Historical Monumentalism: A Case Study of How the Board Game “Wallenstein” Utilizes History and The Past.

Wallenstein is a tabletop board game designed by Dirk Henn and published by Queen Games in 2002 with a second edition released in 2012. [1] It is played by three to five people vying for territorial control of the many provinces of seventeenth-century Germany during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The game has been commercially

Divided Kingdom, 561: The Classroom Game

This is the finished copy of my Undergraduate Honours Research Thesis. Many thanks for the help of Doctor Marc Saurette (Carleton University Department of History) in the production of this game and research project.

Review – Celia Pearce, “Towards a Game Theory of Game”, Electronic Book Review, 2004.

While we have seen that a key element to ‘good’ educational games is the collaboration of game mechanics and context, it is important to point out that the design of games centres on play rather than story. Although this does not necessarily mean that both cannot be rigorously developed, a game is not a game

Review – Kurt Squire, “From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience”, Educational Researcher, Vol. 35, No. 8, 2006: 19-29.

It is important to distinguish games (both analog and digital) from other forms of pop culture historical texts like film and literature. The main distinction being the ability for games to be interactive texts. Squire defines games as “possibility spaces” that players can interact with and inhabit, rather than passively experiencing the narrative being presented.

Review – Alun Munslow, Narrative and History, Introduction, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Alun Munslow presents history in his book Narrative and History, unsurprisingly, as an authored narrative process. History, or more importantly the act of ‘doing’ history, is the narration of a story – ‘story’ referring to a certain series of events being recounted, and ‘narration’ referring to ‘how’ that story is being told. To Munslow, that

Review – Adam Chapman, “Is Sid Meier’s Civilization History?” Rethinking History, Vol.17, No.3, 2013: 312-332.

Adam Chapman’s article argues in favour of the idea that video games are acceptable conduits of historical transmission. To Chapman, video games constitute a legitimate form of historical narrative. Chapman focuses on Galloway’s work – Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006), which sees any ideological critique in games being overtaken by history presented as quantifiable

Review – Scott Alan Metzger & Richard J. Paxton, “Gaming History: A Framework for What Video Games Teach About the Past”, Theory & Research in Social Education, Vol. 44, No. 4, 2016: 532-564.

Metzger and Paxton provide a much needed and useful typological framework for analysing and discussing the potential benefits video games can have for social studies – but more specifically how they shape a player’s engagement with the past. Like television and films, video games have been quickly established as a pop culture medium that introduces

Review – Lisa Gilbert, “Assassin’s Creed reminds us that history is human experience: Students’ senses of empathy while playing a narrative video game,” Theory & Research in Social Education, 47:1, 2019.

Lisa Gilbert conducted a qualitative interview study on a cross-section of high-school students where the students contrasted their experience of playing the historically inspired video game series Assassin’s Creed to standard classroom learning. Gilbert rightfully points out that games (in this particular case video games) are forming more and more of the historical consciousness, for

Review – J.P. Marney and heather F.E. Tarbert, “Why do simulation? Towards a working epistemology for practitioners of the dark arts.” Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. Vol. 3, no. 4, 2000.

Marney and Tarbet’s article provides an interesting approach to both defining the benefits of using simulations in the social sciences as well as defending their use against orthodox theory and methodological approaches. In the same vein of defending the use of simulations, I too will have to defend my approach with imparting historical knowledge and

Review – Joshua M. Epstein, “Why Model?”Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, vol. 11, no. 4, 2008.

Epstein provides a useful beginner’s guide to the benefits of modelling for the social sciences, tackling some important misconceptions such as the distinction between ‘explanation’ and ‘prediction’ – both goals for the process of modelling. Firstly, modelling is (in a social science sense) described by Epstein as a projection of a social dynamic and how