Culture

Historical Video Games Have Promise—but Only If They’re Honest

Games rooted in Greek myth and 13th-century Japan can be beneficial for educators. But are games illuminating the narrative or distorting it?
Screenshot of God of War video game featuring two characters in snowy landscape with ruins
God of WarCourtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment

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You can almost smell the drying fish as you step into Ubisoft’s latest Discovery Tour, Viking Age, a free add-on for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (also available to play stand-alone, without the game). Previous Discovery Tour titles have allowed players to take a combat-free jaunt through Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece during the Peloponnesian War, and now early Viking Britain—all “curated by historians and experts,” according to Ubisoft. In partnership with UKIE, the British gaming trade association, the game developer wants to introduce Discovery Tour to 52 schools across the UK.

But this isn’t the first time someone has deployed a video game for education. As early as 1971, when Paul Dillenberger showed The Oregon Trail to his students, the effect gaming could have in a learning environment was apparent. As he recalled for Motherboard: “Kids would gather around [the game’s teletype] to watch what was typed out on the paper. They would come in early to school, and they would stay late to play the game.”

For decades since, developers have tried to bring gaming and education together. Whether it’s learning to type with Mario or exploring the world with Carmen Sandiego, or researchers at the University of Arkansas recreating Pompeii in Unity. Yet academia has consistently failed to grasp the potential of gamifying learning as a way to help people learn history or study historic events.

When I asked game developer Becky Reeve about her experience learning history in school, she told a familiar story. Textbooks remain the primary vehicle for education, which left her struggling “to interact with the work,” she says. Instead, she preferred the history she found in video games because it placed her “directly into the world.”

Whether it’s the untamed west of Red Dead Redemption 2, the wind-fed fields of 13th-century Tsushima, or the bustle of Renaissance Florence, games are becoming more photorealistic and increasingly rely on historical settings for their narratives. Now, you’re more likely to be introduced to a historical subject through gaming than traditional education.

Unlike academic curricula, games also have more freedom to explore ideas that history students might not encounter. David Hopkins, a history teacher in Dublin, says that “women, the history of minorities, LGBTQ history, are all shamefully absent from our courses”—an absence felt across the UK for decades and only recently experiencing reform. Paul Fletcher, a professor of health neuroscience at Cambridge University and consultant on Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, told VentureBeat that games can also play a positive role in “representing mental distress and allowing it to be communicated to others.”

There is room in gaming for narratives that don’t fit the sanitized, conservative history taught in Western classrooms. However, this doesn't mean that games always get it right. The trans narrative in If Found feels real and affecting. But one of the few trans characters in triple-A gaming, Lev from The Last of Us Part II, is, according to Waverly in Paste, not “a character to be respected but investigated.” His trauma is almost a collectible, his presence making “cis voyeurs feel good about themselves.”

This is an issue we see frequently in history-driven games. In an industry dominated by white men—in 2021, according to Statista, 75 percent of developers globally identified as male, while the Entertainment Software Association reports that 73 percent are white—narratives are overwhelmingly viewed through a highly specific lens. In Ghost of Tsushima (2020), the conflict is rooted in the Bushido code, a set of tenets comparable to the European idea of chivalry. Not from the perspective of Japanese culture and history, but the films of Akira Kurosawa. The lower classes treat the samurai in the game with deference, almost worshipping them in their insurgency against the occupying Mongols. However, in reality, the relationship between samurai and the wider population was significantly more complex. The effect is that the narrative is less a glimpse into history than a Western interpretation of decades-old Japanese films.

A more extreme example is Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human. The game actively rewards players for exploring all avenues, including those that cast its playable characters as agents of oppression. The game is set in the future, but it relies on the past to inform its narrative, particularly Black history. Like many fictional representations of rebellious androids and other technological subclasses of people, the game creates a clumsy analogue of the Civil Rights Movement—albeit with an exclusively white cast of protagonists.

When an industry dominated by white men creates games for a perceived white audience, we will continue to see narratives—historical and otherwise—adapted through the lens of white sympathy rather than complicated, intersectional reality.

Similarly, because large developers and publishers are generally risk-averse, it increasingly falls to indie developers to present a more multilayered and complete image of history. In Return of the Obra Dinn, by solving the mysterious deaths of the titular ship’s crew, the player also learns about the class divides between upper and lower decks, the conflicts among a multinational crew, and the reality of people living in the crowded confines of a ship’s hull. Similarly complex narratives can be found in Heaven’s Vault and Treasures of the Aegean.

Without the oversight of major publishers, and with less of a focus on marketability, indie games are more likely to explore the often unpalatable complexities of history that triple-A games shy away from.

Despite some of its failures in developing historical narratives, we cannot underestimate gaming’s ability to drive us toward further interrogation of subjects of which we are otherwise ignorant.

I asked Christopher Mitchell, the head of the School of Creative Technologies at the Vancouver Film School, about this potential. In response, he emphasized that “games are an educational technology. When you make a game you’re constantly teaching and educating the user about how to do complex tasks.” While some may resist introducing games to the classroom, at their heart they are teaching tools, so it makes sense to deploy them in educational institutions.

Covid-19 has thrust this question to the forefront. As the pandemic disrupts education and lessons move to digital spaces, it’s necessary to use interactive, visual tools in teaching. Filippo Lorenzin, art director at the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art, says, “Digital projects and tools many institutions were eventually going to offer to the public in five or 10 years became the top priority overnight and were released in a few months in 2020.”

The pandemic has also driven others to examine how gaming can be beneficial to educators. Video game journalist Andy Robertson has created a family video game database with information allowing parents to make informed decisions about what is suitable, accessible, and positive for families to play together. Budgets and enduring resistance may hinder efforts to gamify education, but Robertson says the greatest challenge “for a teacher or parents is not knowing these games exist or how to find them—and if they find one, how to find more.”

As Western economies press for a “return to normal,” some fear that the accessibility afforded by interactive digital experiences will disappear, in favor of a return to traditional, in-person ones. Lorenzin doesn’t think this will happen. Institutions, he says, “need interactive tools,” and if they are to reach as wide a group as possible, they “must technologically scale their educational projects.”

Games, like other media, may not be the best place to find historical fidelity, and they still have a long way to go before they become the inclusive tools they have the potential to be. There is enormous value, however, in the medium as a tool for education. Research has made it clear that active learning leads to significant increases in retention and understanding, compared with the passive methods of teaching most of us have been exposed to in school.

This is why we’re more likely to learn the pantheon of Greek gods from God of War than the classroom, how many of us know the music of Chopin, and why we all know what dysentery is.

It makes little sense to ask whether games can teach us. They have been since their inception. “We use cameras to extend our eyes and memory,” Mitchell told me, paraphrasing Will Wright. “We use wheels to extend our legs, and now we use games to extend student imaginations and skills.”

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