Download to read offline
![What if people learn the wrong
history?
• Globe & Mail, Editorial, ‘Assassin’s Creed III video
game distorts history’ Nov 14 2012.
• “[…]Assassin’s Creed III is just a video game. But
given the dearth of history instruction in our
schools, it might be the only place that Canadian
young people are learning about the
Revolutionary War. At very least, they need to be
equipped to separate the Ameriphilia from the
facts.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/potsdam-131105110051-phpapp01/75/Toying-with-History-8-2048.jpg)
![marginalia in JFK Reloaded source
code
// —————————————————————
// Jackie cradling JFK before the money shot
// ——————————————————————
[ACTION]
<NAME>
JackieCradleJFK
<CONCERNED>
0
0](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/potsdam-131105110051-phpapp01/75/Toying-with-History-23-2048.jpg)
![The model code:
to go
ask romans
[
pass-the-word ; if somebody here hasn’t heard the idea, tell them!
move-forward ; then follow the route of the itinerary to somewhere else
]
update-plots
; plot the percentage who have now heard the idea
if everyone-heard-it = 100%
[stop]
; if everyone has heard it, stop the simulation
set ticks ticks + 1 ; update the clock.
end](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/potsdam-131105110051-phpapp01/75/Toying-with-History-36-2048.jpg)
More Related Content
Toying with History
- 1.
- 2. -or- What Sid Meier& Bill Murray Can Teach Us About the Past
- 3. In Three Acts 1.On playing games 2. On building games 3. On simulation
- 4. Drill ‘n’ kill.Just say no.
- 5. What makes fora good game?
- 6. 26 of the133 on this list with historical themes or settings (at my last count) sold > 1 million copies
- 7. We’re frightened byhistorical games
- 8. What if peoplelearn the wrong history? • Globe & Mail, Editorial, ‘Assassin’s Creed III video game distorts history’ Nov 14 2012. • “[…]Assassin’s Creed III is just a video game. But given the dearth of history instruction in our schools, it might be the only place that Canadian young people are learning about the Revolutionary War. At very least, they need to be equipped to separate the Ameriphilia from the facts.”
- 10.
- 12. But wait! They’reeducational!
- 13. , Sid Meier,& Kurt Squire
- 14. Writing history isevery bit as synthetic as this:
- 16. Even Wikipedia isa kind of MMO
- 17. 2. The realgame is in making the game
- 18. Year of theFour Emperors
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23. marginalia in JFKReloaded source code // ————————————————————— // Jackie cradling JFK before the money shot // —————————————————————— [ACTION] <NAME> JackieCradleJFK <CONCERNED> 0 0
- 24. Game & Worldbuildingsoftware with affinities to how we’ve always written history
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
- 29. 3. Toying withHistory via the Action Figure Curriculum
- 30. Toying with Historyvia Simulation • Agent based models as the ultimate playset • A formalized ‘let’s pretend’ • A making explicit in code of what we believe to have been true about some phenomenon in the past • An impartial referee to work through all of the unintended consequences
- 31. Raise some zombiesand set them to work.
- 32. Agent models: yourown personal Groundhog Day
- 33. Characteristics of an‘agent-based’ model
- 34.
- 35. The Antonine Itinerariesas Network A limite id est a vallo Praetorio usque mpm clvi A Bremenio Vindomora viiii Vinovia xviiii Cataractoni xxii Isurium xxiiii Eburacum, leg. vi victrix, xvii Derventione vii Delgovicia xiii Praetorio xxv
- 36. The model code: togo ask romans [ pass-the-word ; if somebody here hasn’t heard the idea, tell them! move-forward ; then follow the route of the itinerary to somewhere else ] update-plots ; plot the percentage who have now heard the idea if everyone-heard-it = 100% [stop] ; if everyone has heard it, stop the simulation set ticks ticks + 1 ; update the clock. end
- 37. Results – JMA19.1 Internal Dynamics of Provincial Information Diffusion Proportional of Time Steps "1" represents the initial number of time steps to get the message to 10% of the population 1 Iberia Britain Italy Three Gauls 0.1 1 21 41 61 % Who Have Heard the Message 81 101 121
- 38. PatronWorld A Rather MoreComplex Model Published as ‘Behaviour Space: Simulating Roman Social Life and Civil Violence’ in Digital Studies 1.2 (2009) http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/172/214
- 39. Why doesn't itall collapse sooner?
- 40. Begin with somethingfundamental: salutatio
- 41. Networks derived fromcentral Italian brick stamp data
- 42.
- 43. When Digital RomansGo Bad
- 44. When Digital RomansGo Bad Oppression Model runs where violence emerged Deaths
- 45. Final Word toPhil Connors: I am a God. Key bit is at 1.35 – 1.40
- 46. The Point. • Toyingwith history encourages love & mastery of the materials. • Toying with history allows for expressive, lively, and emotional engagement with contingency in the past. • Toying with history confronts the ways we share authority with algorithms to create knowledge.
- 47. • Toying withhistory forces us to be explicit about our ‘let’s pretend’ stories. • Toying with history allows us to explore the consequences of those stories. • It might be toying, but it’s anything but a…
- 49. Acknowledgements & thanks •Title slide image: “It belongs in a museum!” cc by Puuikibeach, Flickr • Shadows of War, Spanish civil war game screenshot, http://www.vandal.net/cgi-bin/vinot.pl?n=29250&i=5 • ‘Great game’ cartoon http://www.nuklearpower.com/2007/08/01/civilization -daydreams-failure/ • Zombie legos cc by Pedro Vezini,Flickr • Classic photos in LEGO c by Mike Stimpson http://www.mikestimpson.com • Thank you to Elizabeth Andrews, the College Libraries, and the Bregman Humanities Series for having me.
- 50.
Editor's Notes
- #12 Shadows of War – play the fascists, play the nationalists. Furor. ‘Educational!’ say the makersSome people may be shot, others may not be shot. But all of these are just dancing with the surface. The deeper import of games comes at the level of the rules.
- #13 1950s vibe: similar media furor over the role of a new lively art.
- #14 From abstract: “Players’ understandings are developed through cycles of performance within the gameworlds, which instantiate particular theories of the world (ideological worlds). Players develop new identities both through game play and through the gaming communities in which these identities are enacted. Thus research that examines game-based learning needs to account for both kinds of interactions within the game-world and in broader social contexts.” http://edr.sagepub.com/content/35/8/19
- #16 Writing history is a kind of game. Peers, levelling up, scores (citations)
- #20 Source of failure, success:The black box can be opened.Problem is: context of that action ... Beware the creepy treehouse.http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/the-creepy-treehouse-problem/23027
- #21 So what is the main game play mechanic in the game of being a history student? Close reading. I should’ve started with this. Instead of ‘go play’, I should’ve said, ‘let’s look under the hood’.
- #23 JFK Reloaded. Tradition of documentary; an art game; an exploration of the past, say supporters
- #24 Mark Sample: Their outwardly respectful “interactive reconstruction of John F. Kennedy’s assassination” is undone by inaccuracies and misspellings (Nelly for Nellie, “desparate”) but even more so by the explicitly sexual reframing of this traumatic event. It’s difficult to take JFK Reloaded as a serious exploration of history when under the hood it resembles an adolescent joke, preoccupied with sex and making light of death (“before he croaks”).
- #30 MacDougall: when we look at a simple, stylized cartoon, we can project our own identity on to it. We can see it as our self. This is why cartoon protagonists from Tintin to the Simpsons are so often drawn in less detail than their backgrounds or supporting casts. The abstraction of a Playmobil, or any tiny plastic representation of the human form, has a similar psychological effect. Henry Jenkins describes action figures as avatars that let children enter imagined spaces and try on various roles.He goes on: “I do believe the most mature kind of historical thinking only comes when we confront what we cannot understand or empathize with in the past. Still, in proscribing personal identification, play-acting, and make-believe, professional historians amputate a whole lot of what people want from their history.”
- #46 1:35: maybe he’s been around so long he knows everything.