Counterfactual History & Games

Date: October 30th.

Seminar Leader: Nicholas Langer

Readings

Tom Apperley, "Moddding the Historian's Code" Historical Versimiltitude and Counterfactual Imagination" in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Similation of History, M.A. Kapell and A. B. R Elliott, ed.

Kazumi Hasegawa, "Falling in Love with History: Japanese Girls’ Otome Sexuality and Queering Historical Imagination" in Playing with the Past (see above).

Aviezer Tucker, "Review: Historiographical Counterfactuals and Historical Contingency. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals by Niall Ferguson. History and Theory, May, 1999, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May, 1999), pp. 264-276.

Scott L. Roberts, "Using Counterfactual History to Enhance Students’ Historical Understanding," The Social Studies, 102:3 (2011): 117-123, DOI: 10.1080/00377996.2010.525547.

Going Further

For next time: Andrew Denning, "Deep Play? Video Games and the Historical Imaginary," The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 180–198, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab002

How to Win a War by Niall Ferguson

The historian Niall Ferguson discusses how playing Making History: The Calm and the Storm challenged his counterfactual assumptions regarding the Second World War. Can games or historical games prove surprisingly insightful when it comes to counterfactual history?

History and Game Design with Chris King, Game Designer, Paradox Development Studio

Chris King, a game designer at Paradox Development Studio, offers insight to how Paradox turns history into games. Take note of how he says Paradox "shops around" (24:39) for historians (or more precisely historical theories) that suggest the best gameplay.

The 1974 Sandhurst wargame of a hypothetical "Operation Sealion"

This was a military war game of Operation Sealion, which was a German war plan for invading Britain in 1940. Since the players were professional military officers, this serves as an interesting case study of a "serious game" approach to counterfactual history.

With a nuclear North Korea and Iran on the way, the geopolitical situation is evolving in unpredictable ways. Can a hypersophisticated World War II simulation teach us 21st-century global strategy?...