Living history through games: immersion, learning and entertainment

Being at once a multifaceted legal object and an extremely powerful economic and financial lever, the video game also fulfils a third function: education. To this extent, the video game work plays the role of teacher, providing the player with a particular and meaningful experience. As a result, the player about to dive into a fictional and entertaining world also acquires knowledge about the history, culture and civilisations present in the simulation.

Today, with more than 230 million copies sold for the Assassin’s Creed franchise alone, and 73 million for Civilization, historical video games have become a global cultural phenomenon. Far from being mere entertainment products, these works recreate with growing concern for accuracy Ptolemaic Egypt, the Greece of Pericles, the French Revolution or feudal Japan.

This massive commercial success, combined with an increasingly assertive commitment to documentation, invites us to examine a fruitful tension: how does the historical video game, through playful immersion, transform the player’s relationship with historical knowledge?

I. The historical video game, a means of rediscovering past societies

A. The technical and documentary reconstruction of vanished civilisations

Chronologically, the first video game works considered to belong to the historical genre appeared at the end of the 20th century, notably with the release of Castle Wolfenstein, developed by the American studio Muse Software in 1981. The game features an American soldier fighting the Nazis during the Second World War. Producing such a game seems to require genuine documentary research to guarantee the truthfulness of the elements that go into it. However, seeking historical accuracy in every respect is a particularly arduous task. Maxime Durand, a historian at Ubisoft Montréal, explains that the challenge regarding the sources used is less about accuracy than about credibility and authenticity. The aim is not to reproduce the great periods of history stricto sensu: the idea is to add a touch of credibility to entertain the player and to bring out, implicitly, a cultural and even educational dimension.

The documentary arsenal used may include:

• Primary sources: ancient literary texts, inscriptions, written archives;
• Archaeological sources: plans, artefacts, excavations, specialist journals;
• Visual sources: iconography, photographs, paintings of the period;
• Scientific sources: monographs, academic publications, museum databases.

By way of illustration, the collaboration between Dr Glaire D. Anderson, founder of the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture & Collections at the University of Edinburgh, and the French studio Ubisoft on the Discovery Tour of Assassin’s Creed Mirage reflects this assertive academic grounding.

B. The embodied experience of alternative social, political and cultural models

Acquiring historical knowledge requires intensive and deliberate reading. With video games, by contrast, the player no longer reads history: they become an actor in it. The video game work projects them into an environment that is admittedly fictional, but based on real historical facts. In this context, the player does not merely watch; they take on a social identity: an Athenian citizen, a medieval vassal or a Japanese samurai. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the player travels through both Athenian direct democracy and the Spartan military oligarchy. They thus find themselves in an era confronting two radically opposed models of society, which nevertheless coexisted in the 5th century BC. One favours the direct participation of citizens in public affairs; the other rests on the diarchy, the power of the ephors and the gerousia, the council of elders.

Another example, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, is a perfect illustration of historical narrative put to the service of video games. The character discovers the rigidity of the feudal pyramid of 15th-century Bohemia, the omnipresence of Catholicism and the precariousness of peasant life.

This diversity confronts the player with social and cultural organisations sometimes far removed from contemporary models, without ever becoming abstract. What the historian describes from a distance through concepts, the video game makes the player experience. It is precisely in this passage from stated knowledge to lived knowledge that the importance of narrative in a video game can be measured.

II. From playful immersion to the transmission of knowledge: the emergence of an educational vocation

A. Informal learning through play

Knowledge is experienced before it is stated: this is the observation that stands out today, as a whole new form of learning is emerging. The example of Civilization is particularly telling in this respect. Since 1991, the franchise created by Sid Meier has sold more than 73 million copies and accumulated nearly a billion hours of play. All those hours during which millions of players became familiar with the diversity of political regimes, the succession of technological revolutions and the persistence of major geopolitical dynamics, without this learning ever being their primary intention. Transmission happens through the very mechanics of the game. To govern their civilisation, players must grasp what a theocracy involves, measure the consequences of the invention of printing or anticipate the effect of a diplomatic alliance. They are then placed in the role of guide to their people and take full responsibility for the choices made to ensure the survival of their empire.

In another register, Red Dead Redemption 2 illustrates the same phenomenon. Behind the appearance of an outlaw adventure, Rockstar Games’ title recreates with rare sociological depth the America of 1899: the death throes of a cowboy way of life doomed by industrialisation, the persistent racism of the South after Reconstruction, the dispossession of Native American nations pushed back onto their last territories. Absorbed by the story, the player goes through these realities without them being the object of their conscious attention. This informal learning offered by historical video games is not only a guarantee of commercial success, but above all a vehicle for raising awareness of various landmark events in human history.

B. The institutionalisation of video games as an educational tool

Playing video games is not just about the discreet transmission of historical knowledge. It is also accompanied by the development of genuine cognitive abilities, now documented by scientific research. The work of Daphné Bavelier at the University of Geneva on action games such as Call of Duty shows that playing them regularly improves spatial memory, attentional control and visual cognition. Applied to historical games, these skills translate into detailed knowledge of the topography of vanished eras, from the beaches of Normandy in 1944 to the Athens of the 5th century BC, which no atlas could convey with the same intensity.

This dual value, accumulating knowledge and developing faculties, has led some institutions to incorporate these works into their educational programmes. This War of Mine, inspired by the siege of Sarajevo, has thus been part of the official Polish school curriculum since 2020: for the 2020-2021 school year, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced that this game developed by 11 bit studios would be included on the school reading list. While Poland remains to date the only country to have formally included a video game in its national curriculum, other education systems are moving in the same direction. In France, the Ministry of Education has been working with Ubisoft on the Discovery Tour since 2018. In the Czech Republic, Charles University in Prague and the Czech Academy of Sciences themselves developed in 2017 the serious game Attentat 1942, devoted to the memory of the Nazi occupation, and then, through their studio Charles Games, Svoboda 1945, focused on the communist takeover after the war. Co-financed by the Czech Ministry of Culture and accompanied by official teaching guides, both titles were honoured at the international Games for Change festival.

At the same time, video game developers enjoy a certain freedom in designing their works. The demands of gameplay, player immersion and technical constraints frequently lead them to adapt certain elements of historical reality. Adam Chapman stresses in this respect that the historical video game is not a faithful reproduction of the past, but an interpretation of it shaped by the specific features of the video game medium.

In the future, we may see such initiatives multiply, now that video games have become the world’s leading cultural industry.

Bibliography

Book

• A. Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice, Routledge

Online sources

• Radio-Canada, Gravel le matin, « Entrevue avec un historien d’Ubisoft sur Assassin’s Creed »
• Institut du monde arabe, « Lancement d’Assassin’s Creed Mirage : l’IMA partenaire d’Ubisoft »
• Persée, Dialogues d’histoire ancienne, supplement 11, 2014
• University of Geneva, « Campus n° 131 : recherche »
• ActuaLitté, « Pologne : un jeu vidéo inscrit sur la liste de lecture officielle des écoles »
• Attentat 1942, Best Learning Game, Games for Change Festival, New York, 2018: attentat1942.com/press
• Les Sherpas, « Les cités-États de la Grèce antique »

Maleine OUMAR NIANGCo-founder, intellectual property lawyer, student at CEIPI

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