My name is Maximilian Cronkite
I am a current Masters student of History at Carleton University in Ottawa.
My historical focus is the early middle ages, specifically Merovingian Gaul as told by the historian and bishop Gregory of Tours. My thesis is focused on how game-based learning can be utilized to communicate an understanding of complex histories. Utilizing historical research, literature of game-based learning, game theory, as well as game design theory, I hope to construct a playable boardgame that effectively illustrates Merovingian history. This blog site will be where I engage with said literature to create a research and theoretical journal for my thesis project.
My interest in creating a boardgame is in part personal and in part academic. I was drawn to history through a variety of games such as the historically grounded videogame series Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty, as well as historically themed boardgames such as Wallenstein[1] and Conquest of the Empire.[2] These game experiences allowed me to explore various historical periods such as the twelfth-century Crusader States and the Italian Renaissance in Assassin’s Creed or play as a prominent general during the Thirty Years’ War in Wallenstein. I could experience and explore the idea of agency in a pre-determined historical framework (i.e. actions are constrained by explicit rules, the limits of the format – whether a physical boardgame or a virtual videogame – and wherever the determined narrative takes you as a player) which I felt allowed me to better understand the historical periods as well as their socio-cultural and sometimes economic context.
In my undergraduate honour’s thesis, I gamified the world depicted by Gregory of Tours in the past to suit a classroom setting. It took the form of a Role-Playing-Game (hereafter, RPG), in which students adopt the persona of someone described in the Historia Francorum (mainly kings, queens, bishops, and nobles), they interact with the other student characters to achieve their own personal agenda (i.e. be the most pious, or be leader of the largest kingdom, etc.) and they accumulate the two ‘currencies’ of the game – faith and honour. I translated the events that Gregory writes about (i.e. the excommunication of a king) into playable scenarios – which is what I intend to also do in the creation of my boardgame, except in a smaller and more concentrated format. Players will now inhabit one of the four kingdoms that was established after 561 CE. They will gather a host of characters from various sections of Merovingian society (counts, bishops, queens, monks, warriors) to achieve their own agendas while also balancing certain scenarios determined by the game (invasion, plague, church councils). Playing through these historical scenarios instead of reading about them grants the player access to a historical actor’s perspective, which has the promising potential to create empathy for historical actors, their situations, and their perspectives in life.
[1] Dirk Henn, Wallenstein, Germany: Queen Games, 2002.
[2] Larry Harris, Glenn Drover, and Martin Wallace, Conquest of the Empire, U.S.: Milton Bradley and Eagle Games, 2005.
Divided Kingdom, 561 