I realise it’s a constructed example, but a videogame that would be even remotely accurate in modelling the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire strikes me as unrealistically ambitious. I would at any rate start out with Easter Island, which at least is a relatively small and closed system.
Another point is that, if you gave the player the same levers that the actual emperors had, it’s not completely clear that the fall could be prevented; but I suppose you could give points on doing better than historically.
Do we need a realistic simulation at all? I was thinking about how educational games could devolve into, instead of “guessing the teacher’s password”, “guessing the model of the game”… but is this a bad thing?
Sure, games about physics should be able to present a reasonably accurate model so that if you understand their model, you end up knowing something about physics… but with history:
actually, what’s the goal of studying history?
if the goal is to do well on tests, we already have a nice model for that, under the name of Anki. Of course, this doesn’t make things really fun, but still.
if we want to make students remember what happened and approximately why (that is, “should be able to write an essay about it”), we can make up an arbitrary, dumb and scripted thing, not even close to a real model, but exhibiting some mechanics that cover the actual reasons. (e.g. if one of the causes would have been “not enough well-trained soldiers”, then make “Level 8 Advanced Phalanx” the thing to build if you want to survive the next wave of attacks.)
if we’d like to see students discover general ideas throughout history, maybe build a game with the same mechanics across multiple levels? (and they also don’t need to be really accurate or realistic.)
and finally, if we want to train historians who could come up with new theories, or replacement emperors to be sent back in time to fix Rome… well, for that we would need a much better model indeed. Which we are unlikely to end up with. But do we need this level in most of the cases?
TL;DR by creating games with wildly unrealistic but textbook-accurate mechanics we are unlikely to train good emperors, but at least students would understand textbook things much more than the current “study, exam, forget” level.
Do we need a realistic simulation at all? I was thinking about how educational games could devolve into, instead of “guessing the teacher’s password”, “guessing the model of the game”… but is this a bad thing?
If what they learned about “evolution” comes from Pokemon, then yes.
Pokemon is an example of what an educational game which doesn’t care about realism could look like. People should be expected to learn the game, not the reality, and that will especially be the case when the game diverges from reality to make it more fun/interesting/memorable. If you decide that the most interesting way to get people to play an interactive version of Charles Darwin collecting specimens is to make him be a trainer that battles those specimens, then it’s likely they will remember best the battles, because those are the most interesting part.
One of the research projects I got to see up close was an educational game about the Chesapeake; if I remember correctly, children got to play as a fish that swum around and ate other fish (and all were species that actually lived in the Chesapeake). If you ate enough other fish, you changed species upwards; if you got eaten, you changed species downwards. In the testing they did afterwards, they discovered that many of the children had incorporated that into their model of how the Chesapeake worked; if a trout eats enough, it becomes a shark.
It’s true that you don’t need a model that lets you form new theories of the downfall of the Empire; but my point is that even the accepted textbook causes would be very hard to model in a way that combines fun, challenge, and even the faintest hint of realism. Take the theory that Rome was brought down partly by climate change; what’s the Emperor supposed to do about it? Impose a carbon tax on goats? Or the theory that it was plagues what did it. Again, what’s the lever that the player can pull here? Or civil wars; what exactly is the player going to do to maintain the loyalty of generals in far-off provinces? At least in this case we begin to approach something you can model in a game. For example, you can have a dynastic system and make family members more loyal; then you have a tradeoff between the more limited recruiting pool of your family, which presumably has fewer military geniuses, versus the larger but less loyal pool of the general population. (I observe in passing that Crusader Kings II does have a loyalty-modelling subsystem of this sort, and it works quite well for its purposes. Actually I would propose that as a history-teaching game you could do a lot worse than CKII. Kaj, you may want to look into it.) Again, suppose the issue was the decline of the smallholder class as a result of the vast slaveholding plantations; to even engage with this you need a whole system for modelling politics, so that you can model the resistance to reform among the upper classes who both benefit by slavery and run most of your empire. Actually this sounds like it could make a good game, but easy to code it ain’t.
It gets even more complicated when these causes interact. A large part of the reason for the decline of smallholders and the rise of vast manors using serfs (slavery was in decline during that period), was the fact that farmers had to turn to the lords for protection from barbarians and roving bandits. The reason there were a lot of marauding bandits is that the armies were to busy fighting over who the next emperor was going to be to do their job of protecting the populace.
Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while heavily stylized and quite frequently diverging from actual history, nevertheless do a pretty good job of conveying the basics of the time period and region.
I realise it’s a constructed example, but a videogame that would be even remotely accurate in modelling the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire strikes me as unrealistically ambitious. I would at any rate start out with Easter Island, which at least is a relatively small and closed system.
Another point is that, if you gave the player the same levers that the actual emperors had, it’s not completely clear that the fall could be prevented; but I suppose you could give points on doing better than historically.
Do we need a realistic simulation at all? I was thinking about how educational games could devolve into, instead of “guessing the teacher’s password”, “guessing the model of the game”… but is this a bad thing?
Sure, games about physics should be able to present a reasonably accurate model so that if you understand their model, you end up knowing something about physics… but with history:
actually, what’s the goal of studying history?
if the goal is to do well on tests, we already have a nice model for that, under the name of Anki. Of course, this doesn’t make things really fun, but still.
if we want to make students remember what happened and approximately why (that is, “should be able to write an essay about it”), we can make up an arbitrary, dumb and scripted thing, not even close to a real model, but exhibiting some mechanics that cover the actual reasons. (e.g. if one of the causes would have been “not enough well-trained soldiers”, then make “Level 8 Advanced Phalanx” the thing to build if you want to survive the next wave of attacks.)
if we’d like to see students discover general ideas throughout history, maybe build a game with the same mechanics across multiple levels? (and they also don’t need to be really accurate or realistic.)
and finally, if we want to train historians who could come up with new theories, or replacement emperors to be sent back in time to fix Rome… well, for that we would need a much better model indeed. Which we are unlikely to end up with. But do we need this level in most of the cases?
TL;DR by creating games with wildly unrealistic but textbook-accurate mechanics we are unlikely to train good emperors, but at least students would understand textbook things much more than the current “study, exam, forget” level.
If what they learned about “evolution” comes from Pokemon, then yes.
When did Pokemon become an educational game about evolution?
Pokemon is an example of what an educational game which doesn’t care about realism could look like. People should be expected to learn the game, not the reality, and that will especially be the case when the game diverges from reality to make it more fun/interesting/memorable. If you decide that the most interesting way to get people to play an interactive version of Charles Darwin collecting specimens is to make him be a trainer that battles those specimens, then it’s likely they will remember best the battles, because those are the most interesting part.
One of the research projects I got to see up close was an educational game about the Chesapeake; if I remember correctly, children got to play as a fish that swum around and ate other fish (and all were species that actually lived in the Chesapeake). If you ate enough other fish, you changed species upwards; if you got eaten, you changed species downwards. In the testing they did afterwards, they discovered that many of the children had incorporated that into their model of how the Chesapeake worked; if a trout eats enough, it becomes a shark.
I’d like to hear more about that Chesapeake result.
I’m seeing if I can find a copy of their thesis. I’ll share it if I manage to.
The GAMER thesis is here. (Also looking for an official copy.)
The ILL thesis is here.
It’s true that you don’t need a model that lets you form new theories of the downfall of the Empire; but my point is that even the accepted textbook causes would be very hard to model in a way that combines fun, challenge, and even the faintest hint of realism. Take the theory that Rome was brought down partly by climate change; what’s the Emperor supposed to do about it? Impose a carbon tax on goats? Or the theory that it was plagues what did it. Again, what’s the lever that the player can pull here? Or civil wars; what exactly is the player going to do to maintain the loyalty of generals in far-off provinces? At least in this case we begin to approach something you can model in a game. For example, you can have a dynastic system and make family members more loyal; then you have a tradeoff between the more limited recruiting pool of your family, which presumably has fewer military geniuses, versus the larger but less loyal pool of the general population. (I observe in passing that Crusader Kings II does have a loyalty-modelling subsystem of this sort, and it works quite well for its purposes. Actually I would propose that as a history-teaching game you could do a lot worse than CKII. Kaj, you may want to look into it.) Again, suppose the issue was the decline of the smallholder class as a result of the vast slaveholding plantations; to even engage with this you need a whole system for modelling politics, so that you can model the resistance to reform among the upper classes who both benefit by slavery and run most of your empire. Actually this sounds like it could make a good game, but easy to code it ain’t.
It gets even more complicated when these causes interact. A large part of the reason for the decline of smallholders and the rise of vast manors using serfs (slavery was in decline during that period), was the fact that farmers had to turn to the lords for protection from barbarians and roving bandits. The reason there were a lot of marauding bandits is that the armies were to busy fighting over who the next emperor was going to be to do their job of protecting the populace.
Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while heavily stylized and quite frequently diverging from actual history, nevertheless do a pretty good job of conveying the basics of the time period and region.