History, agency and games

How is history used in games?

One of the simplest and most obvious ways is the use of historical settings and historical personalities. There are a wide variety of games to take this approach, ranging from strategy games to role-playing games and so on.  The popular Dynasty Warriors series is just one of many to use the Three Kingdoms period as backdrop, and many of the standout personalities from this era - Cao Cao or Zhuge Liang - serve as characters in the game. It should be no shock that these games’ take on these characters has more to do with the historical novel Romance of Three Kingdoms than with a more cold-blooded approach to historical events. Any historical change that occurs is to be limited and is hardwired into the gameplay. The novel and the games use the setting in similar ways – they reference characters and events that open up storytelling possibilities due to their very familiarity.  Civil War era strategy games are fundamentally similar. Once again the setting and characters provide a familiar backdrop that allows the player to concentrate on other aspects of the game: action, or strategy, or fantastical or humorous riffs on well-known events. In either case, historical dynamics do not play a major role in the gameplay itself; history is a motif or a backdrop to the action. The fact that these are “historical” games has little bearing on anything. I had initially been dismissive of this approach to history games as superficial. “History,” to my mind, was fundamentally about plumbing the roots of temporal change, and therefore approaches that fail to handle dynamics dynamically were uninteresting. I have since come around  somewhat on this position; I will return to it in a bit.

A more complex and involved way of approaching history through games is to attempt to portray historical dynamics through game dynamics. Rather than the player acting out a drama or planning strategy on a static background, the game dynamics shift in response to temporal change - including changes wrought by the player, by non-player actors, and in the background. This approach has generally been limited to strategy games, although these nonetheless encompass a relatively wide range of variations. An example par excellence of a dynamic approach is the Civilization series.  These attempt to portray large-scale historical change – in fact the main point of interest of the games is the ability to play through all long timescales and  experience and affect dynamic change. There are a wide range of imitators and variations on this approach, from Age of Empires to Total War to the many Paradox games. I grew up on these games, and can probably to them some of my interest in history.   Nonetheless, I have grown dissatisfied with both the in-game experience and the broader portrayal of historical dynamics. I have been trying to figure out why.



My first thought (which was not entirely my own) is that these games involve historical change, but the rules for this change are hard-wired. Change is technology-driven, and technological advance is cumulative, progressive and proceeds through fixed channels. This is what historians might call a (somewhat simplified) Hegelian dialectic, and what gamers refer to as a fixed tech tree (note that Civilization is essentially the locus classicus for tech trees, at least in video games). This makes the play-through relatively the same every time, allowing some variation for geography and other players’ choices. In some cases the resulting game-play is almost absurd; in the single-player of Age of Empires, you find yourself replaying the stone age and bronze age in every level! In many respects, these games are little different than Dynasty Warriors. Age of Empires, for all its purported historical dynamics, essentially functions as a real-time strategy game against a backdrop of classical civilization rather than science fiction or fantasy worlds. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing as Teutonic Knights as much as the next guy - I’m just not sure this gives me any more sense of history than playing as the Protoss.

In fact, I have found that the games that restrict or hardwire the extent to which temporal dynamics impacts gameplay actually give a better experience of “historicity” (in some vague sense of the word). Colonization, with its restricted temporal span and highly limited tech tree, gives a fairly good sense of the dynamics of mercantilism and import substitution (setting aside its failure to portray slavery, disease or give any sense of why the home market demanded fur coats or cigars). Shogun: Total War (the only Total War game I’ve played) does something quite different - separating the tactical aspects of fighting from the more strategic and arguably historical aspects of diplomacy and fief management. Europa Universalis accomplishes a rather stunning degree of historical realism through a combination of incredibly arcane game dynamics and hardwired historical progress. As long as you play a [Western] European country, the game makes sure that you don’t conquer the world as Trier, that Burgundy reeks bloody havoc and then disappears, the Iberians are the first to the New World but collapse under the weight of debts, and that France is a fucking behemoth. Blood ties matter as much as battles, and managing the economy is a constant challenge. The disadvantage here is that the complexity of gameplay makes it a real bear to learn (it took me three whole days).

The other disadvantage of all of these games is that the seams show all over the place. In every case, it feels for the most part like you are playing a strategy game - not like you are experiencing or participating in history. You may learn a little bit of geography (I have a very good sense of where Nevers is from hours playing EU as Burgundy), or about the importance of building manufacturing capacity for achieving economic independence (but I have always tended to invest in this too soon when playing Colonization). But overall the lesson is that history is a game where you know the rules. After making motions at placing you in the role of an historical person (generally the ruler of a country), these games do nothing to place you in that character - and actively invite you to call on expertise about both historical and game-engine dynamics that would have been unavailable to that person. This is not quite “ludonarrative dissonance,” but it is something akin to it (ludohistorical dissonance?).

Increasingly, I think that it is the games that use temporally static gameplay (that don’t allow the player to effect historical change) actually present a closer experience of history. It seems that to produce a better experience of historicity, and perhaps to attract a different audience (I would hesitate to say wider, given the success of historical strategy games), designers should think about how to create a sense of agency within the game. This probably depends more on models that do not aim explicitly at “historical” experience. Those that situate the player actively in the in-game environment, rather than removing them at a strategic distance - Fable, for example, or GTA.

These are stray thoughts for now. I'll have more to say about gameplay experience vs. game mechanics, and why I think these should matter to historians (and perhaps to game developers).