Last year, Nikolas Mudd, a professor of history at Cornell University, posted online that he wanted netizens to help him get to know a class of students in the classroom — gamers of the video game Europa Luma. Many students sign up for Mudd's course on modern Europe, but he had never heard of the game before. Brett Defrey, a professor of history at North Carolina State University, saw the message and wanted to use it as an opportunity to explain a new phenomenon.
Defrey is a die-hard player in the "Europa Storm" series. In his view, game developers by non-professional historians have influenced many teenagers' perceptions of history, a phenomenon that deserves further study. As the developer of the "Continental" series, many of the strategy games owned by Swedish studio Paradox Interactive are popular with players around the world, and you can control a country with a long history or its monarch and guide the course of history. In "Continental", the average player's play time reaches hundreds of hours, and some even invest thousands of hours.
Inevitably, these players' understanding of history will be influenced by the game, but what exactly do they learn from it? This remains a mystery. In a blog post, Defrey noted that academic historians must confront a new type of student. "For them, the P Society is history, and the real history is only a second language." To answer Mulder's confusion, Defrey wanted to explain the historical assumptions behind the P-Club game.
Nicholas Mudd is the author of Economic Sanctions: The Rise of the Tools of Modern Warfare
How the game affects the player
"In fact, the history game has long crossed that line, has the same influence as a historical film or TV series, and requires the same level of critical analysis." Defrey said. Although the PC gaming industry is already twice the size of the film industry, few people still analyze the role of games from this perspective.
The difficulty is that, first of all, the impact of the game is difficult to quantify. Many educators don't realize that students who often ask why the Ottoman Empire didn't colonize america, or what happened to the Kingdom of Burgundy, may have their own view of history and be subtly influenced by the P-Club game. "In your classroom, the students who have heard about the Kingdom of Prussia are often Europa League 4 players."
Second, unlike other cultural mediums, systems and mechanics are at the heart of the game. Video games can only "teach" people to learn history through these two aspects, but players may not understand them all. "The biggest challenge is that you need to get players to recognize and think clearly around these systems." Marion Cruise, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, said.
Based on the experience of most players, Europa Is very good at introducing users to its unique system. If you control Spain in the game, you will understand the role of marriage, because Spain is actually the result of the marriage between the Castilian and Aragonese royal families. If you are unlucky enough to choose a country in the Balkans, you will soon feel how strong the Ottoman Empire invaded Europe was... In the World War II simulation game Steel Ambition, if you decide to invade the Soviet Union, you can understand why neither Napoleon nor Hitler was able to conquer it – neither of them could pass the "Winter General" level.
The game is our guide to understanding history, but what about later?
In a sense, the P-Clubs have prompted players to develop their own views on how the world works—in the words of game designer and scholar Ian Burgster, they influence players in ways like "Procedural Rhetoric," generating effective expression and persuasiveness through play mechanics.
The game does not employ any single historical perspective, but each title provides a framework for players to understand a particular historical period. For example, "Continental Storm" simulates the rise of the once isolated and backward Continent of Europe until it dominates the world. This means that no matter which specific route the game takes, it usually leads to the result that Europe will eventually dominate the world.
The "European Storm" used a mechanism known as the "Institution", including printing, the Enlightenment, etc., which appeared every 50 years in a preset order, and almost always appeared first in Europe and then slowly spread around the world. If a country does not have these trends, it will have to pay a higher cost to adopt new technologies. As a result, over time, Europe has become technologically ahead of the rest of the world. The knowledge learned by the player is that the popularization of ideas has led to the rapid development of science and technology in European countries and the accumulation of the advantages needed to compete for world hegemony.
If you want to lead a non-European country to world domination, you have to be good at killing, conquering, and colonizing—in other words, you have to do what Europeans do. Similar to most of P's games, "Continental" encourages players to fight for territory in a brutal and ruthless way, and fierce wars between countries are commonplace. If the game were like an interactive encyclopedia, it would most likely make readers feel the urge to delete half of it. These design ideas themselves are enough to cause people to think, what Europeans have done must be repeated by non-European countries? Should the cruelty of history be conveyed to today's audience?
The Europa Europa 4 expansion pack The Golden Age tells the history of the Iberian Empire's colonization and plundering of gold in the Americas
Limitations of historical games
The Europa League series encourages players to act in an extremely realistic view of international relations: national security is paramount to players, and to ensure that security, the best practice is to expand their power in a chaotic world order. Non-State Actors (NSAs) rarely appear in the game, and player actions do not have any real humanitarian consequences. Whenever a game is over, players are likely to feel that the cold logic of national security and power politics has driven the rise of the centralized states of Europe... Most of the games are spreading this state-centered view of history, influencing many players' perceptions of history and may lead them to believe that the state—not people, ideas, or society—is the only driving force behind history.
Defrey says this view of history is short-sighted to say the least, and has led to some embarrassing shortcomings in the game. In his view, in versions prior to "Europa Luma", technological progress was overemphasized, while slavery was relegated to a minor historical footnote; in the "Steel Ambition" series, some brutal historical atrocities were almost completely ignored.
In recent years, P-Club has been trying to incorporate historical complexity and more detail into its games. For example, multiple expansion packs for Europa Lu have corrected some historical mistakes and enriched gameplay in non-European countries. DeFrey said he has criticized the developers of many historical games, of which only the P Society has responded positively.
Of course, no medium can accurately restore history, and games are no exception. In many ways, what the P Society has done is nothing new. As early as the Kingdom of Prussia in the 19th century, officers used specially designed board games for tactical training. In the 1870s, when the Kingdom of Prussia defeated France, those games were considered "heroes" and quickly spread throughout Europe. In the 20th century, some board games played a similar role.
For the average player, getting started with the "European Storm" series is not easy, and often requires him to have a certain interest in history
Jonas Sluj is a staff member of the Danish Embassy in Turkey and often plays "Europa Luma" in his spare time. Sluj says that whenever he plays the P-Club game, he has to find ways to "forget" what he has learned. Sluj found that the game's state-centered, linear view of history wasn't of much use to his profession because he had to understand the many subtleties of Turkish history and culture.
Sluj added that P-Club games are a good place to start if someone wants to learn about history, but given the current limitations of these games, the history they illustrate needs to be supported by other sources.
While Defrey has repeatedly criticized P-Club games, he believes historians should be happy that these games are widely popular with players, because playing games is still a better way to understand history than many other ways. "Compared with film and television dramas, video games require players to use their brains to interact with history... Players focus on those historical processes, and as historians, that's exactly what we want them to focus on. ”
Cruise also said that the game's ability to disseminate historical narratives is very limited. On the other hand, he argues that any interpretation of history is misread, and that popular notions of history are also full of errors and oversimplifications. So, although games are not the perfect medium, they still help to attract people to understand history.
"Video games are the opposite of apathy." Cruise said, "If you play a game like 'Europa Luma,' you start to care about the past, even in a relatively superficial way." In any case, the value of video games can draw attention to historical eras that they will never encounter. ”
So, the reality we face is that P-Club games offer players a vast, detailed, and exciting way to study history, and while some of the content in the game is controversial, it does work better than some textbooks. So, how do you get players started with the game and gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of the serious subjects they're involved in?
This article is compiled from: theatlantic.com
原文标题：《Kids Are Learning History From Video Games Now》
Originally written by Luka Ivan Jukić