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.

Gods, demons and historical agency

In seminar this week, we are discussing the following question: "Do animals have historical agency?" This strikes me as one of the great red herrings of environmental history (see also “commons, tragedy of the”). Agency carries so many different meanings in such different contexts that this question seems aimed at prompting knee-jerk opposition from a historiographical constituency that may not actually exist.

Let us try to unpack what this question might actually mean:

A. Do animals effect history? I think we would be hard pressed to find a contemporary historian who does not think that non-human actors can have a role in changing the course of events. Even the most anthropocentric must concede that horses had a role in the course of warfare, or that people care about national symbols like the bald eagle.

B. Do animals effect history (independent of humans)?  Many historians have never particularly considered this question, and to me it seems a moot point. In the modern world, there are effectively no animals that exist independent of anthropogenic interventions. Everywhere, animals are interdependent in a web that includes humans. In the rare contexts where this is not the case, I am not sure that we (as historians) especially care what animals do.

C. Do animals effect history (in seemingly unpredictable ways)? This is how I would interpret Brett Walker (sometimes, especially in Toxic Archipelago) and Timothy Mitchell (in "Can the Mosquito Speak?"). It is a more productive phrasing of the above question, that avoids the problematic [modernist] assumption that factors can be manipulated independent of one another. The answer is yes, clearly animals display what might be mathematically termed “chaotic” or “nonlinear” behavior. Wolves that had coexisted peacefully with humans suddenly start attacking them. Or conversely, humans that had previously coexisted peacefully with wolves suddenly start attacking them. But if this type of agency extends beyond humans to other animals, surely it also extends to phenomena like weather, currency markets and machines. If we begin talking about all of these phenomena as having “agency” it lends them equivalence that harkens back to the days of ghost in the machine and money demons coexisting with gods and men. This may carry narrative power, but I do not think it is analytically coherent.

D. Do animals effect history (through their unique symbolic power)? This seems to be where Harriet Ritvo’s main argument lies. Animals do form powerful discursive symbols. And we know that symbols have sociohistorical power. But this still fails to differentiate animals from other powerful symbols like - again - weather, currency markets and machines.

E. Are animals psychosocial/moral actors? I think this is the provocative position that Walker aims at (in Lost Wolves). The most convincing answers to this question do not come from history, however, but from the zone where evolutionary biology melds into anthropology, and psychology. Walker does make interesting use of this, combined with his personal musings. I would argue, however, that the implications here lie more in the realm of moral philosophy than in history. Walker is making a normative case - that animals should be treated as moral actors - rather than a historical case - that the moral nature of non-human animals changes the way they function historically.


Questions:
1. Does the psychosocial/moral agency of non-human animals change the way they function as historical actors? To me, this is the position that must be demonstrated before animal agency becomes an interesting question. Walker takes aim at this, and succeeds to some degree in posing humans and wolves as part of the same continuum; but I do not think he succeeds in showing that animal agency E causes animal agency C or D, merely in conflating the three.

2. Why stop at animals? We have seen Mitchel suggest (perhaps) that plasmodia and bugs have agency, and Walker argue that chemicals do as well. McNeill pêre et fils have both written about the historical power of diseases. Elsewhere, Michael Pollan (in Botany of Desire [and see also]) has suggested that plants are agents. But why stop there? Complex machines, markets and weather are chaotic systems. Even abstract phenomena like ideas and evolution behave in ways that are predictable only in retrospect. They may not have type E agency, but it is not clear that type E agency effects the broader course of history. Maybe agency is a useful way of talking about complex phenomena.

3. If we talk about weather, markets, wolves, diseases, concepts and corn as all having agency -  effecting events in seemingly unpredictable ways, being readily anthropomorphized, having symbolic power - aren't we back to a sort of polytheistic religion? And is is a problem if this takes us back to gods and demons? Contemporary theorists - Manuel de Landa and Bruno Latour, to name two - suggest that drawing clear epistemological division between natural and social processes obscures important commonalities and hybridities. This is not to say we should throw up our hands at complexity, or ascribe too much in the way of human characteristics to non-human processes - modern science and social science are not without successes. But it does suggest that we should not be so quick to look down our noses at premodern modes of thought.