Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming

Kevin Kee, Shawn Graham, Pat Dunae, John Lutz, Andrew Large, Michel Blondeau,
Mike Clare

The Canadian Historical Review, Volume 90, Number 2, June 2009, pp. 303-326
(Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/can.0.0164

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/267473

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 CHR Forum

Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming

KEVIN KEE, SHAWN GRAHAM, PAT DUNAE, JOHN LUTZ, ANDREW LARGE,
MICHEL BLONDEAU AND MIKE CLARE
Abstract: History computer games have become an economic and cultural pheno-
menon, and historians should seize the opportunity to participate in their
development. Players of history games are interested in the past and in the big
questions that drive historical scholarship. In this way, games have the potential to
draw players into the discipline if we can discover the best way to express history
though simulation. But what research do we draw on as we study how to accomplish
this transformation? This essay is the product of a meeting of historians, educators,
and gamers who joined previously separate lines of inquiry to identify literature and
models that we believe form the foundation for developing a theory of good history
through gaming.
Keywords: computer games, history teaching, learning

Résumé: Les jeux vidéo à thème historique sont devenus un phénomène économique et
culturel, et les historiens devraient saisir cette occasion de participer à leur développement.
Les personnes qui jouent à des jeux historiques s’intéressent au passé et aux grandes
questions qui mobilisent la recherche historique. Par les jeux, il est peut-être possible
d’attirer les joueurs dans la discipline, si nous parvenons à découvrir la meilleure façon
d’exprimer l’histoire par la simulation. Mais à quelle recherche faisons-nous appel quand
nous étudions les moyens de réaliser cette transformation? Cet essai est le produit d’une
réunion d’historiens, d’éducateurs et de spécialistes du jeu qui ont relié des pistes de
recherche jusque-là indépendantes afin de repérer les études et les modèles qui, croyons-nous,
serviront de base à l’élaboration d’une théorie de bonne pratique de l’histoire par le jeu.

Mots clés : jeux vidéo, enseignement de l’histoire, apprentissage

THE EMPEROR’S PROBLEM

The emperor has a problem. Barbarian farmers have been spotted along the
borders of his domain. They haven’t crossed over yet, but when they do, it is

The Canadian Historical Review 90, 2, June 2009

ß University of Toronto Press Incorporated
doi:10.3138/chr.90.2.303
 304 The Canadian Historical Review

sure to be a crisis. What can he do about it? He doesn’t have enough troops
to launch punitive raids. Maybe if he trades with them, they’d be happy
to settle down outside his borders? Yes . . . perhaps he’ll try that.

The emperor, in this case, is sitting at his computer, one of many

players of the popular computer game Civilization IV.1 Playing the
game, the ‘emperor’ – or ‘empress’ – has to learn how to balance
competing forces. How does he increase agricultural output so that his
army can sweep across the plains of a far continent? Should he direct
his people to concentrate on cultural activities – or should the state’s
focus be on technology? How can he deal with the long-term fallout of
that disastrous episode at diplomacy with his rival?
Civilization IV lets the player guide any one of a number of cultures
from the stone age to the space age. It has spawned a host of imitators,
including some designed with educational goals in mind. Harvard
historian Niall Ferguson reviewed one of these educational history
games and suggested,

Gaming history is not a crass attempt to make the subject relevant to

today’s kids. Rather it’s an attempt to revitalize history with the kind of
technology that kids have pioneered. And why not? After all, the Game Boy
generation is growing up. And, as they seek a deeper understanding of the
world we live in, they may not turn first to the bookshelves. They may
demand to play – or rather replay – the great game of history for
themselves.2

Indeed, the demand is growing. One of the highest-grossing

commercial-off-the-shelf computer games ever published, in an
industry that in 2007 reaped $9.5 billion in the United States
alone,3 Civilization IV sold over six million copies in the six months
that followed its release in September 2005. What is truly novel about
computerized games is this reach, one that historians ignore at their
peril.
Historians need to respond to these games for another reason –
students are learning history while they play. Games such as the one
reviewed by Ferguson have imitated Civilization for the express

1 Firaxis Games, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, Take-Two Interactive Software,

http://www.2kgames.com/index.php?p¼games&title¼civ4.
2 Niall Ferguson, ‘How to Win a War,’ New York Magazine, 16 Oct. 2006,
http://nymag.com/news/features/22787.
3 Entertainment Software Association, http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp.
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 305

purpose of education. But even in games that have been designed for
entertainment, the player is learning. Sid Meiers, the creator of the
Civilization franchise, did not set out to create an educational game, in
the sense that playing it would teach the player ‘true’ history. Like
many of other game developers, he views ‘education’ as a pejorative
term. ‘I want to make the distinction between education and learning,’
Meiers observed several years after the launch of his franchise.
‘Education is typically boring but learning is very exciting.’ Meiers’s
goal was to create a history-based game where the learning process
itself was a significant part of the fun: ‘We like to introduce learning
into a game without making it feel educational. In learning you decide
what to learn – in education you are told what to learn.’4 Yet as many
observers have pointed out, Civilization does not allow the player to
learn whatever she decides – the rules of the game are suffused with
American myths of frontier expansion and benevolent capitalism.
Those who dismiss these games, frequently in the context of their
historical inaccuracies, are simply ceding the field to the game
developers and their sometimes ill-considered views of historical
change. Instead, we need to take this new form of historical
engagement seriously and seize the opportunity to participate in its
development. Game players are not barbarians; that they choose
historical over sci-fi or contemporary themes – one quarter of PC-based
games that have sold at least one million units have been historically
themed, or employed historical tropes – suggests an interest in the past
that we need to speak to.5 Moreover, players of games like Civilization
IV are exhibiting an interest in the big questions that drive much
scholarship, such as, How do empires work? Playing a game, the
player has to learn why things happen the way they do in order to play
the game successfully. In this way, history games have the potential to
draw players into the discipline. Gamers may be short steps away from
becoming historians, if we can discover the best way to express history
through simulation.
But what research do we draw on as we study how to accomplish this
transformation? Recently, several historians, educators, and gamers met
in connection with the ‘Simulating History’ research project at Brock
University to discuss the literature that each considered to be seminal

4 Sid Meiers quoted in David Brake, ‘Civilization Creator Sid Meier: The
Mindjack Interview,’ Mindjack: The Beat of Digital Culture, 8 May 2003,
http://www.mindjack.com/interviews/sidmeier.html.
5 Wikipedia, ‘List of Best-Selling Video Games,’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_best-selling_video_games#PC (accessed 7 July 2008).
 306 The Canadian Historical Review

for work in games and history.6 We wanted to join our previously

separate lines of inquiry, to understand one another’s disciplinary
perspectives for research into simulations and games, and to explore the
intersections between these perspectives. Although the movement
towards educational games is an international one, the meeting revealed
that in different sectors Canadian scholars and game developers are at
the vanguard.
Games that have been designed by academics, with little grounding
in theories of good gaming, are typically of the boring drill-and-response
type. As researchers, we run the risk of ruining what makes a good game
if we do not consult with professional game designers. At the same time,
gamers are good at figuring out what makes a game ‘fun’ but will not
make games that are pedagogically sound if they do not engage with
experts in teaching and learning. ‘The answer,’ as Richard Van Eck
points out, ‘is not to privilege one arena over the other but to find the
synergy between pedagogy and engagement.’7 Our goal was to build a
bridge between game developers such as Meiers – passionate about
gaming and hopeful for learning, with historians such as Ferguson –
committed to learning and hopeful about gaming.
This essay outlines the agreed-upon areas of overlap between ‘good
history’ and ‘good gaming’ and provides a survey of literature and
models we believe to be the foundation for developing a theory of good-
history-through-gaming. We cast a broad net and explore the potential
of virtual environments, virtual worlds, games,8 and technologies that

6 The meeting was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council Image, Text, Sound and Technology Networking Grant.
7 Richard Van Eck, ‘Digital Game-Based Learning: It’s Not Just the Digital
Natives Who Are Restless,’ EDUCAUSE Review 41, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 2006): 18.
8 The definitions of virtual environment, virtual world, and game have been the
subject of considerable disagreement among game theorists. According to
Ralph Schroeder, a ‘virtual environment’ uses virtual reality technology to
create a ‘computer-generated display that allows or compels the user (or users)
to have a sense of being present in an environment other than the one they
are actually in, and to interact with that environment.’ Ralph Schroeder,
Possible Worlds: The Social Dynamic of Virtual Reality Technologies (Boulder:
Westview, 1996), 25. In short, virtual environments are about ‘being there.’
Ralph Schroeder, ‘Defining Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments,’ Journal
of Virtual Worlds Research 1, no. 1 (2008), http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/ issue/
view/38. ‘Virtual worlds,’ according to Schroeder, are ‘persistent virtual
environments in which people experience others as being there with them
[italics added] – and where they can interact with them’ (ibid.). In short, these
are online places for socializing. Games, which are sometimes embedded in
‘virtual environments,’ but may exist in 2-D environments (e.g., Tetris), are
built with a focus on the user’s enjoyment. A game, according to Edward
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 307

have been heretofore associated with research, not entertainment.

We begin by acknowledging the larger academic interest in games for
learning – both within and beyond educational institutions, and the
research it has spawned. Historians have been slow to address the
potential for games to teach history, a caution that may stem from our
discomfort with popular history. Historians prefer the medium of text,
but we note that history is protean, requiring expression in different
forms. Back to ancient times, authors have championed the pleasure of
exploring a historical simalcrum – a re-creation of a place in time past.
New technologies enable us to create these worlds and to connect
information about these places to data about people, events, and
activities, creating environments that are both data- and experience-
rich. Expressing history in game environments will require new
methodologies, and we propose that in the practices of micro-history
we may find a theory and framework to guide us. Micro-history
champions the reader’s point of view and links well to games in which
the decisions that a student makes result in a new and personal
historical narrative. We can study student game play in order to make
this effective, but we propose going further and including students in
the development of historical games. The manner in which students
engage one another in history games provides a model to how we
might revitalize history learning, as Ferguson suggests, in the years to
come. When it comes to game play, the emperor, it seems, knows a
great deal, and we should pay attention.

ACADEMIC (DIS?)INTEREST IN GAMING

While historians have been slow to embrace the potential of computer

games for learning,9 the field has grown exponentially in Canada
(witness the Canadian Game Studies Association, formed in 2006,
and Serious Games Canada, organized in 2007), led by scholars of
education and thoughtful game designers. Drawing on research by
colleagues in the United States, Britain, and Scandinavia, they note
that, while the computerization of games is a novel development,
games-in-education is an ancient phenomenon. As Chris Crawford,
one of the ‘deans’ of games for learning, points out, games are

Castranova, focuses ‘all thought and research on the user’s subjectivity and
well-being.’ Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of
Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 291–2. In short,
they are fun.
9 An exception is Pierre Corbeil, one of the pioneers in the use of games for
history learning, and editor for the journal Simulation & Gaming.
 308 The Canadian Historical Review

the most ancient and time-honored vehicle for education. They are the
original educational technology, the natural one, having received the seal of
approval of natural selection. We don’t see mother lions lecturing cubs at
the chalkboard; we don’t see senior lions writing their memoirs for
posterity. In light of this, the question, ‘Can games have educational value?’
becomes absurd . . . Game-playing is a vital educational function for any
creature capable of learning.10

Indeed, many of the best history teachers already use gaming

strategies in their classrooms. They use role playing, historical
re-enactments, and counterfactual assignments for the same ends as
those who use computers: to give the students a reason to ‘do history’
and make it engaging at the same time.
The rationale for using games in education is closely tied to
the impact they have had on youth culture: as Ferguson observes, the
bookshelf and the single-authored authoritative tome may not be the
first point of call for our students.11 Marc Prensky, the founder of
‘Games2train.com,’ has coined the term ‘digital natives’ for twenty-
first-century students who have grown up surrounded by digital
technologies, and ‘digital immigrants’ for the late adopters who have
come to digital technologies later in life and who are in charge of the
education system. Prensky has called for a radical shift in the power
dynamic; in his view, students should guide their teachers in the
adoption and use of technology.12
Some have questioned the appropriateness of ‘virtual’ experiences
for young people.13 Several researchers have also suggested that there
is no clear evidence that these environments add value to young
people’s learning and have emphasized that experience with
other media does not demonstrate significant effects on learning.14

10 Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, 1982,

http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Coverpage.html.
11 Ferguson, ‘How to Win a War.’
12 Mark Prensky, Digital Game-Based Learning (New York: McGraw-Hill
Education, 2001).
13 Fred Brooks, ‘Virtual Reality in Education: Promise and Reality panel
statement,’ Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International
Symposium (VRAIS ’98), 208; Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The
Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press,
1986).
14 Herb Brody, ‘Video Games That Teach?’ Technology Review (Nov/Dec 1993),
51–7; Richard Clark, ‘Media Will Never Influence Learning,’ Educational
Technology Research and Development 42, no. 2 (1994): 21–9.
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 309

More recent research, however, suggests the opposite – that games

may be effective tools for learning.15
The emerging theory on games for learning has been built on
several pillars, but few are more foundational than Seymour Papert’s
notion of ‘constructionism.’16 It contends that knowledge is not
deposited by the teacher into the student – what Paolo Freire termed
‘banking’17 – but rather constructed in the mind of the learner. Tying
insights into ‘constructionism’ with conclusions drawn from other
fields of study, literary theorist James Paul Gee has articulated a
unifying theory of how games support learning. Drawing on cognitive
psychology, Gee notes that good learning is situated within the world;
drawing on literary studies, he shows that good learning is tied to
social practices; drawing on education, and especially the research of
Papert,18 he shows that good learning involves making connections to
knowledge already acquired.19 Summing up, he contends that good
video games provide excellent forums for learning because a player
experiences the world in a novel way, joins others and works with a
new group, develops resources for problem solving, and views the

15 See, for instance, Kurt Squire and Sasha Barab, ‘‘Replaying History: Engaging
Urban Underserved Students in Learning World History through Computer
Simulation Games,’’ Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference of the
Learning Sciences, ed. Y.B. Kafai, W.A. Sandoval, N. Enyedy, A.S. Nixon, and
F. Herrera, (Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 2004), 505–12. Tom Boyle, Design for
Multimedia Learning (London: Prentice Hall, 1997); Meredith Bricken and
Chris Byrne, ‘Summer Students in Virtual Reality: A Pilot Study,’ Virtual
Reality: Applications and Explorations, 178–84 (New York: Academic
Publications, 1993); Shazia Mumtaz, ‘Children’s Enjoyment and Perception of
Computer Use in the Home and the School,’ Computers and Education 36
(2001): 347–62; Maria Roussos, Andrew Johnson, Thomas Moher, Jason
Leigh, Christina Vasilakis, and Craig Barnes, ‘Learning and Building Together
in an Immersive Virtual World,’ Presence 8 (1999): 247–63; Mike Scaife and
Yvonne Rogers, ‘Informing the Design of a Virtual Environment to Support
Learning in Children,’ International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 55
(1991): 115–43; M.R. Thompson, J.D. Maxwell, and P.M. Dew, ‘Interactive
Virtual Prototyping,’ Eurographics (1999): 107–20; Maria Virvou, George
Katsionis, and Konstantinos Manos, ‘Combining Software Games with
Education: Evaluation of Its Educational Effectiveness,’ Educational Technology
& Society 8 (2005): 54–65.
16 Idit Harel and Seymour Papert, Constructionism (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991).
17 Paulo Freire and Myra Bergman, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1970).
18 Harel and Papert, Constructionism.
19 James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and
Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
 310 The Canadian Historical Review

environment (in the game, but in other domains as well) as a design

space that can be engaged and manipulated.
While Gee has pointed to the potential for games to build
knowledge, they are also effective at problematizing knowledge.
Playing games is a cyclical process of formulating hypothesis (‘What
happens if . . .?’), testing (‘I’ll try this’), and revision (‘Well, that didn’t
work!’). This is what is called cognitive disequilibrium, the process where
the learner readjusts her expectations in light of new information
(resolution). Feedback in a game world is often immediate, allowing
the cycle to begin again. As Van Eck points out, ‘Games thrive as
teaching tools when they create a continuous cycle of cognitive
disequilibrium and resolution . . . while also allowing the player to be
successful.’20 The question then is how to create this virtuous circle for
teaching history, its methods, and its problems.

HISTORIANS AND HERITAGE

The first task is to convince ourselves that the project is worthy of our
attention. Developing history computer games can strike us as too
popular and too presentist. These kinds of discussions have occurred in
our profession before, though in a different context. In the 1980s,
British academic historians had criticized heritage theme parks, open-
air museums, and historical re-enactments (that is, simulations of the
historic past, in non-digital form), all of which were enjoyed by the
general public. In the view of the critics, these environments trivialized
the past, providing a package holiday substitute for the real thing. These
were not diversions; they were symptoms of national and intellectual
decay. In Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel (who founded the History
Workshop movement at Ruskin College, Oxford) countered that ‘history
has always been a hybrid form of knowledge syncretizing past and
present, memory and myth, the written word and the spoken word.’21
She was a ‘promiscuous’ mistress, and all the better for being so.
Part of the problem, he pointed out, was historians’ obsession with
text. Samuel took specific aim at academic historians who continued
‘to give a privileged place to the written word, to hold the visual
(and the verbal) in comparatively low esteem, and to regard imagery as
a kind of trap.’22 Samuel suggested that historians who were
intellectually ‘offended’ by heritage were possibly offended by its lack

20 Van Eck, ‘Digital Game-Based Learning,’ 20.

21 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994), 1:259.
22 Ibid., 268.
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 311

of fixedness, but it was just this vitality of heritage that appealed

to Samuel. The activity of heritage, and the way it engaged people,
made it a legitimate kind of historical discourse. ‘There is no reason to
think that people are more passive when looking at old photographs or
film footage, handling a museum exhibit, following a local history trail,
or even buying a historical souvenir, than when reading a book,’ he
said. ‘The pleasures of the gaze – scopophilia, as it is disparagingly
called – are different in kind from those of the written word but not
necessarily less taxing on historical reflection and thought.’23
David Lowenthal has made a similar point. Professor emeritus in the
Department of Geography at University College, London, he has been
deeply interested in exploring the roots of our fascination with the past
and understanding why we seek the presence of the past in so many
ways and places. These are major themes in his books, Possessed by the
Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998) and The Past
Is a Foreign Country (1985). The title of the latter book is taken from the
opening lines of L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between (1953): ‘The past
is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’24 Lowenthal
considers the various vehicles we use to reach the past, including
historical scholarship, memory, preservation, rumination, and creative
anachronisms. He defines history as a discipline that ‘explores and
explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time,’ and contrasts it with
heritage, an activity that ‘clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with
present purposes.’25 Lowenthal sees value in both history and heritage,
and while they serve different purposes, both are created in the present.
As a result, history is protean: ‘What it is, what people think it should
be, and how it is told and heard all depend on perspectives peculiar to
particular times and places.’26 He concludes that, while the past is a
foreign country, it is at the same time ‘assimilated in ourselves, and
resurrected into an ever-changing present.’27
Two American historians, Roy Rosenzweig (George Mason
University) and David Thelen (Indiana University), have revealed the
many ways in which Americans assimilate both history and heritage.28

23 Ibid., 273.
24 Leslie Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: Penguin Books, 1997).
25 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), xv.
26 David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 105.
27 Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 412.
28 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of
History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
 312 The Canadian Historical Review

In a survey that borrowed methodologies from the social sciences, the

authors found that ‘ordinary people’ in the United States were
fascinated by the past, but they did not like ‘history’ as the subject was
taught in schools and colleges.
Rosenzweig and Thelen discovered that Americans engaged with
the past in a multitude of ways, such as scrapbooking, compiling
genealogies, collecting antiques, restoring vintage cars, visiting historic
battlefields, and talking to elders. The authors discovered that Native
Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and white
Americans valued different elements of the past in different ways;
similarly, they found that age and gender were important variables in
determining people’s history-related interests and activities. But nearly
everyone in their sample of 1,500 people felt ‘more connected to the
past’ by visiting a museum or watching a movie or television program
about the past than they did by studying history in school or college.
Moreover, when asked their opinions on the ‘trustworthiness of
sources of information about the past,’ respondents overwhelmingly
ranked museum curators and personal accounts from their grand-
parents above university history professors.29
Rosenzweig and Thelen concluded there was a need for a new style of
historical culture. They deduced that people want ‘to get as close to the
[historical experience] as possible’ and want ‘to use the past on their own
terms.’30 Thelen suggested that academic historians move towards a
‘participatory culture’ where individuals ‘would explore whether things
from the past were like or unlike the present,’ and see ‘the sources of
[historical] change or continuity.’ ‘By revisiting or reliving the past,
[participants] could reinterpret it as they unearthed new sources but also
as they experienced new needs in the present,’ Thelen observed. The
historical culture he envisioned ‘would be one with many levels, uses,
points of access, recognitions.’31 Rosenzweig saw considerable promise
in new digital technologies – his last book, Digital History, championed
the potential for historical resources on the World Wide Web.32

29 In Canada, researchers are undertaking a similar study of Canadians’ views of

their pasts. More information can be found at http://www.canadiansandtheir
pasts.ca.
30 Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past, 189.
31 David Thelen, ‘Afterthoughts – David Thelen: A Participatory Historical
Culture,’ 1998, http://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/afterdave.html.
32 Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering,
Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 313

One of the first steps has been taken with the digital recreation
of historic places and landscapes in three dimensions or ‘virtual
environments.’ In Canada, historian Léon Robichaud, at the Université
de Sherbrooke, blazed a trail with his work on Old Montreal, and
Virtual Savanvah. Brock University’s John Bonnett, another early
innovator, recreated streetscapes of historic cities including Ottawa as
part of his ‘3D Virtual Buildings Project.’ Several years later, the Pierre
Berton Award–winning Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History
project,33 led by Peter Gossage of the Université de Sherbrooke, John
Lutz of the University of Victoria, and Ruth Sandwell of the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, developed
more game-like 3-D environments, in mysteries such as ‘Torture and
Truth,’ and ‘Explosion on the Kettle Valley Railway Line.’ Especially
notable is the mystery ‘Where is Vinland?’ – an ambitious immersive
environment created by the Visualization Design Institute at Sheridan
College, which allows users to explore the 1000 CE Viking settlement
at L’Anse aux Meadows, painstakingly recreated from detailed
archaeological evidence.
Having established these three-dimensional virtual worlds, histor-
ians can begin to consider the manner in which we can use them to
foster the participatory culture that Rosenzweig and Thelen envi-
sioned. Progenitors are already emerging, though with little input
from historians, in places such as Second Life, a commercially
successful online virtual world that has been billed as ‘even better
than the real thing.’ Anyone can join, create an avatar, and build a life,
engaging in social relationships and developing lucrative careers. Open
to the public since 2003, in July 2008 it claimed fifteen million
residents (though not all of them active).34 There is nothing to ‘do’ in
Second Life except what you want to do (a fact that sometimes drives
new users away). Educators have been flocking to this world in droves,
because this lack of restriction allows them to create their own
immersive simulacra and to write their own rules.35
Second Life has been home to several historically themed environ-
ments, such as Caledon, a steampunk rendition of Victorian England,
and Sigil, a virtual town set in late-nineteenth-century Arizona. In Sigil,
participants could dress their characters in period costume at the

33 ‘Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History,’ http://www.canadianmyster-

ies.ca.
34 Linden Labs, ‘Second Life’ (2003), http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_
stats.php.
35 Michael Rymaszewski, Wagner James Au, Cory Ondrejka, and Richard Platel,
Second Life: The Official Guide (Indianapolis: Wiley Science, 2007), 318–24.
 314 The Canadian Historical Review

general store, or engage in town hall meetings with other virtual

citizens. How the American West, and the past, was represented in the
environment depended on the individual participants, and the results
would have left many a historian perplexed. Nevertheless, what Sigil
may have lacked in scholarly rigour, it gained in participation, and
in this way it demonstrated the potential for historical role-playing in
online worlds.
Several Canadian researchers and developers have brought together
three-dimensional virtual landscapes and participatory engagement
and tested their potential in educational online environments.
In Quebec, Découverte de la Nouvelle France recreated a small village
in New France. Designed as an in-class and online program that would
appeal to both teachers and students, it balanced a blend of online
communication tools and offline research and role-playing tasks.
The virtual villagers of New France began building lives, weaving their
own stories, and linking their lives to local village history. As the
number of participants grew, so too did the complexity of the lives of
the villagers, their community interactions, and later, the shape of the
town.36 Also in Quebec, another more specifically game-like historical
environment resulted from a collaboration among Kevin Kee at Brock
University, Jamshid Beheshti and Andrew Large at McGill University,
and a Montreal-based private-sector partner. The resulting virtual
environment, A Journey to the Past: A Quebec Village in 1890 / Un voyage
dans le passé: Un village québécois à la fin du 19ième siècle, recreated
late-nineteenth-century Saint-Hilaire, Quebec.37 This environment
comprises characters such as a priest and inn-keeper, who ask
questions, respond to the user’s answers, and solicit the user’s help
in completing tasks.
As these world-building technologies become more accessible,
researchers may take up the challenge of crafting digital historical
environments and face the same quandaries as Brian Moore’s fictional
character, Anthony Maloney. The protagonist of The Great Victorian
Collection (1975), which won the Governor-General’s Award for
Fiction, Maloney is a twenty-nine-year-old assistant professor in the

36 Offered to select schools only, ‘Découverte de la Nouvelle France’ was designed

by teacher and Les Technologies ÉVI founder Jean-Yves Frechette. ‘Découverte
de la Nouvelle France’ was the first in a planned series that included the
Manitoba Metis and the Acadiens, but none of these programs were ever
commercialized.
37 ‘A Journey to the Past: A Quebec Village in 1890 / Un voyage dans le passé:
Un village québécois à la fin du 19ième siècle’ (Montreal: Virtuel Age, 2006),
http://www.envi-iven.com.
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 315

Department of History at McGill University. Returning from a

scholarly conference at Berkeley, he stops at a motel in Carmel,
California. That night, he dreams of things Victorian – something
that, Moore tells us, ‘was not, given his background, an improbable
conjunction’ (Maloney’s doctoral dissertation had focused on Victorian
aesthetics, a subject that occupied much of his research and
teaching).38 When Maloney awakens the next morning, he finds that
the motel parking lot has been transformed into a crowded, open-air
market, with a maze of narrow lanes lined with stalls and exhibits.
These contain an extraordinary collection of Victorian artifacts, from
toys to industrial machinery to the crystal fountain that had been
the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851. All of the artifacts are
pristine, and all appear to be real. Art historians and museum curators
arrive from London and New York to authenticate the collection and
conclude that the artifacts are not replicas or copies. Rather, every
object in the collection has somehow been ‘reproduced in a manner
indistinguishable from its original.’39
Historians can now work in virtual environments, and, like
Maloney, watch their research spring to life in three-dimensional
space. Their focus will be on the user’s experience in that space and the
creation of a willing suspension of disbelief while immersed in the
virtual world. If the historian’s research addresses the early-twentieth-
century suffrage movement in Winnipeg, for instance, the history
simulation could force male players to don the persona, or avatar, of
Nellie McClung and her colleagues. Their goal might be to band
together in a campaign against the government of Sir Rodmond Roblin
(played by female players), who refused women’s suffrage. Those who
visit these environments may marvel that they are, to borrow the
marketing slogan of Second Life, ‘even better than the real thing.’ The
conversations (and inevitably, the disagreements) that follow will not
signal the trivialization of the past; they will instead herald the arrival
of a new style of participatory historical culture.

GAMES AND HISTORICAL RESEARCH: GIS

In addition to supporting teaching and learning, computer-mediated

historical environments may benefit historians by providing new
avenues for historical scholarship. Creating these environments

38 Brian Moore, The Great Victorian Collection (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1975), 3.
39 Ibid., 46.
 316 The Canadian Historical Review

necessarily involves a focus on space, and how to fill it. Currently, the
space is built using game engines, such as the Unreal engine, and
filled with characters or objects developed with modelling tools such as
3D Studio Max. In the future, however, we may be able to build
these environments in other ways and couple them with other tools,
such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and develop new ways
to analyze and represent information. In its simplest form, GIS is a way
of linking attribute data (information relating to people, events,
and activities) with spatial data (which relates to points on the Earth).
Geographers, social scientists, and resource industry professionals
have been using GIS for many years, but the concept is not yet
widely used by social historians. But that is changing, thanks in
part to Anne Kelly Knowles, a geographer at Middlebury College in
Vermont.
Her edited collection of essays demonstrates the value of GIS to
historians, and how historians ‘envision’ history.40 In her introduction
Knowles explains how GIS can represent and map changes across time.
The contributors to the book, who include historical sociologists,
geographers, and environmental historians, show how historical maps
can be digitized and geo-referenced to create 3-D representations of
time/space. This book is the first collection of essays to apply GIS
methodologies to the study of history, and it offers compelling reasons
for historians to think spatially and digitally.
To date, most GIS models focus on functionality, in contrast to the
visually rich 3-D environments one finds in A Journey to the Past: A
Quebec Village in 1890 / Un voyage dans le passé: Un village québécois à la
fin du 19ième siècle. Combining the two, however, we may build both
data-rich and experience-rich 3-D environments with historical
information about the people who actually resided there. In his
essay ‘Computing and the Historical Imagination,’ William Thomas
contemplates

extending historical GIS . . . to recreate ‘lost landscapes’ in ways that fully

allow readers to move and navigate through them. These four-dimensional
models might restore buildings, roads, and dwellings to historic landscapes
as well as the legal, economic, social, and religious geographies within
them. Networks of information, finance, trade, and culture, might also find
expression in these models. Readers might do more than query these

40 Anne Kelly Knowles, Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (Redlands, CA:
ESRI, 2002).
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 317

datasets; they might interact with them too, taking on roles and following
paths they could not predict but cannot ignore.41

Creation of these ‘lost landscapes’ is already underway, as historians

augment the real world with data depicting people and places of the
past. Combining GIS and the Internet, and connecting these to mobile
phones, they are creating location-based ‘hotspots’ that trigger audio or
video content to the screens of the mobile phone. This technology is
most famously being used at the Tower of London, where the visitor,
equipped with a mobile phone, has to ‘help’ famous (virtual) prisoners
of the tower to escape. Along the way, the visitor is presented with the
same amount of historic material traditionally delivered in a guided
tour. But instead of listening to a historical interpreter, the user
uncovers information through exploration and discovery, becoming
immersed in the landscape of sixteenth-century politics, intrigue, and
daily life.42

ONE METHODOLOGY FOR HISTORY GAMING: MICRO-HISTORY

Researching and communicating history in these kinds of 3-D

environments will necessarily force us to focus on the local and the
particular. Fortunately, historians have a school of doing history to
guide us in this project. The technology of games and 3-D presentation
has finally caught up to a historical method that has gained popularity
over the last thirty years and has awaited the new media to fully take
shape. Micro-history is a historical approach, partly method, partly
theory, that at its most basic says that we can ask big questions in small
places and in so doing find answers that we did not see before.
The micro-history approach has its origins in the work of French,
German, and Italian scholars. It is most closely identified with Carlo
Ginzburg, whose 1976 book The Cheese and the Worms43 is still
regarded as one of the best of its kind. Micro-history takes a range of

41 William G. Thomas III, ‘Computing and the Historical Imagination,’ A

Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John
Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/
companion.
42 The technology is available from http://www.mscapers.com. Information about
the ‘Prisoner Escape from the Tower of London’ game can be found at
http://www.mscapers.com/msin/ABA0000023.
43 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-
Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) (First
published in Italian as Il formaggio e I vermi, 1976).
 318 The Canadian Historical Review

forms from the ethnographic to the statistical, but in its different

manifestations believes that by reducing the scale of study, and
increasing the magnification, details and patterns can be observed that
are invisible at the macro level. Since knowledge is not scalable across
space and time, explanations that seem to hold for large populations
often break down when small populations are examined. Since people
ultimately experience life in small communities (even in large cities we
interact with relatively few individuals), explanations that do not work
at the level of the individual, family, and community are likely not
describing causality at more abstract levels of observation.
This new approach maps onto the digital dissemination technolo-
gies of 3-D worlds and games. First, micro-history disrupts the long
narratives of history and presents histories in episodes, often centred
on an intriguing event associated with gripping stories. Although the
approach allows the asking of general questions, it does not expect the
answers to be applicable in other places or times. There is a strong
emphasis on context and the unique response of people in different
circumstances to common pressures.
In the words of Homi Bhabha, the emphasis on the ‘event’ unsettles
the usual academic practice ‘whereby incidents are seen as instances or
examples of a more general, authoritative metalanguage. Indeed, a
more productive discussion of the event is one that neither subsumes
it into theory nor appropriates it by practice, but allows it to maintain
its own performative authority and interrogates the conditions under
which knowledges, image, and discourse are socially and pedagogically
authorized.’44 Such events might be the famous conversation
Ginzburg’s miller Mennochio had with the Inquisition about how
the earth and the heavens were like cheese riddled with worm holes
(which led to his execution for heresy), or Natalie Zemon Davis’s story
of the return of Martin Guerre, who returns home after years at war to
find that another man, claiming to be him, has taken his place.45
Similarly, computer games lend themselves to the ‘episodic.’ And
when computer-mediated micro-histories focus on an intriguing event,
such as the murder of the black man William Robinson on Salt Spring
Island in 1868,46 they differ from the traditional narrative in that they

44 Homi Bhabha, Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1994), 271.
45 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983).
46 John Lutz and Ruth Sandwell, ‘Who Killed William Robinson?’ Great Unsolved
Mysteries in Canadian History (1997), http://www.canadianmysteries.ca/sites/
robinson/indexen.html.
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 319

often explore the event from a variety of perspectives. These forms of

digital publication allow the interweaving of multiple narratives in
ways that the book does not. Bringing a small community or group of
historical actors under study invariably reveals a network of relation-
ships. The digital universe is in its nature a web of links, supporting
the presentation of networked social relationships in a way that print
technology cannot.
And that’s another key feature of micro-history – the way that it
foregrounds the researcher. According to Giovanni Levi, ‘In micro-
history . . . the researcher’s point of view becomes an intrinsic part of
the account . . . The reader is involved in a sort of dialogue and
participates in the whole process of constructing the historical
argument.’47 The digital technologies lend themselves to this dialogue
and the transparency of the research process. Instead of a simple
footnote, one’s whole research database can be linked to one’s micro-
history. Instead of a monologue, computer environments, especially
those delivered via the Internet, invite dialogue; in place of solitary
research, these support collaborative research and multiple voices. In
place of a linear plot, these accommodate multiple, overlapping
pathways of causation. It asks us to think about relationships.
Even more fundamentally, computer games offer the opportunity for
the reader/player to take some control of her reading experience. The
form of the technology invites, even urges, readers to solve problems in
a way that the book does not. In the case of Who Killed William
Robinson, cited above, or the pioneering CD Making History: Louis Riel
and the North-West Rebellion of 1885,48 one can sift through a digital
archive of documents such as newspaper stories, private correspon-
dence, and photographs. Researchers from a range of disciplines,
using various methodologies, have interpreted the documents in a
variety of ways and have come to different conclusions.
The ideal computer game for exploring micro-history might be cast
in the form of a role-playing game, where the student takes on the role
of Martin Guerre, trying to establish himself and defeat the imposter.
This need not be a graphics-intensive environment. Instead, it could be
implemented as an interactive fiction (a kind of text-adventure), where
the protagonist – ‘I’ – is the player. This would allow for simulation of a
different kind, where the player’s mind paints the canvas, and the

47 Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory,’ in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed.

Peter Burke (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1991), 11.
48 Making History: Louis Riel and the North-West Rebellion of 1885 (Montreal:
National Film Board of Canada, 1997) CD-ROM.
 320 The Canadian Historical Review

historical documents may be presented in a manner most familiar to

historians, while also creating a sense of immersion. An interactive
fiction is a performance of the narrative, and it would be different
for each player, depending on the choices made during play.

FOCUSING ON THE STUDENT

As a result, a student develops her own narrative – her own reading –

of a history. As Keith Jenkins points out, this is what we should
be encouraging in our students.49 The past is gone – it is a foreign
country, to use the words of Lowenthal – and history is created
according to what the historian considers to be important in the
present. But one does not need a PhD, according to Jenkins, to act
like a historian; students can also craft their own narrative explana-
tions. Jenkins provides an intellectual foundation on which to build a
pedagogy for learning history, in which the student is a writer of
history. As Chad Gaffield observed from his own experience in
university lecture halls, students want to get their hands dirty in the
doing of history. Evaluations at the end of a course in which Gaffield
had invited his audience to help him interpret trends that he had
identified in census data ‘revealed how the students longed to look at
historical evidence themselves, and, with my collaboration, to discover
patterns, hypothesize about thought and behaviour, and then construct
interpretations that had meaning for them.’50
The opportunity to examine evidence and construct interpretations
has already been shown to be one of the most engaging aspects of
history gaming. A 2004 study of Civilization III showed that the game,
when used in schools, supported students in replaying history
according to their identity and motivations: African-American
students, for instance, directed their civilizations to invade Europe
and enslave Caucasians.51 Along the way, students who had shown
little previous interest in history interrogated the historical record to
see how they could accomplish their goals. At Brock University,
Kee tested a modification of Civilization III – The History Canada
Game52 – to similar effect. The students, aged thirteen to seventeen,
were campers at Youth University, a summer enrichment camp.

49 Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (New York: Routledge, 1991).

50 Chad Gaffield, ‘The Blossoming of Canadian Historical Research: Implications
for Educational Policy and Content,’ in To the Past: History Education, Public
Memory and Citizenship in Canada, ed. Ruth Sandwell (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2006), 94.
51 Squire and Barab, ‘Replaying History.’
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 321

Though they viewed history as inherently boring, they spent a week

contesting Canada’s colonization, taking on the roles, for instance, of
the Aboriginal peoples in an attempt to thwart the Europeans. Games
such as these can provide opportunities for students to replay history,
and in the process, craft new and highly personal historical narratives.
Games designed specifically for learning can build on the same
principle, placing the student in the role of a researcher. To cite but one
example, Jeffrey Clark and Brian Slator, at North Dakota State
University’s Department of Archaeology, have used text-based interac-
tion among users in a 3-D space to create the ‘Virtual Archaeologist
Educational Environment,’53 where students learn the methods
of archaeology on a simulated excavation on the village of Like-
a-Fishhook. Being able to ‘adopt’ the persona of an archaeologist
makes the experience richer than trying to learn methodology from a
textbook.
If historians are to engage in similar exercises of game develop-
ment, we will need to work in concert with colleagues in education.
Our focus will have to move beyond the delivery of content to include
its reception by audiences with a multitude of learning abilities
and styles. As Piaget and Inhelder point out, we must study student
information-seekers as a community with cognitive abilities and
affective needs that differ from our own.54 Moreover, they point out,
young people themselves cannot be understood as a homogeneous
community: it is necessary to explore the specific abilities and needs of
young people at various developmental stages if we are to elaborate
sophisticated user behaviour models.
Rather than applying the conclusions of these studies to the
production of history-learning games, we may find ourselves including
our students in game development. The work of educational
researcher Alison Druin is apposite here; Druin and her team have
developed and refined models for working with young people in
intergenerational teams, to design technologies for student use.
Her ‘Cooperative Inquiry’ model demonstrates how young people
can play an active role from the outset in the design process.55

52 ‘The History Canada Game’ was produced by Toronto developer Bitcasters.

Information about the game can be found at http://www.historicanada.com/.
53 ‘Virtual Archaeologist Educational Environment: Like-a-fishhook/Fort Berthold
Reconstruction’ (2003) http://fishhook.ndsu.edu.
54 Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child (New York: Basic
Books, 1969).
55 Alison Druin, ‘The Role of Children in the Design of New Technology,’
Behaviour and Information Technology 21, no. 1 (2002): 1–25.
 322 The Canadian Historical Review

She points out that adults need to work closely with young people
if their aim is to produce technologies that other students will use
effectively. Druin’s colleagues, Jamshid Beheshti and Andrew Large,
have extended the application of this and other models to high school
and undergraduate students.56
Models for this kind of work in history already exist. Roland Case,
through ‘The Critical Thinking Consortium’ (TC2) at the University of
British Columbia, is building a body of research and practice that
explores how students, from the primary to undergraduate level, can
become engaged in the art of doing history. At the University of
Manitoba, Shawn Graham helped students use the scenario-building
tools included in Civilization IV to explore counterfactuals and produce
alternative histories. At Brock University, Kevin Kee teaches under-
graduate courses in which students build history computer games
‘from scratch.’ And conclusions from related teaching and research
continue to be published under the banner of the ‘Simulating History
Research Program,’ of which this essay forms a part.

DO GAMES WORK?

But do these strategies work? How effective are these technologies in

teaching students about the content and practices of history? Data so
far have been more anecdotal than definitive; nevertheless, they point
to the potential for games in history. Kurt Squire’s PhD dissertation
(2004) using Civilization III with high school students showed that
students used the game as a tool for asking questions of history in a
way that they had not done before. Squire’s conclusions are in keeping
with those from a growing body of literature: multimedia fosters
engagement and facilitates critical thinking.57

56 Andrew Large, Valerie Nesset, Jamshid Beheshti, and Leanne Bowler,

‘‘‘Bonded Design’’: A Novel Approach to Intergenerational Information
Technology Design,’ Library and Information Science Research 28, no. 1 (2006):
64–82.
57 David Hicks, Peter Doolittle, and John K. Lee, ‘Social Studies Teachers’ Use of
Classroom-Based and Web-Based Historical Primary Sources,’ Theory and
Research in Social Education 32, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 213–47; Cynthia Hynd-
Shanahan, Jodi Patrick Holschuh, and Betty P. Hubbard, ‘Thinking Like a
Historian: College Students’ Reading of Multiple Historical Documents,’
Journal of Literary Research 36, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 141–71; J.W. Saye and
T. Brush, ‘Scaffolding Critical Reasoning about History and Social Issues in
Multimedia-Supported Learning Environments,’ Educational Technology
Research and Development 50, no. 3 (2002): 77–96; Robert A. Scheider,
‘Improving Student Achievement by Infusing a Web-Based Curriculum in
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 323

Quantitative studies of the effectiveness of games for learning are

underway, though conclusions from this research are still far off. In
the United States, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
(through its Digital Media and Learning Program), and the Federation
of American Scientists (FAS) have been especially supportive. The FAS
2005 Summit of Education Games reached many of the conclusions
for science that we have reached here for history, and called for a deep
research program focused on evaluating the impact of games for
learning.
Just as importantly, the FAS highlighted the need for appropriate
assessment tools to measure the effectiveness of educational games.
It warned that assessment must be approached cautiously, because the
‘higher-order knowledge and skills [learned in games] are typically not
revealed by tests of facts, or standards of learning-types of examina-
tions.’ Games for learning often place the ‘player’ in the role of a
professional, such as a historian or scientist, and as a result ‘tend to
blur the line between education and training, as they involve learning-
by-doing,’ which typical tests measure poorly.58 Tests are artificial
constructs; the choices of the researcher will determine what is being
assessed. As the FAS points out, ‘If assessments are not measuring the
right skills and knowledge – the higher order skills that games may be
able to develop – then the use of educational games and simulations
may be viewed as having poor efficiency. In reality, the assessment is
designed to measure something other than what the game is designed
to teach.’59
What do historians need to measure? In order to properly assess the
effectiveness of games for learning in our domain, we must first
determine the goals of history learning. We need to think about what it
is that we want to achieve, and then test if games help us realize these
goals. Fortunately for our purposes, the epistemology of history and
history education has been the subject of public discussion for the last
two decades in Canada, the United States, and Western Europe. Some
of the discourse has focused on content or ‘first order knowledge’ and
of transmitting to students the substance of history. Another thread

Global History,’ Journal of Research on Technology in Education 36, no. 1

(Fall 2003): 77–93; A. Shapiro and D. Niederhauser, ‘Learning from Hypertext:
Research Issues and Findings,’ in Handbook of Research on Educational
Communications and Technology, ed. D.H. Jonassen, 2nd ed., 605–20
(Mahaway, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004), 605–20.
58 Federation of American Scientists, ‘Harnessing the Power of Video Games for
Learning,’ Summit on Educational Games (2006): 42.
59 Ibid., 43.
 324 The Canadian Historical Review

has addressed the necessity of supplementing content with ‘second-

order knowledge,’ which moves students beyond the ‘facts of history’
to an understanding of the skills of historical practice – generating,
corroborating, representing, and assessing interpretations of the past.
This kind of history teaching gives attention to the concepts, methods,
and vocabulary required to do history and underscores to students the
challenge of knowing the past.60 Peter Seixas, the director of the
Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness at the University of
British Columbia, has developed a series of benchmarks to measure
learning of this ‘second-order knowledge.’61
How then might we measure the effectiveness of a history game for
learning? Kee and Large, with their colleague Jamshid Beheshti, have
designed – though not yet implemented – one such test, drawing
on the methodology employed by Lee and Ashby in their ‘Concepts
of History and Teaching Approaches’ study.62 Students at the outset of
the Kee, Large, and Beheshti study would complete a biographical
questionnaire and a pretest focused on history content and practices
relevant to the game. Pencil-and-paper responses would be collected
across different, self-standing task-sets. All evaluation sessions would
be captured as real-time recordings, capturing the dialogue and
thinking-aloud that goes on during game-play. The students would be
allotted a fixed amount of time to evaluate the game, but additional
time would be deliberately made available for the students to keep
playing if they so chose (allowing the researcher to assess their degree
of engagement). At the end of each evaluation, students would
complete a post-test of questions in order to measure their knowledge
of the history content of the game. In addition, students would be
asked to complete a series of exercises: putting an x in boxes, drawing
arrows, and ordering statements (for instance, choosing the most
significant historical events (Seixas’s first benchmark), or arranging a
series of statements in chronological order to show continuity and

60 Tom Holt, Thinking Historically: Narrative, Imagination, and Understanding

(New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1990); Sam Wineburg,
Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2001).
61 Peter Seixas, Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: A Framework for Assessment in
Canada (Vancouver: Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness,
University of British Columbia, 2006).
62 Peter Lee and Rosalyn Ashby, ‘Progression in Historical Understanding Ages
7–14,’ in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International
Perspectives, ed. P. Stearns, P. Seixas, and S.S. Wineburg (New York: New York
University Press, 2000), 199–222.
 Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming 325

change (Seixas’s third benchmark). These exercises would measure the

students’ understanding of the practices of history. The data gathered
in the questionnaires and tests would then be available for quantitative
analysis. It remains to be seen, of course, whether such an evaluation
would provide valid data on the effectiveness of games in the learning
process. As our understanding of the potential and limitations of
technology evolves, new methodologies may emerge.

CONCLUSION

Conclusions from these studies will necessarily affect our ever-evolving

view of good history education. The contemporary approach to history
teaching and learning has its roots in the late 1980s, and the
transformation of history education from what Chad Gaffield calls a
‘model based on passive learning to a discovery-and-construction-
of-knowledge model based on active learning.’63 Not everyone was
impressed with the result: Jack Granatstein surveyed the history
education landscape in 1998, noted the absence of grand national
narratives, and declared that Canadian history was dead, ‘or perhaps on
life support.’64 The distinction mattered little to Granatstein, and less,
he contended, to most Canadians.
Ten years after his lament, history is alive and well; it just looks a bit
different. Canadians continue to read about the past – witness the
presence of history on the bestseller lists. They continue to watch
history, as evidenced by the vitality of History Television or Canal
Historia. But, in addition to engaging history in these established
forms, they are also playing Civilization IV.
Students, for their part, continue to read textbooks and watch films
but are spending increasing amounts of time on the World Wide Web,
in virtual environments and games. And as the technology becomes
more affordable, and increasingly reliable, students’ screen time will
lengthen. The challenge for educational institutions will be to marry
the collectivist learning inherent in old media, which saw all students
literally reading from the same page, to the individualist learning of
one student using one computer to explore the digital universe.
We hope that this essay has given us a foundation upon which to
engage this transformation. The world of computer games does not yet
provide us with a model for doing history in a creative, authentic,
authoritative way. We cannot point to any one game, method, or tool

63 Gaffield, ‘The Blossoming of Canadian Historical Research,’ 96.

64 J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998).
 326 The Canadian Historical Review

and say, ‘This is how one can teach history better than we have
done before.’ But then historians have not yet fully engaged the genre.
What we can point to today are elements of a new history that are
available but have not yet been combined, and challenge ourselves and
our colleagues to be part of the generation that changes how we do
history.
What can games do? Not everything, of course – these too have
limitations. But they can build on the same pleasures of the media of
‘heritage’ by providing player-learners the opportunities to create their
own narratives. Coupled with other new digital technologies, such as
GIS, they can incorporate historical data, providing new avenues for
representing and exploring history. They can also enable player-
learners to focus on ‘micro-histories’ that are episodic both in their
game play and their content. In the future, historians will continue to
write historical narratives, but they will also craft potential narratives
from which learners create their own experiences. Indeed, good
gaming may also incorporate the learner in the crafting of the game.
This will not be a replacement for reading; instead, it will offer a way to
bring students into further discussion and research. After all, why stop
at reading about ancient barbarian invasions when you can also
repulse them?

Acknowledgment: This research was made possible by funding from the

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.