{"id":8214,"date":"2024-10-22T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-22T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=8214"},"modified":"2024-10-16T20:17:59","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T00:17:59","slug":"conquering-the-curriculum-learning-social-studies-from-crusader-kings-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=8214","title":{"rendered":"Conquering the Curriculum: Learning Social Studies from Crusader Kings II"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Joel is a MA student in the Communication and Culture program at York University in Toronto, where he plans to research the empathetic potentials of digital roleplaying. If he’s not playing and dissecting a strategy sim or RPG, then the chances are he’s off driving someone crazy by gushing about his favourite games. More of his writing can be found at\u00a0www.thethirdmedium.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What do you do with a kid who underperforms at school and plays too many videogames? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the totally unbiased perspective of someone who loved videogames and wasn\u2019t always a standout student, I say this: give \u2019em the right game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My History<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For as long as I can remember, I\u2019ve loved everything historical\u2014or rather, almost<\/em> everything historical.  If you brought twelve-year-old me to a model fur trading post at the Fort Edmonton heritage park<\/a> in my hometown, I\u2019d want to feel the furs, ask how much they went for, and learn which Indigenous nations traded with which Europeans. But at school, I\u2019d usually spend the hours of history lessons daydreaming or sneakily pulling up games on my laptop. Ask me to draw up a timeline of the fur trade on a test, and I\u2019d drop marks from the year 1670 to 1867 One possible explanation for the gap between my enthusiasm for history and my disinterest in its classroom form is that I preferred learning in ways that didn\u2019t revolve around reading\u2014my brain just wasn\u2019t wired for it. But having recently completed a BA in English Literature, I\u2019m not convinced that reading itself was the problem. To find where the issue might lie, I looked at the Social Studies \u201cProgram of Study<\/a>\u201d from my home province of Alberta, Canada:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cIt [Social Studies] has at its heart the concepts of Citizenship and Identity in the Canadian Context.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The historical content in Alberta Social Studies purports to explain where notions of modern Canadian citizenship and identity came from. I don\u2019t believe there\u2019s anything inherently wrong or uninteresting in learning about those concepts, yet this focus on modern Canadian society took away much of the wonder and possibility I felt when learning about history outside the classroom. I get a sense of how this happened when I look at the Program of Study subsection on \u201chistorical thinking,\u201d a skill Social Studies students are supposed to develop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cHistorical thinking is a process whereby students are challenged to rethink assumptions about the past and to reimagine both the present and future\u2026 Historical thinking skills involve the sequencing of events, the analysis of patterns, and the placements of events in context\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As all my nerdy kid hobbies might suggest, I was a big fan of thinking historically for history\u2019s sake. I was less interested in how something like the fur trade shaped my citizenship than I was in the needs and wants of its historical participants. I wanted windows into other worlds like those in the fantasy novels I also loved. Historical worlds could be all the more exciting because of how real and immediate they were; I was not interested in a linear sequence from A to B that explains how we got here. The way our textbook and classroom discussions framed the past as past<\/em>, explaining and assigning its importance through its relationship to the present, made it seem more like an inferior version of the present than a dynamic world inhabited by real people. But something came along that helped me bring my interest in history to the classroom: a good game.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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A screenshot example of how the Social Studies 8 textbook communicates historical thinking. Having lived through the COVID-19 Pandemic, rereading this paragraph gave me a sad laugh; it oversimplifies past and present, but perhaps a new curriculum could bring the two together and explore what drove misinformation during COVID. (Source<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Crusader Kings II <\/em>(CK2<\/em>)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Before encountering Paradox Interactive\u2019s 2012 entry in the Crusader Kings <\/em>franchise, the closest my interests in history and gaming had come to colliding was in the Total War <\/em>series, which focuses almost entirely on the military aspect of the past (sometimes with inaccuracies and gross misrepresentations<\/a>). Then at a family gathering in the summer of 2014, an older cousin told me about CK2<\/em>. I was immediately drawn to his descriptions of its huge, open-ended scope and how it contrasted with the historical strategy titles I was familiar with. I\u2019d been disappointed in Total War: Medieval II <\/em>when, in the tutorial, the game guided me through replicating the Norman victory at Hastings; William the Conqueror already did that! Where was the fun\u2014the challenge<\/em>\u2014in doing what had already been done? I wanted to try my luck with the Anglo-Saxons instead, but the main game picked up after their defeat. I didn\u2019t know it then, but I wanted to experience some counterfactual history<\/a>, using real historical facts to explore what might have happened. As it happens, CK2 <\/em>is a paradise of counterfactual history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Battle of Hastings as depicted in the tutorial of Total War: Medieval II<\/em>. (Screenshot by the Author)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The CK2<\/em> base game uses a map of Europe, North Africa, West Asia, and South-Central Asia as its game board. This map is divided into counties, each with a ruler from the incumbent noble house. Counties group to form duchies, duchies group to form kingdoms, and kingdoms group to form empires. Each ruler from the lowliest count to the grandest emperor works constantly works to further their interests. Often at the end of a sword, but also through the manipulation of other resources such as money or religious influence. The player manages a dynasty in this volatile drama, choosing their first ruler to play as, then taking control of each heir down through the generations. Seeing as this setup allowed me to do what I could not in Medieval II<\/em>, I decided to take the resources available to King Harold Godwinson\u2014and the rest of my summer\u2014to thwart the Norman and Norwegian invasions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The character selection screen of CK2<\/em>. The top of the screen allows the player to choose their start date, while they may click on a country to choose its ruling lord or lady to act as their first character. (Screenshot by the author)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Princes, Paupers, and School Projects<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

            I\u2019ll return to the battlefields of England in a moment, but first I need to fast forward to the fall of 2014, when my grade eight social studies class kicked off the school year with a unit on Renaissance Europe. The first two weeks were devoted to a broad strokes outline of feudal Europe as the launching point for a more detailed timeline of the Renaissance, so there was less emphasis than usual on details and dates, and greater focus on how feudalism functioned as a social system. The idea here was that students would learn about feudalism to drive home the nature of the Renaissance as a pivot point where we can find, as the unit\u2019s title suggests, the \u201cOrigin of a Western Worldview.\u201d Rather than asking us to summarize key events in feudal history, our teacher tasked us with writing a dialogue script that showed we understood the basics of feudal hierarchy, as neatly represented by the diagram below.<\/p>\n\n\n

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A screenshot of a diagram from the Social Studies 8 textbook. Though it puts a monarch at the pinnacle of European feudal power, the textbook also explains the parallel power of the Pope, with a similar diagram to explain Church hierarchy. (Source<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Fortunately, running some counterfactual history in CK2 <\/em>that summer primed me for this exact assignment because CK2<\/em> builds a similar hierarchical structure into its game mechanics. To explore how that works, I recently ran another playthrough of the game as the House of Godwin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1066 in 2024<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

            Keeping the House of Godwin safe meant I had to decisively defeat the Norwegian Harold Hardrada and the Norman William such that each would renounce his claim to England, preventing their descendants from inheriting their claim and causing my house future headaches. I called on all my vassals to send any levies they had left to contribute, but still vastly outnumbered, I decided to seek out allies. The Kingdom of Scotland was my largest neighbour, so I maneuvered my army to avoid battle and began a charm offensive on the Scottish king, Malcolm III. Bringing our kingdoms into an alliance would require a marriage between our families, but my soon-to-be best friend Malcolm wouldn\u2019t agree to marry his daughter to a potential rival already on the verge of defeat. The nerve of this guy! To earn his trust, I sent my two youngest kids to his court as wards\u2014or hostages, to be less diplomatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Malcolm accepts the guardianship of my daughter. The game helpfully provides his rationale with the note \u201cGlad to take hostage.\u201d (Screenshot by the author)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Even though these kids weren\u2019t so much characters as they were lists of information with portraits, I still hesitated a little before pushing the button. If these were my children, could I really send them to another court and put them at a stranger\u2019s mercy in such desperate circumstances? Then I thought about what would happen to them if they stayed: their home would be taken from them; they could be killed for their claims; and our family\u2019s legacy would be a bloody stain on some other royal tapestry. Feeling more like Tywin Lannister than Harold Godwinson, I shipped those brats off to Gowrie without a second thought. Soon after, I noticed the Norwegian army had split into several smaller groups to seize territory faster. I responded by hiring mercenaries to help my army crush the groups one by one. Seeing my fortunes improve and having my children at his court convinced Malcolm it was safe to wed our houses together. Using his two thousand-odd reinforcements to wring a pretty penny out of the Norwegians as a condition of their surrender, I immediately hired additional mercenaries. That ol\u2019 bastard Bill may have thought he won the war when he found London undefended, but he\u2019d hardly left the capital before my force of Scots, English levies, and sellswords fell on his now outnumbered Normans. The House of Godwin was saved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My armies converge on a third of the Norwegian forces faster than the main army can arrive to reinforce them. (Screenshot by the author)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Hey, I wasn\u2019t calling him a bastard to be rude or anything. It\u2019s his official nickname! (Screenshot by the author)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What Really Happened?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not sure how closely this most recent battle for England resembled the one I had in 2014; I remember that I eventually triumphed in that instance too, something that separates both playthroughs from the actual events of 1066. The learning value of experiences like those I had in CK2 <\/em>doesn\u2019t lie in their literal resemblance to past events, but in how such experiences encourage historical thinking in the player through historical problem spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeremiah McCall outlines the historical problem space<\/a> (HPS) framework as a way to understand how designers present a curated representation of the past through various elements in their games. McCall lists seven key aspects of a historical problem space, though the first five elements are the most relevant to CK2<\/em>. Those are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n