(Note: This blog entry is the fourth part of a six-part series. Read more on using games in the classroom in parts one, two, three, five, and six.)

The goal of lessons involving simulation games is twofold: to explore systems in the past by making choices and experiencing the resulting consequences and to critique simulation games as interpretations of the past in order to develop historical criticism skills and appreciate the role of modern media in shaping our views of the past. Accordingly, after students have had sufficient time to play and observe a game, they should be provided with learning activities and assessments that facilitate these two goals.

Activities and assessments can be divided into two types. The first consists of those that focus on analyzing, understanding, and extrapolating on the models posed by a simulation game. It concerns the content of the game, the questions raised by the game about how and why people in the past acted as they did. The second type of activity focuses on evaluating and critiquing the models in a game, determining the validity of the game as an interpretation. This blog entry will deal with the former.

Before beginning it is worth remembering that recent position statements from the National Council for the Social Studies and National Council of Teachers of English emphasize training students to interpret, critique, and create new media. Though not all of the activities and assessments that follow meet this goal, many do by design.

Gaining familiarity with how a game functions and models the past depends upon regular opportunities for play and reflection. Keeping a regular journal of gameplay is an excellent way to give students writing exercises and encourage them to consider and engage with the models involved in gameplay. As an added benefit, teachers can use the information in these journals to monitor students’ progress and understanding, and adapt lessons accordingly.

The game journal can be used to take observation notes along the lines of those explored in the previous segment. Providing opportunities for reflective writing is also a good idea. Consider variations on prompts that ask students how the game presents the past as a way to introduce them to critiquing the game. For example:

• What does Mission US suggest the key divisions in colonial Boston were?
• How important is money in winning a presidential election, according to Political Machine?
• Does Energyville suggest it is possible for U.S. cities to shift to renewable fuels in the near future?

Reflections like this should be accompanied with observations from the game that support the students' conclusions.

Where the resources are available, students can also log their ideas and observations in the 21st-century analog of the journal, the blog. There are many sites dedicated to providing free blogging capabilities to individuals and groups, most notably Wordpress and Blogger.

An excellent quick assignment that allows students to consider how a game functions is an annotated screenshot. Capturing a screenshot from a browser-based game is a straightforward affair. Both Windows and Mac OS machines have a printscreen function that will capture a picture of the browser window. The picture can subsequently be inserted into a program like Word. Students can print the image out and make annotations on the paper, or make annotations in Word or a graphics program. A general prompt for a screen annotation exercise is to explain the different features on the screen. This is a good way to develop and demonstrate an understanding of core gameplay. Another effective prompt is to take a screenshot and explain the current situation of the player.

Students can develop their skills of critical observation, analysis, and writing by studying a game just as they can a film, text, image, or other representation. The key to such essays is to teach and require students to provide detailed specific observations from the game to support their interpretation of it. Strictly speaking, essays on games can be divided into two types: those that focus on analyzing how the game represents the past, and those that evaluate the validity of those representations. Both are useful learning exercises. My next blog entry will consider how to locate and draw upon historical sources of evidence in order to craft an essay evaluating a game. Before engaging in a full-scale evaluation, however, it is necessary to understand what exactly the game is suggesting, hence the usefulness of analytical essays on core game models. The prompts for such essays generally use phrasing like: “What does [name of game] suggest about [historical topic]?” and the evidence comes from detailed observations about gameplay and feedback.

The following are just a few examples of written and illustrated work that can be based off of a game’s presentation of the past:

• A historical narrative of events in the game from the perspective of a character within the game.
• A speech for an in-game character justifying some action, drawing on historical sources.
• A letter or diary entry from characters who are underrepresented or missing from the game.

(Note: This blog entry is the fifth part of a six-part series. Read more on using games in the classroom in parts one, two, three, four, and six.)

Part Four dealt with activities and assessments focused on analyzing and understanding the models presented by a simulation game. Now it is time to consider exercises evaluating and critiquing the models in a game, determining the overall validity of the game as an interpretation. After a sample of activities we will consider the core principles that should guide all efforts to evaluate historical simulations as interpretations of the past.

Annotated screenshot assignments provide an excellent opportunity for students to demonstrate their understanding of game mechanics. The same is true of screenshots annotated with an eye to evaluating the game. The distinction in this case is that notes made on the screenshots should address the strengths and weaknesses of the game's historical interpretation.

For a quick research and evaluation exercise, students can find (or be provided with) a valid source that deals with an element of the game. In some cases an accessible primary source can be used. The students read the source and use it to corroborate or challenge the game. This can be done in a brief oral presentation, an annotated screenshot, a reflective write-up, or a more formal essay.

Examples:

• Read a primary source written by a Boston Loyalist and compare it to the    Loyalist reasoning expressed in Mission US: For Crown or Colony.
• Study a map of major army placements in the U.S. at any point in the    American Civil War and compare it to the setup for that same year in a    Civil War simulation.

These smaller-scale evaluations can pave the way for an excellent full-class discussion where each student presents his or her findings. As a summative exercise after all the presentations, each student can write a reflection or formal paper on the overall accuracy of the game.

A formal researched essay on the ways a game does and does not reasonably present the past is an excellent high-level summative assignment. It requires a real familiarity with the game and its models, knowledge of a set of historical evidence, and an ability to compare the two and consider what can and cannot be said about the past from the evidence available. The core prompt for such essays is straightforward: In what ways does the game effectively represent the past? In what ways does the game misrepresent the past? Any formal essays on these questions must be grounded in valid historical evidence and detailed descriptions of gameplay.

Formal discussions, where students are assessed on discussing and debating the merits of a historical simulation directly with their peers, is a fantastic form of authentic assessment. When students are placed into small groups—say three to five students—and the teacher is removed from a discussion, students must engage each other in true dialogue, not just search for the magic words they think the teacher wants to hear. Such formal discussions can result in spectacular displays of engagement, curiosity, and intellectual achievement on students’ parts.

Some time prior to the discussion, students should be given a set of one to four provocative questions about how the game presents the past and the accuracy of that presentation. They develop responses to the questions based on gameplay and study of relevant evidence discussed in class and assigned as homework. During the actual discussion they may bring notes and sources with them and they must work effectively as a group to explore the questions.

Though the exact specifications for research and evaluation assignments can vary widely there are several guidelines that should inform all serious efforts to critique simulation games.

1. Whenever it is feasible, students should craft their own research    questions. Doing so leverages the ability of simulations to inspire    questioning and provides students a far greater sense of investment in the    discussions they pursue. Even when the task is to argue the main    strengths and weaknesses of a game's historical interpretation, let    students decide what they think those main strengths and weaknesses are.
2. Criticisms must be based on valid evidence. Refer to valid historical    sources and, ideally, both primary and secondary sources. Reference to    primary sources and high-quality secondary sources, especially historians'    works, is the critical foundation of any exercise in historical criticism.
3. Criticism should focus on the core aspects of gameplay. One could spend    an eternity listing the details that a game represents well or misrepresents    —articles of clothing, names, types of weapons, exact figures. Such an    exercise misses the whole for its parts. The real questions should be about    the core gameplay, the strongest statements a game makes about the past.
4. Students should consider historical elements the game represents well    in addition to those it does not. Indeed when teaching students how to    handle historical interpretations it is a very good idea to reinforce for    them that, generally speaking, no historical interpretation is completely    valid or invalid. Accordingly, students should not fall into complacent    patterns of entirely accepting or rejecting a game. Instead they should    push themselves to support and critique. In doing so they can develop    their ability to see more than one viewpoint.
5. Remember that a simulation game is a human creation. Consider and    discuss why the designers made the game the way they did.    Understanding how this form of media portrays the past demands    considering the goals and constraints of game designers. It is vitally    important to be clear that, in many if not most cases, designers intend    their games to be entertaining and commercially viable. The goal then    should not be to criticize designers for failing to achieve some objective    standard of historical accuracy. Rather the goal is simply to understand    what shaped their particular game, their particular representation of the    past.

Years of working with simulation games have prompted me to re-examine and re-evaluate the content, methods, and skills of studying the past. Since last May, I have been slowly developing a new framework for using simulations games and simulation game thinking in the study of the past that I’d like to share in this last installment. This is still very much in the initial conceptual stages, but already proving successful in my own classes.

Spending time with simulation games suggests that countless human situations past and present can be studied as problem spaces. In this context, the term “problem space” borrows elements from the field of problem solving and game theory. A problem space in the historical or current political, economic, social, etc. sense can be likened to a simulation game. There are players with roles, though we would more likely term these players agents or actors. These players have motives and goals, though they may not always seek them or know them—the goals may not be rational or achievable. Player/agents have choices and strategies, though not all choices or strategies are always readily perceived, and those that observers outside the space identify may not have been choices at all at the time. Finally, the environment itself—the physical space, objects, and resources—offers affordances (aids to carrying out decisions and strategies) and constraints (limits to carrying out decisions and strategies). Additional affordances and constraints are posed by psychological and cultural factors.

That simulation games represent the world in these terms is self-evident, but it never hurts to have some specific examples:

Energyville
Player/Agent & Roles:

• A conflation of city manager, city planner, city council with (unrealistically) extensive power to make choices about fuel sources

Goals and Motives:

• To power the city for the future
• To minimize and balance the security, environmental, and economic impact of fuel sources (insofar as this earns higher scores in the game)

Choices and Strategies:

• Types of fuels to employ
• Balance of fuel types to employ

Affordances:

• Variety of fuel types available
• Complete authority over the fuel types to use
• Information on the impact of each fuel type

Constraints:

• Petroleum is required in some amount for vehicles
• Unpredictable future events can make certain fuel choice liabilities
• More advanced fuel possibilities cannot be used immediately

This only scratches the surface of ways one could fill in a chart like this. The point is that simulation games, as an interactive, goal-oriented, problem-solving medium, lend themselves to this type of structure.

Why use this problem space as a means for analyzing simulation games and historical settings? Beyond the value any effective strategy provides by presenting cognitive hooks to which students can attach new learning, problem space offers several particular advantages. First, this concept aids in moving beyond identification in history education to comprehension and analysis because it requires students to move beyond terms and information to look at the relationships between agents and their goals, choices, and environment. It also provides a flexible yet clearly applicable guideline for the usefulness of historical evidence and information. If an item helps fill out the elements of the problem space it is useful; otherwise, less so. When one cannot teach, learn, or study everything, and meaning has to be made, criteria for the most useful information can benefit students.

There is also the potential for greater engagement. The study of the past becomes more a matter of problem-solving rather than simply learning information. Addressing the perennial student question of “what's the point?” a problem space analysis sets up a world with independent actors with problems that must be solved. Emphasis shifts to choices and outcomes, actual and potential. Engagement is also generated by the potential to game with the content more—in other words, to think more about the agents and their choices, including why they decided against or never considered alternative choices.

Finally, I suggest that exploring the past as so many problem spaces fosters the kind of intellectual flexibility and creativity that 21st-century history education should promote. The ability to view the world in terms of the physical and intellectual interactions of agents with their own goals and choices carried out within affordances and constraints can only help students become the problem solvers of tomorrow.

How can this conceptual framework be put into practice? History educators can use simulation games to lead the way.

Play simulation games and analyze their problem spaces: Studying problem spaces in simulation games helps students gain familiarity with the concept and more readily apply it to situations beyond those in the game. Discussion of games becomes a discussion of choices, affordances, and constraints. To this end, teachers discussing simulation games should focus on the choices the players have and the obstacles and resources.

Assess the problem spaces in games in light of historical evidence: In critique, focus on how the game represents a historical problem space. When all is said and done, how reasonably, in the light of historical evidence, does the simulation game cast the player’s role and the choices available?

Start to analyze historical scenarios in terms of problem spaces: This is where simulation games, beyond being important tools for studying the past in their own right, can start to shape the way history is taught. In between readings, discussions, and lectures, have students diagram problem spaces. There are many ways one might do so. Click here to see a diagram representing one possibility. Players and roles are listed at the top, then goals, followed by choices. At the bottom left are affordances and motivations and at the bottom right are constraints and prohibitions.

Once students have sifted through the evidence and plotted out the problem space, they should be presented with some historical or hypothetical scenarios and consider how they think historical players could have and did respond given their situations. Here, the lessons of simulation gaming about the importance of choice and systems-thinking come full circle and students begin to game the past in another meaningful way.