The value of models in history

Feb 4, 2011 Alun Digital Academia, The Past 7 Comments Gaming, History, Models, Teaching

Total War Screen Grab. (cc) Miyaoka Hitch­cock.

Play the Past, a group blog about the use of video games in his­tory teach­ing is pro­du­cing some excel­lent posts. It’s par­tic­u­larly use­ful to me given my atti­tude to teach­ing with video games. It’d be nice to say I’m scep­tical, but that implies I’ve had a crit­ical look at the evid­ence and come to a reasoned con­clu­sion. It’d be fairer to say I’m unreas­on­ably hos­tile and there’s been a couple of good posts that show that.

Prac­tical Nec­ro­mancy for Begin­ners by Shawn Gra­ham would have been a big help to me if it had been my intro­duc­tion to mod­el­ling soci­et­ies. I didn’t like mod­els for his­tory when I was intro­duced to them. What I saw was a big soci­etal model with no real jus­ti­fic­a­tion for the arbit­rary pro­cesses that made up the model and then a detailed dis­cus­sion of one of the sub-processes without much ref­er­ence to the rest of the model, all presen­ted as “this is how soci­et­ies are”. Shawn Gra­ham could have made a massive change to my first reac­tion thanks to one simple sen­tence:

“Ah. So you’re not sim­u­lat­ing the past, but rather how you think x worked in the past.”

It’s small dif­fer­ence but it’s a subtle dif­fer­ence. He goes on to explain how you don’t have to accept any model he puts for­ward, you can change it. Again this adds sup­port for accept­ing or reject­ing a model. It also helps his mod­els have con­sequences if you change the inputs and are not purely about dynamic thrust­ing arrows in excit­ing shapes and intersections.

There are places I could grumble. One of the bene­fits of com­puter mod­els is that read­ing code requires close-reading which is a use­ful his­tor­ical skill. Yes it is, but my gut reac­tion is why learn close-reading for his­tory by examin­ing code, when you could close-reading for his­tory by examin­ing his­tor­ical texts? The gut is not noted for its large num­ber of brain cells, and this example demon­strates why mine is no genius. Close-reading for code should be sim­pler. It should be unam­bigu­ous and lack­ing the com­plex­it­ies of mean­ing that words in his­tor­ical text have. It’s an easier way of learn­ing the skill that you can then take into more com­plex situ­ations effect­ively mak­ing a shal­lower learn­ing curve.

The only thing I could ser­i­ously say is miss­ing is that mod­els can also be help­ful when they break down — if it’s a good model. If you have some­thing is that work­ing very well in most situ­ations, but breaks down at a spe­cific time or place, that’s a big clue that some­thing really inter­est­ing is hap­pen­ing at that time or place. His­tory is com­plex, so it’s cer­tain that any model will break down sooner or later, but maybe a recog­ni­tion that a model that breaks isn’t the same as a failed model would be helpful.

The other entry is older, but again shows me that I’m miss­ing some­thing, Sid Meier’s Col­on­iz­a­tion: Is it offens­ive enough? by Tre­vor Owens. I saw a brief flurry of tweets and I wasn’t inter­ested. I’ve played Col­on­iz­a­tion, it’s a very basic game with not much adher­ence to the his­tory of the times. My feel­ing was you could spin up some­thing about his­tor­ical rel­ev­ance, but the lim­it­a­tions of tech­no­logy would mean that it would have to be lim­ited by design. If you actu­ally read the post, you’ll see Tre­vor Owens goes way bey­ond that.

He points out that a game based in that period is by neces­sity going to have racist over­tones, because the beliefs of the times and the col­on­isa­tion pro­cesses were racist. Yet he makes a very sens­ible point that the Tri­an­gu­lar Trade makes no appear­ance in Col­on­iz­a­tion. You see North Amer­ica. You deal with Europe at a dis­tance, but there is no Africa. I can see why the design­ers balked at mak­ing own­ing negro slave a fun activ­ity. At the same time it does no favours to the African-American exper­i­ence to com­pletely ignore that the slavery exis­ted. It’s not simply the lim­it­a­tions of PCs at the time that meant slavery was omit­ted. It was a choice. That blind­ness can be seen in other ways that we use or remem­ber the past. It’s another good post.

I dare say there are shal­low and vapid obser­va­tions on the use of games in teach­ing. You can find shal­low opin­ions in all fields, so it would be weird if teach­ing through gam­ing was exempt. What the Play the Past is show­ing is that it’s not inher­ently the case that teach­ing with com­puter games has to be shal­low. So I’ve tried to work out why I have an imme­di­ate pre­ju­dice against teach­ing through gaming.

One reason might be pur­it­an­ical. If it’s fun it’s not work. Games are sup­posed to be fun, ergo they can’t be work. It might be silly, but pre­ju­dices don’t have to be rational. Oddly another reason might be dia­met­ric­ally opposed to this. I’m not a huge fan of com­puter games. I’ve been temp­ted by Rome: Total War, that I’ve seen has hit the Mac App Store. That’s partly due to see­ing it used in the semi-documentary Time Com­mand­ers which I liked. Pre­ju­dices don’t have to be con­sist­ent either.

I think another reason is that I haven’t grasped what games mean in the mod­ern media land­scape. I can see why someone would ana­lyse the use of the past in films or books. Why not games? I don’t play many games, but it ignores the fact that many people do. It’s a massive industry that is rivalling the film industry in reach into house­holds. People like me will dis­ap­pear through nat­ural wastage in time, but I won­der if people pro­du­cing really clever and pion­eer­ing research and teach­ing tools are going to find a frus­trat­ing bar­rier of ignor­ance for the next few years.

For sens­ible com­ment­ary on games and mod­els, see also the post that Shawn Gra­ham linked to from his post, Stu­dent Cre­ated Sims as His­tor­ical Inter­pret­a­tions.