for a given decision.

Potential for transgressive play: Players are welcome to make terrible decisions. They are free to toy with the model and see if you can get all of the colonists killed. Just take a look at  what happens when you decide to not plant any crops and build a stone fortress. Similarly, players are encouraged to try and do better than the original Jamestown colonists. In both cases, the game presents a range of possible outcomes and encourages a player to probe and explore them.

Model exploration enables replay value: You play through, you see the result, you want to go back and see if you can do it even better. Each play through gives you a chance to think through different scenarios and compare them to the actual past. As you probe the (rather simple) counterfactual model of the game you gain an appreciation for the social, economic and agricultural forces that the game’s authors think are most important to understanding the possibilities of Jamestown.

Where Does this leave us?
What makes both of these games useful is that they present relatively simple models. They are effectively little montessori toys that you can manipulate and explore. While they are both rather simple their simplicity obscures that they represent a very different way of thinking about the past. Instead of starting with a story to tell, a sequence, or a chronology, this game’s genesis lies in the development of a simple model, a system that one manipulates and through manipulation produces a narrative, and unfolding of a particular circumstance. I think the trick for historians and public history professionals interested in designing games is that they need to think about defining units and operations that create systems filled with interesting decisions. Whether it be these small interactives or massive games like Civilization, I think the most exciting possibilities for the future of games for history exists in changing one’s frame of mind away from thinking about retelling stories and instead to focus on building models that people can play with.

For more background on the game, I would suggest reading Leigh Alexander’s nice piece, Gamer’s Paradise: Worshipping At The iOS Altar. Given the historical theme of the game I thought it would be interesting to chat with Ian about making a game for the iPad in Latin that looks like a rather stylish religious manuscript.

Simony, front view, Photo by Douglas J. Eng Photography

Trevor: So Simon is a matching game, and Simony is the buying and selling of Church offices. What prompted you to stick these two things together?

Ian: I’d thought about making a game that addresses the topic of in-app payments and free-to-play games for some time. Like Cow Clicker had done for Facebook games. But I also wanted it to be more serious than that, not just a send-up or a parody. I set the idea aside in my mind.

Then I was given the opportunity to create a game for the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville’s Project Atrium series. The museum has a large, 35′ tall white atrium space in which they host new works. When I visited the space for the first time, the vaulted space felt cathedral-like to me in its height. But, like a minimalist, modernist, white gallery cathedral. Almost like the merger of an Apple Store and a church.

Knowing I wanted to create both a digital game that could be played anywhere and a site-specific installation, I started playing with different ideas that connected the themes of church, technology, museum, and gallery, and it was then that I returned to the f2p theme.

Trevor: The title of the game points to the past. It’s a term outside our everyday vocabulary. What prompted you to bring this historical concept into the game and how do you think the game makes use of the past?

Ian: For one part, Simon/Simony is a pun or a joke that almost felt like it didn’t deserve to be turned into a real product—that could remain conceptual. But I sort of abhor conceptual art, and I wanted to take this idea that might as well have remained just an idea, that surely would have done if it had been Dada or Fluxus, and really carry it out completely and wholeheartedly. So, one reference to the past is a reference to the last century of art history, to the idea that ideas are sufficient, and the unseen consequences of that notion.

For another part, of course, we have the reference to church history, both the idea of selling office, and the more basic idea of worship and sin. In today’s culture, we tend to think that we’ve moved beyond religion, that we’ve replaced it with science and technology. But then we line up at the Apple Store for the latest iPhone, like it’s the eucharist. We worship technology and we justify that worship with the same sorts of mysticism once used in religion.

Trevor: The game looks like a medieval manuscript. Most of the game’s text is in Latin. But underneath that it’s Simon. What role does this historical veneer over the existing game do for the experience of the game?

Ian: It looks like an illuminated manuscript and sounds like a monastery. And if you play the game, it’s really quite beautiful, somewhat haunting, with the chanting and the lutes and whatnot. But of course, you know all the time that it’s also “just Simon,” just a derivative of a silly, gaudy toy. So there’s a sense of history there, already, the history of games and toys, and the matter of evolution or reinvention in games—or maybe the lack of evolution and reinvention. In fact, Simon wasn’t an original game, itself. Ralph Baer revised an idea that Atari had marketed as Touch Me in the late 1970s, which is ironic given Baer’s animosity toward Atari for “stealing” his idea of a television ping-pong game. There’s more I could say about this, including the surprisingly adult nature of games in the 70s. I mean, a game called “Touch Me” is a clear double-entendre, and coin-op games of this era were largely marketed to adults for play in bars or bowling alleys.

Anyway, If you play the game on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll get this sense of a conflict between a real, legitimate, serious ritual object and a simple toy, and that dissonance is by design. Visually, the game is riddled with Christian symbolism, which interested players can research if they choose. But playing it at the MOCA Jacksonville installation is much more striking. You ascend a 10′ high dais and the music reverberates all around you, and you are on display, turning the gallery space into a place of worship and a place of transaction. In that context, the institutions of church, museum, and corporation sort of overlay upon one another, which hopefully further accentuates the themes in the piece.

That feeling is accelerated by the gambit the game places on the players: at the end of the exhibition at the museum, the top 10 players worldwide will form a “Jury of Ten,” who will decide what to do with the game’s proceeds on behalf of the museum. So, the piece tries to draw together the cultural, ritualistic, and artistic functions of the church, the museum, and the tech company and cast all three as iterations of a common pattern.

Trevor: Simony is, in general, a dirty word. Historically, it names a crime. Simony amounts to religious cheating. What kinds of connections are you trying to draw between corruption in the history of religion and corruption of the purpose of purity of games?

Ian: The curious thing about free-to-play games is the friction point at which they become “pay-to-win” games. Why play a game when you just intend to “buy out” of really playing it? Even if the payment just “helps” you along your way, isn’t it illogical to opt into an experience only to then bypass the experience? Likewise, in the historical case, if the idea of holding church office is to earn and then carry out the good works of the righteous, how can one justify buying out of the righteousness part of the bargain? We also see this in the context of the museum: the donor, the philanthropist who supports an organization financially in order to exert influence upon the art world, and once more money seems to trump values or ideals.

Or does it? Was there ever purity in the church, in games, in corporations, in design, in technology, in religion, in art? Differently put, were we ever really “outside” of transactions, or did we just fool ourselves into thinking we were? Is there a naturally parasitic relationship between any exchange and virtue or creativity? Is even a dollar enough to poison something? These are questions that I can’t answer, but perhaps Simony will offer some perspectives on the matter.

Trevor: Given that you coined the phrase procedural rhetoric, I would be curious to hear you describe what you see as the procedural rhetoric of the game. It’s simon, with buying a point multiplier, but it is also part of a kind of performance art thing where the people at the top of the leaderboard

Simony, iPad kiosk with credit card reader, Photo by Douglas J. Eng Photography

Ian: It’s Simon with a point multiplier and a pay-to-complete-the-sequence button. But the procedural rhetoric isn’t just in the game itself, which is really just an arbitrary ritual you have to perform to earn your rank, your station—your office if you will. In that respect, it argues that all rituals are arbitrary, and playing Simon is really no intrinsically more or less weird than reciting rosaries. But even more so, the rhetoric is in the dynamics of choosing or refusing to pay. There’s a kind of prisoner’s dilemma at work in the game: so long as no one commits the sin of Simony—or so long as no one thinks other players are doing so—there’s little incentive or demand to pay. But once someone starts, everyone is on the hook. And that process can become strangely compulsive quite quickly.

Trevor: So why is the text all in Latin? As I don’t know Latin, my first experience with the game involved clicking on things I didn’t understand. I knew about enough to know that “ludens” likely ment play. Why put text in a game that players can’t read? Given that many religious traditions involve sacred languages I would be curious to know how the illegibility of the text fits into the message of the game.

Ian: Remember that before the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Catholic mass was still held in Latin, although Pope Benedict XVI has been advocating for certain returns to Latin traditionalism. Anyway, the idea of a language of the church that was not accessible to the laity is both a bug and a feature of Catholicism: for one part it made it difficult for speakers of modern languages to know what was going on, but for another part it gave the church a better method to uphold its traditions without dispute or discussion. This is just how it’s done. When you think about it, every practice has these secret languages—whether it’s church Latin or the purportedly “intuitive” touch gestures on an iPhone. By refusing to descend to the player’s lowly, vulgar linguistic demands, the game demands that it be taken as a relic, right from the start, as something that is unfamiliar and rarified.

As for the game, it could have been much worse. The instructions are still in English, and in the museum the cues for swiping a credit card, entering an email address for a receipt and so forth are also in English. But as you discovered, it’s quite easy to figure out the game’s language even though you don’t know it by relying on your existing knowledge of interaction design for apps and games more generally.

Trevor: The game has a very serene feel to it. Between the flipping pages of the manuscript, the iconography on the simon tiles, and the harp music I found it to offer a rather peaceful experience. Beyond this, the repetitive memorization nature of the game brought with it a meditative quality. I’m curious to know if this was something you were designing for of if it was an emergent quality of the design? Is it supposed to move the player into a more peaceful state of mind, if so what are you trying to say with that?

Ian: The repetition is serene for a while, but it’s also brutally boring after a time, particularly for players who chose to pay their way to higher scores. I wanted that feeling of repetition to mimic the sense of ritual practice we find in any ceremonial activity. Is it “boring” to check email or Facebook or Twitter? To wait in line at the Apple Store? To perform the stations of the cross? To recite the rosary? In a sense, Simony tries to put the game on parity with these other sorts of ritual activities, knowing that it will never match them in historical or cultural relevance. And yes, there is a strange balance between tedium and relaxation in these cases. This is far more the case at home with the iPhone than it is in the museum, but of course the museum visitor always knows he or she can download the game and play at home.

Trevor: I took a quick look at the leaderboard and it looks like you have some dedicated players toping the charts. Already, (at that point) just a few days in, it would seem that to make it to the top users are likely needing to buy the most expensive bonus multiplier and be very good at the game. Did you anticipate the leaderboard looking like this? If so I would be interested in your thought process, if not I would be interested in hearing about anything that has been surprising.

Ian: As far as the game qua installation goes, remember that the top 10 players are all treated equally, as members of the Jury of Ten who get the same temporary rights of office in the museum. So in that respect, I expected the game would see a couple of outliers, but I wasn’t sure how many. As it stands, it’s still very possible to get a top ten score through both “good works” and through “sin,” although it was always necessary that sin make things easier. But even then, what does “easier” really mean? It’s still quite a bit of work to “earn” those ranks by paying for them rather than just by playing for them. Today, it seems, we pay for the privilege of working to play as much as we play to escape the demands of working to live.

Trevor: When you were designing the game were there other ideas or concepts for it’s mechanics that you considered incorporating? If so, I would be curious to hear what prompted you to change your mind. I would be particularly curious to hear about any other historical concepts or components of the historical act of Simony that you considered.

Ian: It’s important to remember that I designed this game for the physical installation at the MOCA Jacksonville, and I knew that lots of different kinds of people would encounter it for just a few minutes at a time. I figured that everyone would either remember a memory game like Simon or be able to learn it quickly.

I did try a number of variants of the gameplay, and several variants on scoring. The problem wasn’t that they weren’t compelling, but that they were almost too interesting that they risked making the game more important than the metagame. I kept one of them, an occasional disruptive spin, which I called O Fortuna after the 13th century Goliardic poem about fate. As it stands, Simony exists in a kind of conservative relationship to the game design tradition, which is perhaps apt for a game that owes so much of its origin to the Catholic church.

Trevor: Could you briefly explain the concept of the game and the historical period it is intended to represent?

Dirk:The New Science models the high-level flow of how the core scientific revolution progressed. As with all of my designs, I am most interested in the human aspect of things. So, the game has five scientists from the period each with unique ratings and characteristics that intend to serve as a snapshot of what made them unique and interesting. You control one of them and are essentially racing toward new discoveries in five fields of science: Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Those were the “big five” of the period. In order to advance up the discovery tree you must first research, then experiment, on a discovery. At this point you have a choice. You may hoard your knowledge and try to move higher up the tree. Or you can choose to publish in order to receive prestige. Therein lies the essential tension of the game: if you hoard the knowledge you can advance farther than your opponents. But the winner is the player with the most prestige, which you primarily get from publishing. So should you publish for the glory, or succumb to your thirst to be farther ahead of your opponents? Once you publish, everyone reads your book and any advantage you had is lost.

Example of one of the Scientist’s Cards, in this case Johannes Kepler

Trevor: Could you tell us a bit about the details of how the game models science in the period? I am particularly curious to hear how you think the specifics of the context (Europe during the scientific revolution) creates a game that would be different if it was in a different historical context?

Dirk: I’m trying to tell a story. Players can really get sort of an executive summary of 75 years of science, during the most important period in scientific history. Like, we learn about calculus in school, and we know it is hard and advanced. But few regular folk know it came in the 1670’s, much less the incredible controversy over its discovery. The discovery tree is trying to show people where some of these things we take for granted came from, and introduce them to some of the more obscure or complementary aspects that built forward.

The other part of the story is the scientists themselves. Most people know who Newton and Galileo are. But they don’t know how they were different or unique; just that they both belong in the same bucket of scientific geniuses from a long time ago. I’m trying to show, thru game mechanics and ratings, “This is how they were different.” Then too is introducing people lost to history. I took easily 50 hours of history classes in university but, until researching my previous game, Road to Enlightenment, had never heard of Athanasius Kircher. I would argue he was more important to science and culture in the 17th century than any of the other guys portrayed in the game. The problem is, he was not rigorous and published many things that were, more often than not, wrong. However, his diversity of interests and celebrity-like status made him a giant of his century. History just quickly forgot about him. I want people to learn about him.

Trevor: If you were going to demo this game for historians, what kinds of things do you think they would be excited about? Knowing that they are not at all your target audience, do you think there are any elements in the games design they might be particularly interested in?

Dirk: I hope that historians are tickled to see that I care about these people and things, that I’m driven to create stories and systems around these somewhat arcane topics to remember and contextualize them in a greater narrative arc. I really care about and enjoy these things and am attempting to honour them.

Now, all of that said, I’m scared of historians. Ultimately I am a big picture, holistic and systemic thinker. I work very hard to get details right but it is where I am weakest. So my fear is historians see my work and get pre-occupied with things they disagree with. And that could either be because I made errors, or because as a game designer I chose expediency and playability over granularity and particularity. But I am sort of perennially insecure about muffing the details.

I honestly don’t know what historians would most enjoy about the game. Thinking about myself, as a person who loves history, I would love the rated scientists. And the Happening cards, because they both throw into the mix a whole bunch of historical context and make the game more untidy and unexpected. Because that is what real life was like. A lot of gamers are used to very controlled and measured outcomes, where they can count on “if I do x then y will happen”. That is certainly not how being an experimental scientist ever is, much less in the 17th century.

Trevor: You call the game a “worker placement” game. For readers who don’t have much background on that kind of game could you tell us a bit about the term. From there, it would be great to hear a bit about why you think a worker placement style game works well for representing advances in science?

Dirk: “Worker placement” means you have markers that you can place on different spots on the board which enable you some benefit for doing so. It is a fairly straightforward and fast-playing game mechanic that hobby gamers know and are comfortable with. It allows you to know what your finite resources to use are, look at a variety of options for those resources, then essentially “race” other players to the best ones. I place one, you place one. Only one person can occupy each option, so the order of operations is critically important. Which option do I think you are least likely to go for? Or, which option do I absolutely have to get? You make a lot of those kind of decisions.

I am a thematic game designer. That means, I pick a story that I want to tell and then try to create systems and mechanics that best tell that story. When I first had the idea for this game it popped into my head as a worker placement game, and in fact the final game is remarkably similar to my original “a-ha!” But that was pure gut. What I actually did after that was frame the problem to myself, “What is the most experientially rich way I can put my players into this theme and these characters to experience what being a 17th century scientist would have been like?” That’s always hard, because it very quickly deprecates to “OK, so the instruments were crucially important so maybe there are physical instruments that make the difference.” It’s a rabbit hole, I essentially had people being the equivalent of junior scientists with a mini-lab kit that they would be dealing with. That was fraught with problems, ranging from not being fun for most, to incredibly expensive to produce. So from there it was just deprecate and deprecate and deprecate. And I found myself back at worker placement.

Why I think it works is that, ultimately, the rate limiting factor for these scientists was time. Their progress was absolutely constrained by the hours they had in a day. So having players face that same scarcity of time just made sense. There are some other reasons related to earlier designs as well, having to do with issues of scarcity, that have largely been washed out of the final design. My earlier prototypes were much more literal representations of the choices and complexity that these men had to deal with. But it caused analysis-paralysis in players and it ran long. I wanted a 60 minute game, 120 minutes at the outside, once people knew what they were doing. That required watering things down down what we have now. While the lover of history in me aches, the game designer is sanguine about how much better the game is for those trade-offs. Some of the early tests that took four, five hours were brutal. But, playtesters still liked the game. The kernel was right. It just needed to be articulated in a way that is easier to digest.

Trevor: How did you decide what attributes to give to the different playable scientists? To what extent do you think these attributes have to do with this being about characteristics of the scientists themselves, of the contexts in which they did their work, or just what made for better game balance?

Dirk: For me the most important thing is being true and authentic to who these richly interesting people were. If the game isn’t telling us an approximately accurate story about these people then I consider it a failure. There was nothing I took more seriously.

Early versions of the game had even more differentiated scientists. But as I mentioned before, it played too slow. I think it worked really well for experienced players who loved the theme, but it would just turn off too many people for how slow it caused a variety of those players to play it. Capitalism man, I hate it! If I ever win the lottery I’m going to design games like this for micro audiences. Like, you mentioned above that historians weren’t the primary audience. You’re right, but that is only because I need to sell 3,000 boxes of this thing and funded its production from my personal savings account. Given my druthers I would design something far more arcane that was carefully crafted to only appeal to a very small number of people but just absolutely turned them on.

Trevor: Can you tell us a bit about the tech tree? How did you decide on which sciences would be in the game and how they would stack together?

Dirk: I did some initial high level research about the different branches of science during this period and fleshed them out just a little. Then I had Troy Goodfellow go off and research what he thought were the key advances in all of those fields and how the progressed over time. He did a really nice job with this. Then I took his work, validated it, and began crafting it toward a structure that would work well in the game. He gave some more pointers in the early going but at some point it just became a system balancing thing. And, again, the final tech tree is significantly simplified. It has 5 levels of depth instead of 7 and dropped, gosh, maybe ⅓ of the total discoveries. Ultimately the progress from one “tech” to another is representational not literal. So the idea is, the ideas around probability theory made tangents & inverses possible but there is not a straight line in real life between them, quite.

Trevor: I find the term procedural rhetoric (PDF) to be a really useful term for thinking about how the models and processes in games make arguments. What arguments do you think the rules and model of the game makes about the scientific revolution?

Dirk: The game argues that people make history. It acquaints people with the building blocks of science, a field of human endeavour that, I would argue, has replaced the Catholic Church as the modern repressor of humanity. Note the game is not in any way trying to make that claim! The game is arguing against the 95% of game designs out there with entirely symmetrical playing positions that I think are boring and add nothing to the human condition by failing to tell a nuanced story. The game is arguing that the world gets in the way: you can’t just work in your laboratory. You’ve got to kiss the king’s ass. You’ve got to kiss the pope’s ring. You’ve got to yuck it up with other professional colleagues you might neither like or respect. All of that human interaction stuff is essential to the highest levels of achievement, and the game makes that very clear.

Examples of happening cards that add a random contextual component

Trevor: I’ve written before about some of the discussions between folks that mod Civilization’s Tech tree. I think it is a really interesting way to work through models of how the history, philosophy and sociology of science work. I would be curious to hear about any ideas you had for different ways the game could have worked that you tossed out. I would also be curious to hear a bit about how working on the game has refined or changed your own ideas about how science functions in society.

Dirk: In terms of the tech tree, the final game is almost identical to the original. There are many fewer techs. It is easier to move up the tree. But the scale has always been late 16th century to the mid-to-late 17th century. Because my interest is primarily in telling stories at a human scale as opposed to the paradigmatic, I really wasn’t intending the tech tree to tell more of a story than to gently educate people on how the early years of some of these fields progressed. Yes, sure, in the five branches I chose, in the inter-relationships between the trees, and particularly in Astronomy vanishing into Physics post-Reflecting Telescope, I’m trying to illustrate how this particular bend in the river flowed. But I was not trying to make a larger statement about science and discovery, beyond what I’ve mentioned already.

The game’s discovery tree

Working on this game really hasn’t changed my thinking on science at all. It was just intellectual curiosity on the topic which, for me, whenever I am curious about something I want to turn it into an essay or a game. I certainly learned a lot of granular specifics I did not know, but I came into this game seeing science as an oppressive cultural force and left it feeling the same thing. It is just the ebb and flow of history, and this period was the crucial century to shifting us from treating hierarchical systems based on the mystical and spiritual as our species’ guiding light to treating the scientific method and the inherently inhumane byproducts that flow out of is as our species’ guiding light. I remain hopeful that our next shift will be toward the psychological and sociological but am not holding my breath.

Trevor: This has been really fantastic. Thank you for taking time to talk through the project and the design with me. I know there are a range of historians and gamers that follow the blog and I hope that they can 1) chime in with more questions and discussion for you about the game and 2) that they go chip in on the Kickstarter for this. Once the game is out, I look forward to playing it and sharing some reactions to it here on Play the Past.

When you die, the narrator explains, “No no no, that’s not the way it happened. Shall I start again?” It’s the game over screen that you’ve seen so many times in so many games but in this case, the voice-over explains that your game play is actually someone else telling you a story. You are listening to the main character tell you his personal history. Your character isn’t dying, you are failing to get your character, the guy talking to you, to perform the correct  telling of his story.

It’s a fig leaf, I mean it’s just a game over screen with this extra bit of voice-over, but at the same time I think it does something clever for making the linearity of the game take on a new nature. The story already happened, you’ve just got to perform it right.

This approach can be found throughout otherwise familiar parts of the game.  For instance, when you save your game the narrator says  ”I’ll start the story from here next time” and whenever you pause the game he says ”Shall I go on?” Again, it is a little touch, but for me it did a nice job at providing a new context for what playing the game actually is. Players are acting out the telling of a story of events that have already come to pass.

Sitting in the Animus Linearity and Retelling

You can see a more robust version of this kind of story telling in how Assassin’s Creed works. I’ll just quote Wikipedia for exactly what is going on as it is a bit confusing and involves make believe science.

The player is in reality playing as a modern-day man named Desmond Miles, who through the use of a machine named the “Animus”, is allowed the viewing and controlling of the protagonist’s genetic memories of his ancestors, in this case, Altaïr ibn-La’Ahad, a member of the Assassins.

What’s important here is that the Animus isn’t a time machine, it’s a machine that lets you recover memories of what already happened. If it were a time machine you could change the past, however, as a replay machine, the device provides a straightforward narrative mechanism to constrict the linearity of your movement and trajectory in the game world.  If you go too far off course, or you get caught, you are simply failing to preform the memory and the history it represents. It’s rather wild, as you are actually playing Desmond on your XBOX who is, playing Altaïr on the Animus which is recovering memories of the past somehow stored inside your genes.

Bastion and Procedural Retelling

It strikes me that the active narration technique in Bastion works the same way. In this case, your actions on the screen trigger the narrator telling you what “the Kid” did at various points. If you haven’t seen it in action I would suggest watching a few minutes of the game in the video play through below.

The narrator explains all of your actions and tells you what your character, “The Kid,” is doing. The narrator also attributes different characteristics to you and your intentions as you do things.  Listen to how Matt Miller‘s review of the game reports on how this active narration style changes the experience of playing the game.

“A horrible calamity has befallen his people, and he must rectify the situation. As he wakes, a distinctive voice begins to speak, telling the Kid’s story as it unfolds. Walk one path, and the narrator tells you why the Kid chose that way. Walk the other path, and the voice might foreshadow what lies at its end. Choose a combination of weapons to take out on your journey, and he comments about that particular load-out. Retry a challenge, and he remarks about the Kid’s indomitable resolve. The excellently written and smartly acted narration lend a new layer to the sense of progression. You don’t just want to complete that challenging mission or get that elusive piece of gear for its own sake; you also want to hear what the narrator has to say about it when you do.”

In this case, the mechanisms for retelling the story are a clear part of what players find valuable in the experience.

How do these retelling game design devices change game play?

The non-linear possibilities of games are really exciting, and I think they are particularly exciting for folks like us at Play the Past who want to talk about the different ways that the past could have happened, or how things like simulations can communicate complex interdependence between historical factors. With that said, modes for inviting players participate in the telling of linear stories is exciting as well. I would be curious to hear from others about particularly clever techniques, tactics, or techniques in games that toy with linearity and notions of retelling stories.  I would also be curious to hear others reflect on their experiences with the Animus, the the narrator of Sands of Time, and the narrator in Bastion. Does the scripted retelling, the performance of a story, lead you to

ps, you can get Animus: History is our Playground on a tshirt

Sid Meier’s Colonization has very little slavery in it

Civilization IV: Colonization (Civ IV: Col) does not include the triangular trade, one of the most important and offensive series of events in the history of the Atlantic. As Trevor said previously, we are not begrudging the developers for this omission. Popular culture is deeply disconcerted by the history of slavery, and a game already facing criticism for being offensive would likely raise far more criticism for letting players “play at” the slave trade.

We should note that slavery (and whether or not a player’s colony supports it) does make a brief cameo appearance in the game. After players declare their independence, they must create a Constitution by making a series of binary choices; one of those choices is whether or not “All Men are Free.” Allowing slavery gives a +25% boost to raw material production (tobacco, cotton, wheat, etc.), while abolishing slavery gives an immediate population bonus of two Indentured Servant units for each of the player’s settlements. Slavery is a single decision that has immediate consequences, but not a major part of the game’s mechanics.

Slavery and racial inequality are still sensitive issues for people living in the United States, and as comedian Louis C.K. has pointed out, we like to mentally distance ourselves from that past. But if games are meant to be a series of interesting decisions (as Sid Meier once said), and if we are supposed to be serious about the potential of historical games, shouldn’t we let people explore offensive and controversial identities and roles? Yes! But cultural norms, commercial interests, and personal discomfort have all been barriers (and will continue to be barriers) in facilitating that exploration through video games.

How Modders Brought Slavery into Civ IV: Col

Firaxis invites its players to changethe the game through modifications or “mods.” Interestingly, the modding community has created (or attempted to create) several different mods for the game that bring slavery and the slave trade into the game.

Civilopedia Entry for the "Slave Unit." Image by modder Dom Pedro II.

Thanks to the modders at the Civilization Fanatics Center, we have been able to further explore a few questions that Trevor posed in his original post on Civ IV: Col:

Can you imagine how powerful it would be if the game forced players to make decisions about trade routes in Africa? If it forced them to think about the results of the commodification of people but still presented information about those who died in transit and died from disease and starvation in colonies?

There are actually four mods (in various states of creation) where players are meant to explore what Colonization would be like with the slave trade included: “The Triangle Trade” by Dom Pedro II, “Slavery Market. The Orient. Port Royale.” and “1492: Global Colonization” by KJ Jansson, and “Religion and Revolution,” currently being developed by a team of modders at Civ Fanatics. In the rest of this post we describe some of the mods’ features and offer preliminary interpretation. We invite any readers to share their thoughts and interpretations with us in the comments.

The Triangle Trade Mod

In November of 2008, little over a month after the game’s release, Dom Pedro II began his Triangle Trade modification with the intention that in the final version of the mod, players would be able to purchase Slave units in Africa to bring back to the New World. Slaves were meant to consume one less food than the Free Colonist, meaning that a settlement that could support more Slaves than Free Colonists. Slave units would have the capability to escape and join a nearby Native village or found their own settlements near the player’s colonies, providing a challenge for those engaged in the slave trade. Escaped slaves would have their own civilization called the Maroons, whose leader was the historic figure Zumbi. Dom Pedro II wrote, “They will be hostile and will harrass [sic] your colonies until you crush them.” While players would not have to face the problem of slaves dying from disease or transit, the inclusion of the slaves’ own civilization and possibility of revolt would present information about the culture and struggles of the same “units” that players would have treated as commodities. Dom Pedro II intended these penalties and challenges for players that engaged in the slave trade, but there would be obvious advantages as well; producing more raw resources aids in raising money, which players could use to expand cities and their military. Dom Pedro II planned on including three different victories: Financial, Military, and Diplomacy (in the original version of the game, the game can only be won through a successful revolt). Within the thread where Dom Pedro II discussed his modification, other members of the forum referred to examples of how slaves were treated in various locations (Haiti, North Carolina, Brazil) to serve as inspiration for developing algorithms for slave revolts. Much like modders thinking about how to more accurately model the history of science and technology, these Civ IV: Col modders attempted to develop more accurate models of the game, illustrated by their willingness to gather historical evidence to support their design decisions. Unfortunately the Triangle Trade mod is no longer playable, except for those who installed the game before March 2009 and did not install Firaxis’ first and only patch for Civ IV: Col. Additionally, the Slave units and Africa screen were never implemented despite lively discussions and community support for the mod. Dom Pedro II seems to have disappeared, never to return and update his mod.

Reactions to the Slavery Market Mod

The inclusion of the slave trade in Civ IV: Col proved too important to let it rest with an unusable and unfinished mod. In April 2010, modder KJ Jansson created the mini-mod Slavery Market. The Orient. Port Royale. This mod was based on Dom Pedro II’s Triangle Trade and later included in KJ Jansson’s 1492: Global Colonization. KJ Jansson explained that these mods compensate for the shortcomings of the original version of Civ IV: Col. Slaves can be purchased in Africa, the Orient, Port Royal, and occasionally Slaves “immigrate” to the New World like other colonists and professionals (meaning they cost nothing).

"Idea of Intercontinental Trading." Image by modder KJ Jansson.

While KJ Jansson and others discussed the possibilities of slaves escaping and revolting, ultimately this mod stayed in beta, and slaves could only gain independence if they were trained in a native village. Without the possibility of slaves revolting however, they are too easily exploited, as one modder explained:

Balancewise I think Slaves are very powerful, perhaps too powerful – a unit consuming only have the usual food is a tempting thing and as it is currently there seems to be no downside (except the comparative low one-time cost of 150 or 300). You can use them w/o a limit, there is no restricted supply…on the top they are better then normal units in ressource [sic] harvesting. I wonder if that bonus is really needed? I would suggest to add also a kind of revolt danger, if you go overboard with them in a colony.

It’s in comments like these that we see players and modders grappling with the questions that Trevor posed in his original post. Simply including Slave units without a potential for them to escape or revolt actually makes the game itself less compelling, and thus players advocated adjusting the balance. KJ Jansson welcomed this suggestion (as do most modders) and wrote, “Please, give your critical remarks about balance. Everything here is very easy to correct. Just edit some numbers in CIV4UnitInfos.xml in UNIT_SLAVE section.”

I was able to explore this mod for myself, but only after having major technical Mac-related difficulties, which speaks to the difficulties in game modification and the fact that many mods are inaccessible for most Civ IV: Col players. What I noticed was that slaves are best used for raw material production, and so depending on how many settlements the player creates, there is a limit to the amount of slaves that the player might import. For players with many settlements, slaves are invaluable; their resource bonus and lower food consumption make them an easy source of labor. Additionally, since slaves “emigrate” from Europe for no cost, the mod forces the player into taking part in the slave trade. If the player finds this disturbing, s/he may send slaves to train in Native American villages to earn their freedom. Otherwise, there is no reason not to use Slaves. A note on the “emigration” of slaves from Europe: I believe they may have been coded that way because it is similar to how colonists are introduced into gameplay, although it is a bit odd and obviously incorrect to have slaves “immigrating” to the New World. So my suggestion to KJ Jansson would be to either force players to pay for the Slaves coming out Europe or not allow Slaves to be purchased in Europe at all, both to give players more choices and for historical accuracy. Additionally, without any penalties for using Slaves, I am ashamed to admit that I forgot that I was using Slave units at all; I just bought them, placed them in settlements, and used them, like any other unit. But perhaps that was a valuable learning experience, too; when the Dutch colonized New Amsterdam, they engaged in the slave trade because it was generally considered to be a normal part of life. My own upbringing prevents me from understanding that way of life, but as I focused on commerce and revolution in the game, I found myself falling into the same mindset that I imagine many Dutch merchants had when engaging in business affairs.

The Slave Trade is Missing from “The Authentic Colonization”

“The Authentic Colonization” (TAC) mod, currently one of the largest mod projects, does not include the slave trade. Forum user Tigranes asked the modders of TAC a question that we have been asking about these games and mods throughout our series:

Why is it so hard to include Slave unit? Why is it so hard to include a Plague mechanics [sic] which would wipe up entire (and very useful) villages of Natives? If the mod would call itself — Beautiful Colonization — I would agree. But Authentic? Make things ugly, please [Backstab emoticon] or change the name [lol emoticon].

One of the mod’s developers explained that if some team members are completely against a feature, then it is not included, slavery being one such “hot topic.” Diseases might be included in the next release of TAC, but as Ronnar pointed out, diseases are hard to implement because, “if you do not have a cure/counter, then human players will not like the feature.” This version of TAC has not yet been released, and the mod team for Religion and Revolution (which will include the slave trade) has promised that they will not release their first version until the next (and final) version of TAC is released. Since modding is a hobby, there are no formal release dates in sight. Until then, players can experiment with KJ Jansson’s Slavery Market mini-mod, if their computers oblige.

Units for sale in Port Royal. Image by KJ Jansson.

Playing the Slave Trade and Authentic vs. Beautiful Colonization

Do these modifications force people to explore the results of the commodification of humans? Perhaps, depending on the mod and its version. The discussions surrounding the inclusion of slavery in these modifications and how the slave trade should be implemented, however, do indicate that modders and users actively want that experience. These discussions highlight the challenges in developing scenarios that would force players to engage directly with the unsavory aspects of colonial history. It is compelling that Civ IV: Col fans continually revisit the idea of slavery and express that they want to explore the triangular trade through the game. However, it is much easier to play and critique a game for its shortcomings than it is to make or alter a game and be responsible for representing a controversial part of history. We should remember that commercial interests are not the only ones at play in the development and modification of games; sometimes people are just plain uncomfortable developing a controversial scenario, and other times development schedules run out of time to implement beloved features. When forum user Tigranes continued to discuss the features that the TAC mod does not include, Raystuttgart responded, “The modders of TAC are only human, too. They tried to give their best to improve the game step by step.”

Tigranes’ accusation that “The Authentic Colonization” is, in fact, a “beautiful colonization” since it does not include plagues or the slave trade is fascinating. Beautiful colonization—what a disturbing turn of phrase! When we stack up the various mods of the game and design decisions for including slavery, we aren’t really sure what it all means. Should we be excited by the fact that there is a community of individuals out there trying to make more offensive and more accurate versions of the game, versions that potentially force players to confront the dark past that is colonization? Clearly these mods show us alternate visions of what the game could have looked like, but they also tell us something about what parts of the player community want to see in the game. Beyond this, what do these mods tell us about the game itself? The game was designed in such a way to invite and encourage this kind of modification, but what does that mean for interpretation of the original game? Does this make the original game’s shortcomings forgivable? Does it remove the game development team’s responsibility in representing an “authentic colonization”? These are questions that we pose to readers and ourselves, and that we will continue to consider in further posts.

[Thumbnail image by modder KJ Jansson]

In this series we plan to review and comment on free educational history games from a practical perspective in the hopes of helping to surface exactly what it is that makes a game valuable for the classroom. We are starting off with a look at Jamestown Adventure. Since it is a free online game you can go play it quick and comeback and share your thoughts on it in the comments.

Jamestown Adventure is a relatively simple flash game that we both think is aging quite well. The  game exemplifies the value that a “less is more” approach to games, one that eschews grandiose notions of immersive worlds, can have for creating little games that are actually useful and used in today’s classrooms. For the sake of comparison, we contrast Jamestown Adventure with Discover Babylon, in many ways the exact opposite of Jamestown Adventure.

Jamestown Adventure: The little game that could

Example of what happens when you consult the charter

Jamestown Adventure falls just slightly on the side of actually being a game, being somewhat of a digital Choose-your-own-Adventure. In this small Flash game you get to make a series of decisions, posed as questions, about colonizing Jamestown. For example, in the image below you are deciding where to build your colony. From there you are presented with a series of further choices with explanatory animations. At each step, you have the opportunity to ask a colonist, talk to a native, or consult the primary source, (the text of the town charter). At the end of the game you get a quick report that you can print out and share and compare with others. The report gives you a sense of what actually happened and provides a comparison of your decisions with those of the actual colonists. You end up finding out if you did better or worse than the Colonists.

The whole game takes about ten to twenty minutes to play, perfect amount of class time and given the amount of time teachers actually have to cover these topics, the time it takes to play the game is mindful of the realities and of the classroom.

The game is straightforward, but in it’s simplicity it incorporates some really valuable properties. Here are seven different design elements that we think make this a great history education game for a K-12 classroom;

• Primary Source as Asset: You do better at the game if you click to consult the charter, which shows highlighted relevant parts of the document to you.
• Differing Historical Actors Perspectives: The straightforward ability to consult different individuals who represent different historical perspectives gets you to think about different perspectives and evaluate those perspectives in making decisions in the game.
• Potential for Transgressive Play: You are free to try and make the worst possible decisions. Heck the game encourages you to. See what happens when you decide to not plant any crops and build a stone fortress.
• Mild replay value: You play through, you see the result, you want to go back and see if you can do it even better. Each play through gives you a chance to think through different scenarios and compare them to the actual past. It is a great opportunity to exercise counterfactual thinking.
• Look over each others shoulders value: It is great to use this game as a classroom activity, if you have computers for every student you can set them all up and, because there are different threads in this choose your own adventure.
• Print outs are a godsend for the classroom: At the end of using this particular game in a classroom the game sets a teacher up with a great activity. Print these out, break into groups and talk through comparing each others print outs.
• Click and play: All you need to do to play this game is to go to the URL

In Contrast, Discover Babylon: Neat Idea, Not for the Classroom

Discover Babylon is indicative of a lot of different games projects out there. It is a cool idea, and to be clear, it’s original context is for a museum. However, it was created to “set the bar” in terms of what is possible for history learning games, therefore it is worth bringing it up primarily as a point of contrast to some of what makes Jamestown Adventure a useful game for the classroom.

Let’s start with the pitch for Discover Babylon:

The game opens with a cataclysmic event—an earthquake in Baltimore. The player quickly learns that this event is caused by an ingenious archaeologist named Dexter who has figured out how to travel back in time, accidentally and unknowingly wreaking havoc with the fabric of time. The storyline then unfolds, compelling the player to go on a series of missions to ancient Iraq to find Dex and restore the fabric of time The player travels back in time, ‘leaping’ into the body of several historically attested characters. In the first level, the player assumes the character of Taribi, a 12 year old boy studying to be a scribe. Living a day in Taribi’s life, the player is challenged to learn what he would have learned in school. Players are encouraged to learn by discovery and to experience one of the earliest cities, Uruk ca. 3100 BC.

Cool story! Sounds like some serious exposition there. This is a big problem for bringing a game into the classroom. Classroom sessions are short, and teachers do not have a lot of time for something that doesn’t check off several standards at the same time. Beyond this, Discover Babylon is a 200mb download that runs on Windows machines. This is itself a non-starter for many teachers who 1) often do not have the ability to install software on the machines and 2) if they can, would then need to pre-install, say 20 copies of this game on computers in a computer lab. This brings us to the final major problem. While the Ancient Babylon may be interesting it isn’t really a good fit for the structure of the American curriculum. This is to say that the game doesn’t really have a place in terms of meshing with what a teacher needs to cover.

With all this said, it is important to note that Discover Babylon’s original audience, museum visitors, are not affected by these requirements. In any event, it is critical to note that if one wants to make an argument for the idea that a game can serve classroom purposes it can’t be an afterthought.

The Moral of the Story: If you want a game to be used in a classroom, Less is More

If anyone wants to make a game for classroom teachers to use, and actually wants to make it something that they will in fact use it shouldn’t be your epic story about something you care passionately about. Things that are useful and used look more like Jamestown Adventure than Discover Babylon. You can play them in browsers and you can play them in 20 minutes. As we have suggested, there is a lot of interesting historical thinking going on in Jamestown Adventure. You want to have the mechanics of the actual game directly support learning objectives and ideally you want there to be a discrete take away object, like the printout, that the teacher can use as a means to structure classroom activity. In short, games that are made for the classroom should look like they were made for the classroom. They should fit the design and constraints of the classroom. Again, this isn’t about bashing Discover Babylon, which sounds like a hoot to play around with at home, that game serves as a foil to highlight how features of a seemingly simple and straightforward game, Jamestown Adventure, is actually jam packed with features that very insightful create a useful learning tool customized for use as a classroom activity.

Cultural exchange plays a major role in understanding the history of interactions between the ingenious peoples of the Americas and Europe. In works like Richard White’s notion of the middle ground or Karen Kupperman’s work in Indians and English, historians have developed rich discussions of what interactions between Native peoples and Colonial powers looked like. The functional and visual modes through which Sid Meier’s Colonization models exchange and interaction between cultures offer an interesting place to further interpret the game.

Trading supplies and technology isn’t always quick and easy in Colonization

In order to win a game of Colonization, you must successfully manage relationships with other colonial powers and Natives. Most player strategies and game reviews suggest keeping amicable relations with as many Native cultures as possible because raising a rebel army is difficult enough without waging wars with your neighbors. At first players may think managing peaceful economic relationships with Natives is easy; they are a good source of trade and always give gifts to the player upon first contact. Trading with Natives seems straightforward; until you realize that most of their settlements consistently request guns and horses, and that once you trade these items with Native settlements, they will be used to upgrade military units. Below, the Arawak settlement Boriken requests horses while the Sioux settlement Isanti requests guns, as depicted by the respective icons next to each settlement’s name.

Of course you can use this to your advantage by selling guns and horses to Natives with whom you are allied, or more deviously, to Natives at war with other colonial powers. Once you (or another colonial power) start trading these items with Natives, it is clear that their cultures have been directly influenced by these new technologies.

This isn’t historically off-base; the horse made its way back to its continent of origin and into Native cultures thanks to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which forced Spaniards to leave hundreds of horses in the Southwest as they fled the area. Horses were subsequently moved through a series of Native trade routes and undeniably shaped Native cultures, most famously the semi-nomadic tribes of the Great Plains. Guns, along with many other material goods, similarly traveled between and within Euro-American and Native American groups. We find it refreshing to see an example of direct cultural influence in a core (but subtle) mechanic of a Sid Meier game. The Civilization games have previously been critiqued because trading supplies and technologies with other cultures for centuries produces no messy hybridized identities or beliefs.

But absent from Colonization is the exchange of germs between Natives and colonials. Native Americans had no previous contact with, and therefore no immunological defenses against, European diseases. And while disease isn’t an artifact that can be traded, or a set of beliefs that can be learned, it was transmitted between and had a huge impact on the people living on the “frontier.” The smallpox, measles, chickenpox, influenza, typhus, typhoid, cholera, bubonic plague, scarlet fever, and malaria were all unstoppable post-contact. Could you imagine playing a game of Colonization where over the course of a few turns, 80-90% of the Native American units were wiped out? Where entire villages you meant to trade with simply no longer existed? Or a game in which your units started to die from contracting syphilis from cavorting with Natives? The inclusion of disease in Colonization would certainly be more “accurate” historically speaking, but if having a range of choices to explore makes Sid Meier games fun, then such a mechanic would very likely worsen player experience. We also understand that coding for the exchange of diseases might unnecessarily complicate an already complex game and that it would be a natural decision on the part of designers to avoid another controversial issue in a game about Colonization.

Cultural cross-dressing, education, and assimilation on the frontier

An Image of the Converted Native

Another benefit in maintaining good relationships with Natives in Colonization is the ability to establish missions and generate “Converted Native” units, pictured here in the game’s Civilopedia. He (and all Natives in the game, converted or not, are male) wears a waistcoat, breeches, stockings, and pilgrim buckle shoes, while the feather in his hair signifies his Indian-ness. Wearing certain clothing was, as Ann M. Little explains, “central to the discourse of status, power, and identity on the frontier.” As a cultural cross-dresser, the Converted Native represents the messy hybridization that the Sid Meier games typically avoid. However, there is no Euro-American equivalent to the Converted Native. While Free and Indentured Colonist units can be educated in Native settlements and learn master trades (e.g. farmer, tobacconist, cotton planter, etc.), they emerge from those settlements in colonial clothing, their cultural identity unaltered by their contact with Natives. The Converted Native, in contrast, will change into a Free Colonist unit if he graduates from a school within one of your settlements. Essentially, assimilation occurs through Western education, which removes all visual identifiers that this unit used to be Native (that is true for his skin color as much as his clothing). As far as the game is concerned, culture is transmitted in one direction, Natives can become European, but even via learning a trade from Native settlements a European does not take on any Native characteristics.

From native, to convert, to free colonist: One way, total cultural assimilation

The fact that Converted Natives, through education, become white and lose any trace of their culture might seem to some simply a technical detail. However, this detail is particularly problematic in the context of the history of education of American Indians. One could argue that the game suggests complete assimilation and acculturation, as the Natives become indistinguishable from Europeans via education. However, in the context of American history the removal of any trace of Native-ness comes with troubling undercurrents. The process of cultural assimilation in the game is deeply resonant with Capt. Richard H. Pratt, founder and longtime superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s often mentioned sentiment that Indian education should “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man.” His attempts to systematically eradicate any traces of native culture in requiring individuals to stop using their Indian names, forbidding anyone from speaking of native languages, and explicitly forcing individuals to look more like whites by cutting off their long hair represent a similar model of cultural assimilation via education. This is not to suggest that the functionality of the game forwards this kind of argument, but simply to note that education functioning in this way fits troubling ideology.

There is no option for the player to keep Converted Natives from becoming European once they have graduated from school. If this makes you uncomfortable, then your only option is to keep the penalties (and rewards) inherent to the Converted Native and refuse to “educate” them. But they are easier to get than any other unit and since generating rebel sentiment, amassing an army, and selling manufactured goods is integral to winning the game, you may opt to assimilate as many as possible.

Do the Natives exist to be used as a means to an end?
In our last post in this series, we explored how the game’s code resists being rewritten in a way that makes the Natives a robustly playable people. In order to win you must revolt against your motherland and establish independence, something that Native cultures cannot do. The various traits that Native Americans posses were created in assuming that the player would only play as a colonial power. There is less variation in the Native cultures’ traits, and all of their traits intentionally benefit the player. For example, the various traits Native American leaders possess are: impressionable, indulgent, gracious, prosperous, and mentor. As a result of the fact that Native peoples are not meant to be played, they are described primarily not by internal characteristics but by characteristics by which a colonial power could use or manipulate them. Compare these traits and bonuses with those of the European leaders: libertarian, tolerant, disciplined, enterprising, militaristic, cooperative, charismatic, industrious, mercantile, determined, resourceful, and conquistador. The exception is that Natives can promote their mounted, melee, or gunpowder units to a specific status for “free.”

The Sioux, for example, have a free Grenadier I promotion for mounted, melee, and gunpowder units. This allows their mounted, melee, and gunpowder units to have an increased Settlement attack power of 20%. As previously mentioned, however, Natives must acquire guns and horses through trade with the player or other colonial powers. And depending on the player’s diplomatic relations with Natives, these militaristic bonuses could still be beneficial. If we were to play as the Sioux, we would quickly realize how little our cultural traits benefit us. Not only would we have to wait for Euro-Americans to trade guns and horses with us to make use of our one true bonus, we would also lose units to religious conversions more quickly than other Native cultures!

Is it possible to avoid playing an overly deterministic game in Colonization?
When considering how disease affected Native populations in combination with the advanced technology of the colonial powers, it might seem that European domination over Natives was a foregone conclusion. However, the great benefit in simulating history is the ability to explore alternate histories through a series of choices. But in order to win, players must be a colonial power and must revolt against their motherland. They will probably have to convert and subsequently educate natives in order to do so, all while benefiting from the Native cultural traits. So, all things considered, can we avoid the assumption that Americans had to revolt against their motherland, or that Natives had to be pushed west and onto reservations? If things like germs have been sterilized out of game play, why couldn’t there be more winning options available to the player than revolution? In forcing the player to relive the American colonial experience, Colonization systematically denies the player a series of interesting choices and opportunities to create a radically different past.

With this said, features like misrepresenting acculturation and assimilation and representing native peoples in terms of how they can be manipulated does make the game a better ideological model of the idea of Colonization. These features are actually in keeping with the idea that a game called Colonization should be offensive. When we take this perspective, removing players ability to dramatically change the past locks them in to the ideological model of the game. If we think about the purpose of Colonization as modeling a dark moment in history then the point in all of this discussion of exchange that becomes the most problematic is that the game doesn’t include the devastating role that disease played and completely avoids the slave trade.

Making Indigenous Playable Characters: Setting bPlayable to 1
When you play Colonization you do not have the option of playing as indigenous peoples of the Americas. You’re meant to be the European colonizer; you go over and start colonizing. With that said, it turns out that it is actually relatively easy to change that. Even after a slight modification to make them playable, however, the Natives aren’t really playable in the same sense as the Europeans.

As Androrc the Orc explains on Civ Fanatics:

It is very easy to make natives playable (you just have to change the “bPlayable” field in CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml to 1), but the gameplay is uninteresting… almost no buildings, little options for play, etc… That having been said, things could be done to improve them, perhaps to the point of making playing them be interesting, but a way for them to sell their goods, among other issues, would have to be thought out.

For the sake of comparison, below are two images, one of the city screen from a European power and one of the city screen when you turn on bPlayable and play as a native.

A Functional Colonial City

A Non-Functional Native Ghost City

The image of Tenochtitlan comes from Robert Surcouf who quite eloquently captures the sentiment of the situation in his comment, “There is not much in Tenochtilan, but it belongs … to me. To us at least, the absence, the ghost town in the Native city speaks explicitly to the limitations placed on native peoples in the game. To make Natives playable in a way equal to that of the European powers in the game, we need to more deeply explore what rules Colonization has used to define what Native peoples can and cannot do.

if (!isNative()){return false;}:Removing People-ness through exceptions
if (!isNative()) appears in CvPlayer.cpp, one of the core game’s files, 23 times. When it is put in the context of if (!isNative()){return false;} the logic of the sentiment reads like a sentence. If a given people “isNative” then the game should “return false,” that is, the system should negate a given rule set in place for all of the other peoples who have not explicitly been marked as “isNative”. What matters here is that the isNative label is used to turn off the abilities and characteristics of what it means to be a people.  Edit See the comments below. The struck through sentences are, in fact, exactly backward. Disregarding those sentences, the idea behind them remains, isNative is how the game assigns new properties or removes characteristics from the Natives. I’m not going to cut up and rewrite the whole post now but I wanted to make sure this was corrected for any new readers before getting too far into the post. I also struck out the ! in the first sentence. isNative appears 23 times in the file seven of those times as part of !isNative End Edit

Throughout this CvPlayer file there are a range of statements that provide peoples in the game with particular abilities (determined elsewhere in the games code). What is interesting about this particular way of setting up and building Colonization is that Native are largely explicitly created by the negation of rules that grant particular characteristics to the colonial powers. From the perspective of the games source code there are normal peoples (colonial powers) who come with a range of abilities and characteristics and then a set of exceptions that strip many of those abilities away from peoples who are flagged as “isNative”.  Here are a few examples of how you can override these issues.

Natives were created by consciously turning off individual characteristics of standard peoples in Civilization IV. That is to say, Native peoples are not a different kind of entity in the game; they are quite literally another kind of people. We’re not really sure what exactly to make of this, but here are a few preliminary thoughts.

The game resists making natives playable, but it exposes its logic in the process
We can read the model of the game from our experience but we can also open up the files and start looking at exactly how the game’s model works, and explore exactly how those rules are enacted. This is just a first peak under the hood; we would by no means suggest that we fully grasp how things work here. With that said, when we open things up and poke around we can quickly save changes, like turning bPlayable to 1, and start up the game to see the results of those changes in the game world. The Natives are only one digit away from being playable, and if we make that change, we can go back into the live game and see what happens when they become playable. This kind of code tweaking has a corollary in the idea of deforming texts to better grasp and appreciate their meaning. In modding and editing the source of the game, in deforming its source code, we come to learn more about how the game models the world. While it is easy to make a switch, and turn bPlayable to 1, the game resists our ability to make Natives playable in the robust sense. In the process of tinkering with the code, the limitations placed on Natives are exposed. To this extent, we think it is clear that poking into the code helps us develop a much richer understanding of exactly what differences exist in the experience of playing the game.

Is there extra functional significance of this code?
One of the tenants of critical code studies is that there is often extra functional significance to code. It would seem like code written to model indigenous peoples within a game already critiqued for its offensive nature would be a likely candidate for extra functional significance. On one hand, the fact that indigenous peoples are so close to playable, literally one character away from being playable, is intriguing. Once we flip that switch, the game exposes exactly how limited the Natives are.

What should we make of the fact that much of what defines Native peoples in Colonization is enacted through the negation of abilities granted to the colonial powers in the game? There is no way around it; at the level of the scripts the game systematically and explicitly removes things like civic development from Native civilizations. We can actually see the sections of the code that strip away particular features of what it means to be a robust people in the game. In this sense we could say that we can see the colonialism of the game represented in the colonialism of the code. With that said, it is clear that this is a relatively efficient way to write code for the game’s peoples. The Natives are not the result of special creation. In effect, the scripts speak them into existence at the level of code as a defunct, stripped, and inhibited version of their oppressors. To what extent do we think it matters exactly how the rules of colonialism are enacted in the scripts? Until the guidance from some discussions in the Civ Modder community prompted us to look under the “hood” of the game we did not know exactly how things like peoples were modeled in the game. We could argue that this is simply an efficient way to enact the experience of the game, one that is largely borrowed from the earlier Colonization games, and one that is actually fundamentally different in the Spain and Inca expansion pack for Civilization V.

What can we say about games that invite us to change them?
Elsewhere Trevor has suggested that the modifiable nature of games like these prompt a challenge for exactly what we can say about them. How exactly does one comment on a text that comes with instructions for how you could go about rewriting it? In this case, as we step in to modifying the game it becomes clear that despite our best wishes to modify Colonization to play as a Native American culture, the intentions behind the model of society in the code itself resists our actions. Sure you can make the Natives playable, but once you do, you are faced with a range of rules that make that play problematic. If we dig further and over-write those rules we discover that the game sort cannot be won unless we can trade goods with a king in Europe. In any event, we think we can say that the models in the game’s code, while rewritable, inevitably carry with them some extensive inertia. It would take a substantial amount of  work to overcome the inertia set in motion by the way that the game’s designers modeled the world. This inertia, powered by rules for winning the game and the exceptions placed on Natives in the code, resists our desire for a revisionist experience of Colonization in which Natives are robust playable people. Attempting to mod the game only further communicates the authorial intentions and implications that result from its design.