Virtual History

How Videogames Portray the Past

A. Martin Wainwright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351653374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Virtual History examines many of the most popular historical video games released over the last decade and explores their portrayal of history.

The book looks at the motives and perspectives of game designers and marketers, as well as the societal expectations addressed, through contingency and determinism, economics, the environment, culture, ethnicity, gender, and violence. Approaching videogames as a compelling art form that can simultaneously inform and mislead, the book considers the historical accuracy of videogames, while also exploring how they depict the underlying processes of history and highlighting their strengths as tools for understanding history. The first survey of the historical content and approach of popular videogames designed with students in mind, it argues that games can depict history and engage players with it in a useful way, encouraging the reader to consider the games they play from a different perspective.

Supported by examples and screenshots that contextualize the discussion, Virtual History is a useful resource for students of media and world history as well as those focusing on the portrayal of history through the medium of videogames.

1

HISTORIANS, CONSUMERS, AND THE VIDEOGAME INDUSTRY

Introduction

No one is born a historian. Every person who develops an interest in history does so for a reason. For me, there were several: relatives of previous generations reminiscing about the two world wars and the Great Depression; movies portraying people in colorful clothing and settings undergoing experiences that seemed very different, yet somehow similar, to mine; and tabletop games, mainly about war and diplomatic relations, that I played with friends and relatives as a teenager. Today many people become interested in history through videogames. They buy a game because of the action or strategic challenges it promises, one that only incidentally has a historical setting. As they play the game, they immerse themselves in the setting and want to discover more about it. This response, which may be barely conscious at the time, is in fact part of a complex set of interactions involving gamers, who buy and play the games; designers, who usually develop the concept behind the games and bring them to completion; and corporate managers, who market the games. Often missing from this relationship but increasingly engaging with it are historians, whose research and writing society often regards as the benchmark of “real” history in contrast to videogames, which are “merely” entertainment. Yet the relationship between the history that historians write and teach and the history that videogames present is far more complex than simply a relationship between serious scholarship and dumbed-down or distorted ideas about the past.

This chapter explores these relationships, between consumers, designers, marketers, and historians. In doing so, it examines their motives for engaging in the production of history, whether as scholarship or entertainment. It also considers the overlap between designer and consumer inherent in this interactive medium. These relationships are often characterized by tension caused by differing motives for producing what some scholars argue are, for better or worse, historical works. However, these relationships also involve surprising levels of cooperation, not only between designers and marketers, but also between both these groups on the one hand and the consumers who play their products on the other. Understanding videogames’ production and consumption, and the extent to which this process compares and contrasts with the production of historical scholarship, enables us to better understand and appreciate videogames’ portrayals of history in subsequent chapters.

The meaning and presentation of history

In order to understand how well videogames depict history, we must first agree on what history is and whether videogames can present it at all. Historian John Lukacs points out an obvious problem with the term “history”: it “has a double meaning. It is the past, but it is also the study and the description of the past” (1). Historians have increasingly disagreed over what precisely constitutes history. For professional historians, history is not simply what occurred in the past; it is also the interpretation of those occurrences. Many historians shy away from using the term “history” to describe the actual past. For instance, theoretical historian Alan Munslow asserts: “‘the past’ and ‘history’ are separate entities or categories” (9). He has good reason to do so. No account of the past, however exhaustive, can include everything that occurred. The historian’s job is, therefore, to decide what is worth attention and what is not, and to explain its significance, either as an illustration of what the past was, or as an explanation of why things turned out the way they did. These are interpretive acts. What one person considers significant, another might not, and vice versa. This process, of choosing what to focus on and why, and then interpreting the evidence, is what separates the discipline of “history” from the actual past.

For millennia, history was usually a matter of community memory. Most people were illiterate and relied on oral tradition to learn what had occurred in the past. The elderly might remember (or think they remembered) details of family life and the greater societal events that influenced them. They also passed on tales they had heard from their grandparents. Such oral traditions were biased in their origins (reflecting one community’s perspective), and suffered from embellishments over time. Occasionally, men of wealth and prestige (rarely women and the poor) would write accounts of great events and the people (usually leaders) involved in them. A disturbing amount of our detailed knowledge of the politics of ancient Greece and Rome comes from a mere handful of “historians” who wrote accounts from personal memory or hearsay. As a result, much of what we know of these details from the ancient past is more of a guess, taking into account the inherent biases of the sources, since few of them have much corroborating evidence. For instance, Herodotus, the fifth-century-bce “father of history’s” estimate of the size of the Persian army in its wars against the Greek city-states is widely considered a gross exaggeration. Rarely did ancient, Medieval, or even early modern histories cite their sources, leaving no way to check the veracity of their assertions.

In the nineteenth century, however, history became an academic discipline in its own right, with dedicated faculties of historians at universities across Europe and North America. These professional historians developed the “historical method,” protocols for researching and writing history. This method involves assessing the accuracy of sources from the past – by determining authorship, context, and potential bias. The original authors of the sources rarely created them with the intent of historians using them later on. Rather, they generated them in the context of events at the time. Indeed, the more the author designed a source to send a message to the future, the more suspect its interpretation of events. For instance, a secret memorandum authored by Winston Churchill during World War II, intended only for the eyes of senior cabinet members or generals, is more likely to express what the prime minister really thought at the time than are the assertions he made years later in his six-volume memoir, The Second World War. The two sources represent the difference between how frank one might be when speaking with a close confidant as opposed to a large public gathering. Historians assess the usefulness of such sources in piecing together what they believe are the most likely explanations of what occurred and why. Having identified what is important, historians rarely simply narrate past events. Rather, they make an “argument” about how the events they are describing are significant or relate to one another. Like the decision regarding the significance of past events, the argument about their relationship to one another is also an interpretive act. Other historians may look at the same evidence and disagree on what it tells us about the nature of past society or the connections between events. Rather than thinking of history as a novel, relating a story that happens to be true, it’s better to think of it as a court case, with different parties presenting different interpretations of what occurred.¹

Although the rigor with which modern professional historians vet their sources and present their arguments is greater than that of historians writing before the last two centuries, many of their motives for studying history remained the same. John Tosh identifies four “long standing and influential aspirations of historians” (2; for the discussion below, see 2–16). Although he describes aspirations fulfilled through the written word, some of them also apply to the motivations behind videogame designers in creating games with historical themes, and videogame consumers in buying them.

The first aspiration is curiosity to find out what happened. Most modern historians would not pursue their subject if they were not passionately interested in it, so this reason remains a powerful one, even for historians who also have other reasons for pursuing their research. If a gamer is buying a game partly because it is set during a particular period of history, then he or she is probably buying the game for similar reasons. Many people are drawn to the past out of a desire to understand where they and their families came from or simply out of the type of escapism associated with reading a historical novel. Professional historians must exercise their imaginations to appreciate the perspectives and circumstances of people living in the past. However, they do so by adhering to rigorous standards of evidence and logic.

The second aspiration is to demonstrate how history is progressing toward an end. This attitude toward history – also called “teleological” – was popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It appeared in the writings of British and American historians, justifying imperialism and “manifest destiny.” It was also central to Karl Marx’s prediction of the inevitability of a classless society. Teleology is still alive in the insistence of many Americans that their country is “exceptional” and therefore not bound to the supposed trajectories of rise and decline experienced by all other societies. However, the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Holocaust, among other developments, shook historians’ faith in progress. Academics, therefore, no longer favor this approach, although notions of inevitable progress remain popular among the general public, particularly in the United States.

The third aspiration is to support political and ideological agenda. Popular narratives and shared memories of the past often serve to justify a community’s reasons for existence and to bolster a sense of unity. Doing so has been particularly important over the last couple of centuries as fairly static members of village communities, in which most people knew one another personally, have transformed into more mobile citizens of nation-states, “imagined communities” (Anderson), in which each individual knows only a small fraction of the fellow members of their larger societies. Narratives of shared societal experiences and common aspirations, often taught through universally mandated education, help to instill primary loyalty to the nation-state, diminishing communal violence and preventing civil war. Unfortunately, such narratives often insist on national superiority over rival nation-states or minority groups within one’s own society, therefore justifying oppression at home and warfare abroad.

The final aspiration is to enable us to use past experience to inform our own choices today. Politicians often invoke the past to argue for a particular social, economic, or foreign policy. Avoiding a recurrence of the events leading to the two world wars or the Great Depression are topics that often arise in public forums. While many historians believe we can learn from the past, however, they tend to approach the topic with greater nuance. The past never truly repeats itself, since the circumstances surrounding our existence constantly change. Learning about the past, however, can give us a better appreciation of how we arrived at our current set of circumstances. It can help to diminish the abuse of history for political and ideological ends. It can also encourage us to appreciate the behavior and attitudes of people in other parts of the world, and in other cultural and ethnic groups, who hold different perceptions of the past from our own.

Whatever their aspirations, however, until the mid-twentieth century, professional historians used the same two media, the printed word and the lecture, to disseminate their knowledge. However, changes over the last half-century of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences have resulted in two processes that allow us to regard portrayals of the past delivered outside the classroom or the scholarly publication as legitimate venues for encountering history.

First, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, historians shifted their focus away from the activities of the social elite to those of people wielding less-formal power. In this process, historians initially focused on the working class. However, the shift toward the powerless also gave rise to a whole set of fields cutting across social science and humanities disciplines that dealt with specific disempowered groups, such as people of color, immigrants, women, and the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer-intersex-asexual (LGBTQIA+) population. The disempowered left less written material, because they were less likely to be literate, had less time to write, and were less likely to have their writing preserved in archival collections. Therefore, although historians still relied on the writings of the elite, they had to analyze them differently in order to glean information through them about the disempowered. For instance, nineteenth-century parliamentary hearings on factory conditions in England often involved interviews with factory workers. These workers rarely left written documents of their own, but the parliamentary record preserves their remarks. Similarly, newspaper reporting of race-related discrimination, protests, and violence in the early twentieth-century United States sometimes contained comments from working-class African-Americans, even if their own written records were not preserved.

In all these cases, historians take careful account of the bias of the person writing the record. A member of parliament might be sympathetic to the plight of factory workers and yet not understand the problems they faced simply keeping personally clean. A white reporter did not have to be a malevolent racist to fail to appreciate the everyday obstacles that official segregation and a hostile judicial system posed to African-Americans. Sometimes written records can reveal information about the disempowered, even though their original function had nothing to do with this goal. Casual references to servants, slaves, women, and children in correspondence about business or government tell historians much about the disempowered and the attitudes of the empowered toward them. Combined with government and business statistics, financial reports, and censuses, they piece together a picture of social relationships and living conditions of those unable to leave us their perspectives directly through their own writing.

Historians have also increasingly relied on sources outside the traditional government archives. For instance, cookbooks marketed to families tell us about diets, the role of women in the procurement and preparation of food, and permeation of foreign or minority ethnic commodities into the lives of the middle and lower classes. Visual and aural artifacts provide records that often tell us as much, if not more, about the disempowered than do government reports. Advertisements, postcards, African-American spirituals, and working-class musical hall performances are all legitimate evidence for the modern historian trying to uncover the lives of ordinary people in the past.

This last point is important, because the increasing willingness of scholars to embrace media other than the written word as primary sources has also increased their willingness to consider them as legitimate secondary sources too. (A primary source is a document or artifact from the period one is investigating. A secondary source is an analysis or portrayal of that period based on primary sources.) For decades, scholarship on education has explored the use of film as a means of conveying history to students. Since the beginning of this century, it has increasingly done the same with videogames (Kee et al.). A major argument for using non-scholarly and non-written sources to convey historical knowledge is that much of the population encounters the past through it. A landmark study in 1998 demonstrat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of images and tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: history in the videogame age
• 1. Historians, consumers, and the videogame industry
• 2. Theme and mechanics
• 3. Contingency and determinism
• 4. Economics and resource management
• 5. Ecology and environment
• 6. Culture and ethnicity
• 7. Gender
• 8. Violence and oppression
• Conclusion: the future of the virtual past
• Index