The Benefits of the Inaccurate Videogame

“But it needs to be accurate otherwise people won’t learn anything from it.”

This is a rough quote of myself in an undergrad seminar called “Doing Canadian History”. We were learning about film and everyone in that course, including myself, sat aloft in our ivory towers, looking down our noses at the peasants and their silly little movies where the historical clothing, events, and accents were fabricated and false. Since I uttered that ignorant statement my perspective has changed but there are still historians out there who feel that historical films, television shows, and videogames need to be accurate otherwise they are useless or damaging to the progress of knowledge.

What they don’t realize is a videogame that represents history in a different way is doing exactly what they feared it would stunt. It is often forgotten that videogames are similar to controversial books in the realm of historiography. Adam Chapman in his article “Privileging Form over Content: Analysing Historical Videogames” discusses how a gamer approaches a game is just as important as the content it presents. Specifically, the way the gamer interacts with the game can create an opportunity “for engaging with discourse about the past” [1]. Gamers can interact with the ideas present with the game and make critical decisions based on this engagement. It could be as simple as determining that a fictional character probably did not assassinate the archbishop of Pisa but it is still a critical analysis of a source.

This sort of engagement is crucial for children in particular. Susan Engel notes that children do not need facts and figures stuffed into their heads but rather they need to “develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on”[2]. Is that not one of the purposes of studying history? To force people to critically think and be able to use that skill later on in life regardless of the situation? If that rhetorical question is false, pardon me for misinterpreting the point of my undergraduate career and disregard everything I've said thus far. Otherwise I hope you agree when I say that it is a good thing if a videogame is “inaccurate” or represents history in a different way so that these sorts of skills can be nurtured.

However, what I appreciate the most about Chapman’s article is the question of what is considered proper history. Why must we compare a historical video game to a book? They are of a different structure, media, and purpose. It is as if we are comparing apples to oranges or- as Diane Carr states- “…disparaging a map for not being life-size”[3]. As historians and public historians we need to be aware that videogames have their place in educating the public about events and trends in the historical narrative. If we are so concerned about the accuracy of the game- although by now I hope you agree that accuracy is not a necessity- we should become more involved in game development.

It is not as if game developers do not want us there. In fact, they seek people like you and I out. For the third installment of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed a professor at the Université de Montréal by the name of Francois Furstenberg was called into action as a collaborator for the game. He said: “In a class, you can teach 30 students, sometimes 200. With a videogame like this, you have the opportunity of getting tens of millions of people interested in history”[4]. Videogames and other forms of digital gaming should be taken seriously by us historians. For the most part, it is an uncharted land for those in academia and we need to make ourselves viable resources to gaming developers, lest the gravy train rolls out of the station without us.

[1]. Adam Chapman, "Privileging Form over Content: Analyzing Historical Videogames", Journal of Digital Humanities http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/privileging-form-over-content-by-adam-chapman/.

[2] Susan Engle, "Playing to Learn", New York Times 1 February 2010.

[3] Diane Carr, "The Trouble with Civilzation," in Videogame, Player, Text ed. T. Krzywinska and B. Atkins (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), endnote 6.

[4] Dominique Nancy "Historian Francois Furstenberg works on the video game Assassin's Creed III" U de M Nouvelles December 10, 2012.