Robert Whitaker History Respawned
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Robert Whitaker History Respawned: Games Designers as Historians and Games as History, 1971 – 1991 Digital games – which include computer, mobile, and video games – represent the most valuable entertainment medium in the world, routinely generating more global revenue than music, film, and television.1 A remarkable facet of the popularity of digital games is the centrality of history as a topic and setting for the most popular digital game titles. For instance, in 2018, five out of the twenty best-selling video games were history titles, including the most popular game, Red Dead Redemption 2.2 Out of the ten top-selling games of the last decade, half were history games or games with significant historical components.3 Digital games are big business, and history is often the most profitable and popular setting for digital games. Historians and other scholars have taken notice of this relationship between digital games and history, and have begun to analyze digital history games for their historical content as well as their potential influence on player’s historical knowledge.4 In addition to traditional academic publications, these scholars also routinely write critiques of popular history games for major publications, including Rock Paper Shotgun and The Guardian.5 This work has greatly contributed 1 Kevin Webb, “The $120 billion gaming industry is going through more change than it ever has before, and everyone is trying to cash in.” Business Insider, October 1, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/video-game-industry-120- billion-future-innovation-2019-9 2 Webb, “‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ beat out ‘Call of Duty’ to become 2018’s best-seller – these were the 20 best- selling games of the year.” Business Insider, January 23, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/best-selling-video- games-2018-2019-1 3 Hope Corrigan, “Grand Theft Auto 5 is the USA’s Best-Selling Game of the Decade.” IGN, January 17, 2020, https://www.ign.com/articles/grand-theft-auto-5-is-the-usas-best-selling-game-of-the-decade 4 Key works include Jeremiah McCall, Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History (New York: Routledge, 2011); Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Present the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B.R. Elliot, eds. Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 5 Holly Nielsen, “Assassin’s Creed Origins: how Ubisoft painstakingly recreated ancient Egypt,” The Guardian, October 5, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/assassins-creed-origins-recreated-ancient- egypt-ubisoft; Andreas Inderwildi, “Kingdom Come Deliverance’s quest for historical accuracy is a fool’s errand,” Rock Paper Shotgun, March 5, 2018, https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/05/kingdom-come-deliverance- historical-accuracy/ Whitaker 2 to informed critique of history games, and built a foundation for analyzing the influence of history games on popular historical memory. However, this work has failed, thus far, to develop in two important ways: first, understanding the creative process and intentions of history game developers and, second, understanding the long history of digital history games, outside of the last decade. With regard to understanding development, scholars have succeeded in bringing their knowledge to bear on the history presented by recent popular games. Yet only rarely are those critiques of history games informed by the intent of developers, or, perhaps more importantly, the historical sources that developers used when developing their history games. Building a knowledge of this topic through archival research and oral histories could greatly change the consideration of published history games and enliven the increasingly stale analysis of representations of history by digital titles. Moreover, archival research and oral interviews would allow scholars to envision history game creators as historians rather than solely as game developers. This distinction is important because of the popularity of history games and their influence on the historical memories of game players. We know that history games represent important touchstones for historical knowledge among players. Yet when it comes to games, we do not yet know how to answer questions related to authorship. We assume and infer the perspective of game developers. We assume and infer their biases. We need to do more in order to understand game development and learn how the development process plays into a game’s representation of the past. With regard to the long history of digital games, the current analysis of history titles is, unsurprisingly, focused on the last ten to fifteen years. This period witnessed the emergence of big budget, “Triple A” history games, including Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, and Call of Duty. Yet this focus on recent history often leads scholars to miss the longer history of analog and digital history games. This is an important problem for two reasons. First, game development is an Whitaker 3 iterative process in which new games build upon the design techniques and methods of previous titles. To ignore the past, in this regard, is to ignore how the genres and gameplay types we discuss in the present are the result of long-term trends in development. Second, much like game development, the representation of history is an iterative process. Scholars of historical games often write about the history in these titles as though they are solely a product of current conditions and concerns rather than iterations on longstanding tropes and themes within the history of historical games. If we can accept that digital games are a medium for influential historical knowledge, then historical games also have a historiography, in the same way as historical films, documentaries, and scholarly monographs. To be sure, the representation of the past in current history game owes much to contemporary circumstances. Those representations, however, also draw inspiration and respond to the history depicted in foundational titles of the late 20th century, particularly Age of Empires, Sid Meier’s Civilization, and the sine qua non of digital history games, The Oregon Trail. Current history titles not only respond to these games, but also often share developers or development teams with those classic titles. The purpose of this study is to consider the long history of digital history games through archival and oral history sources. It will focus on the critical period from 1971 to 1991, which saw the early development of digital games as well as the personal computer and the first video game consoles. Although this work will consider elements of game design, the primary focus will be on the development of digital games as a medium for historical knowledge. Furthermore, this project will study the academic and pedagogical backgrounds of many early game designers associated with history games, and reveal how their backgrounds influenced the development of digital games more generally. Whitaker 4 History hits the Trail One of the more common and pernicious aspects of games studies is the habit of mind of scholars to cordon off educational games from the history of digital games more generally. This habit often results from a narrow focus on the last twenty years, during which time educational games became poorly funded, over produced, and easily forgettable. Yet by extending one’s focus into the late twentieth century and avoiding the teleology of reading the history of educational games through their current state, it is impossible to escape the importance and popularity of educational titles. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that digital games as we know them today would not exist without the educational game industry of the late twentieth century. In the years when computers were prohibitively expensive and even more prohibitively large, schools and universities represented one of the few places people could use a computer, let alone play a computer game. And given the limited availability of computers, early digital game developers, unsurprisingly, often began their careers using campus-based machines and working on educational software. The game genres and gameplay modes we take for granted today often existed first in educational titles. No title better represents this fact than The Oregon Trail, a game which most people associate with the 1985 Apple II version, but which began life in a junior high classroom in Minnesota in 1971.6 The game was the brainchild of Don Rawitsch, a senior history undergraduate at Carleton College (Northfield, MN) working as a student teacher at Bryant Junior High School in Minneapolis. For his student teaching assignment, Rawitsch had been tasked with instructing junior high students on the history of 19th century westward expansion. His training at Carleton had encouraged the use of innovative techniques to reach students and “get their noses out of the 6 Jessica Lussenhop, “Oregon Trail: How three Minnesotans forged its path,” City Pages, January 19, 2011, http://www.citypages.com/news/oregon-trail-how-three-minnesotans-forged-its-path-6745749; “Classic Game Postmortem: Oregon Trail.” YouTube video, 1:02:01. “GDC, Don Rawtisch,” March 15, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdGNFhKhoKY Whitaker 5 textbook.”7 During previous student teaching assignments, Rawitsch and another instructor had roleplayed as Lewis and Clark, and had students interview them while they were dressed and speaking in character.8 In another session, he participated in a mock trial, which began with Don and another instructor getting into a heated argument followed by Don being “shot” with a track coach’s starter pistol – a pedagogical technique that is probably best left in the 1970s. After the “murder,” students would then take on the roles of attorney, judge, or jury to determine the legal response. For westward expansion, Rawitsch quickly latched on to games as a possible way to achieve his goal of engaging students.