Many of us here at extra credits love history and love historical games so
it's weird that we've never really talked about them.
Well, seeing as how we have just relaunched extra history now seems as
good a time as any.
There's a lot we could go over here but there's two large questions which
surround the making and the playing of history games that come up more often
than anything else:
How accurate should they be and can you actually learn history from them ?
Luckily for us the questions kind of go hand in hand don't they ? You see both of
these questions and all the debates surrounding them stem from the same key
fact. You can never be truly historically accurate in a game because, by its very
nature as an interactive experience, in a game the player can change the outcome
of history. To me this isn't really a big problem because that concern comes from
an older slightly narrow view of what it means to learn history. Basically you can
boil it down to the question is the point of history to learn dates, names,
and facts, or to learn from history and to understand the struggles of people in
the past so that we may better make decisions in our lives today.
If you believe the value of history is in the former; than the value of
historical games are questionable at best.
But if you believe it to be the latter well then historical games may well be
one of the best ways to learn history.
Games like rome 2, total war, Victoria two or even Civil War two.
Apparently were on the second generation of a lot of historical games... For all
they strive for historical accuracy.
They can never insure that the player's actions will mirror actual events, but
they can put the player in the shoes of somebody wrestling with the large scale
problems of the day and ask the player to understand them and come to grips
with them themselves.
This is the very heart of history, those moments, those pivotal points where
someone stands at the precipice of a decision that could change their world
and has to make a decision about it. And those games let us live that again and
again.
Better still they let us learn from our mistakes which to me is the very goal of
learning history in the first place.
these games force us to reflect on the decisions we make and weigh whether they
were ultimately correct in a way that's often difficult with just a book or a
lecture.
So yeah you can learn from history by giving it through a game but given that,
how accurate should these games be ? Well that's a much trickier question because i tend
to find that many historical games focus their accuracy in the wrong places.
I mean it's important to make sure that everybody has
the right colors on their shields and but the tanks are the correct ones for
whatever you're in, and it's even more important to make sure that historical
figures and situations are represented as honestly as possible, but all of that
should simply come with the territory.
If you're making a historical game everybody involved should be reading and
studying this time period you're working with. Not just the designers, everybody on the
team. Because this should be a labor of love, and if everybody on the team is
immerged in that era,
all those tiny details should just naturally sort themselves out
somebody on the team is gonna catch the historically inaccurate horns on the
helmet or the comically short Napoleon.
But where we often fail to apply accuracy is in giving the player the
very questions and problems that people of that time struggled with. Often we use
history merely as a skin, and then leave the player to make purely gaming
decisions within that setting.
What do I mean ? Well i'll pick on Rome two a little bit here because despite its
bugs, James really enjoyed that game and the first rome total war serves as an
excellent contrast for this.
You see in Rome two, they added leveling trees to all of your characters so you
could pick what skills they learned as they gain levels and progressed.
Whereas in the first rome you can only influence how your units developed,
making sure they didn't end up lazy or as a drunkard by sending them out into
the field or raining in their temper by making them administer a town rather
than fight in constant battles, but even these actions could sometimes backfire
spectacularly.
The thing is, this second system where people just developed as they developed
with at best a nudge from the player in the right direction, felt much more like
being the head of a Roman family, struggling to make do with the inept
brother that you're cursed with, or having to pack your son off to the army
before his scandalous reputation brought down the family, mirrored the decisions
of paterfamilias would have to wrestle with, as they tried to grow the strength
of their family in the world of Roman politics. By having the player be able to
make every choice on a leveling tree in the new game, the player made only game
decisions. Is this ability or that one more likely to win me the game ? Rather
than having to work through a real aspect of the period and live a part of
history, and you know the game was less engaging for that. And I get it and the
designers tried to throw in leveling trees because it worked in the
multiplayer of their last game and well games have leveling trees, wouldn't the
player want to be able to choose what abilities they got to use. But in doing
that, although they paid great attention to accuracy in terms of the names and
places in
the world, the equipment the soldiers were using and all that, they let slip, to me,
what is perhaps the most important accuracy of all in a historical game,
mechanical accuracy. If the mechanics of the game don't feel like being there in
that time or in the shoes of those people, if they don't present to you the
problems that somebody in the role your ostensibly taking on might have to face
then you aren't playing a historical game you're playing a shooter or a
strategy game with an historical skin. So that about wraps it up for us today but
I'd like to put out a plea for historical games in other genres,
today we mostly talked about strategy games as the majority of historical
games currently fall into that category.
Beyond those there's a good handful of shooters a few action titles and then...
Almost nothing...
Role-playing games seemed perfect to take on historical settings. City sims
used to delve deep into this genre with things like the Caesar series but not
anymore for some reason.
So if you're thinking about making a historical game, but we just like to ask
that before you immediately slap into the strategy box,
think about what genre would allow you to use mechanics that truly enable the
player to explore the period. Now don't get me wrong we love strategy games, we love
shooters,
please please keep making those too but there are so many other aspect of
history that are just waiting to be explored
see you next week