# History Game Design ### Goals: * Consider how to design a History Game * Examine examples of history games designs and evaluate the success or the compromises necessary to the process. * Begin work on exercise 5: this framework will give you the structure to complete your annotated bibliography. Potential Questions: * Rouse's chapter on Game Design highlights their key idea about game design - player choice. In the games that you play, how important is having the ability to solve a challenge in different ways? Which games do this best, do you find? And how, if you were creating a history game, would you balance player choice with historical accuracy? * Grufstedt approaches the idea of game design from an analytical perspective - she is analyzing as a historian the history of history-game design at Paradox. She (p. 77) talks about how Rockstar games use History as "clout" - a way to signal authenticity more for marketing than a game pillar. Or Assassin's Creed series uses the claim historical consultancy to "pre-empt criticism". Do you see that in other games and should this concern us as historians? * What is a counterfactual game in Grufstedt's writing? How might students apply her definition to their own research? ### Read/Watch/Listen: * Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, ed. *The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies*, chp. 20, "Game Design" * Darren Reid; Video Game Development as Public History: Practical Reflections on Making a Video Game for Historical Public Engagement. *The Public Historian* 1 February 2024; 46 (1): 74–107. doi: * Y. Grufstedt, *Shaping the Past: Counterfactual History and Game Design Practice in Digital Strategy Games*, chp. 2. Case Studies: * F. Klaassen. "Game Development in a Senior Seminar" in *Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games*. * [Virtus card deck and rules](http://historygames.usask.ca/islandora/object/historygames%3A10) * A. Clulow et al. "[Designing Historical Video Game](https://notevenpast.org/designing-historical-video-games/)s" * ### Going further Kevin Kee et al., “Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming,” *The Canadian Historical Review* 90, no. 2 (2009): 303–26 Julien A. Bazile, “An ‘Alternative to the Pen’? Perspectives for the Design of Historiographical Videogames,” *Games and Culture* 17, no. 6 (2022): 856 Dawn Spring, “Gaming History: Computer and Video Games as Historical Scholarship,” *Rethinking History* 19, no. 2 (2015): 207 Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek, "MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research", Tanenbaum, T. J., Gardner, D., & Cowling, M. (2017). "[Chalk, Props, And Costumes](https://analoggamestudies.org/2017/07/2716/): Two Exercises for Teaching Pervasive Game Design." *Analog Game Studies*, 4(4), ETC Press. pp 232 – 248 Tim Somers, [Making Historical Boardgames](https://qubpublichistory.wordpress.com/2019/10/07/making-historical-board-games/#_ftn2) (blog post, October 7, 2019) * [Cards and rulebooks](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PKYX8NaWyutnHMbKhqsXW20L7OwrxiMr?usp=sharing) --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://marc-saurette.gitbook.io/historical-game-studies-2024/fundamentals/history-game-design.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.