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"
Y. Grufstedt, Shaping the Past: Counterfactual History and Game Design Practice in Digital Strategy Games, chp. 2.
F. Klaassen. "Game Development in a Senior Seminar" in Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games.
Going further
Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek, "MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research", https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf
Tanenbaum, T. J., Gardner, D., & Cowling, M. (2017). "Chalk, Props, And Costumes: Two Exercises for Teaching Pervasive Game Design." Analog Game Studies, 4(4), ETC Press. pp 232 – 248
Tim Somers, Making Historical Boardgames (blog post, October 7, 2019)
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