The Handbook of Research in Social Studies Education (2008) notes that the teaching of social studies has not changed much over the past 50-100 years; yet, children have in ways they prefer to learn. Exposure to mass media, affordability of technological devices, and a growing expectation of immediacy among students are leading to a changing learning environment. Electronic content offers the ability to teach and we can design unique learning opportunities to deliver important content with appealing devices. For the past four years, we have taught a variety of electronic games to preservice teachers and observed their use with K-12 students. Below we highlight the games that preservice teachers found interesting to play and useful for their future teaching.

Our first foray into educational games was with River City, a well-developed online simulation designed for grades 5-9 students concerning a 19th-century town whose inhabitants are ill. Students try to find out the reasons for the spreading illness. Curiosity was stimulated by the game, but so were concerns. Our group wondered if they would be able to maintain classroom control and how much learning would result. Studies indicate that River City and similar games do produce learning (Dede et al., 2004) but they require extensive upfront teacher training and classroom time.

We found shorter, curriculum-based games a better fit with current classrooms and therefore, more attractive to teacher interest. Do I Have a Right? challenges players to learn constitutional amendments in a situated context. According to the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards, by the end of fourth grade students need to be able to explain how fundamental rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights contribute to the continuation and improvement of American democracy. Through easily understood stories presented in this online game, 4th-grade players learn what constitutes an amendment, what constitutes a legal case, and how to match cases with legal representation. Elementary preservice teachers found that they relearned the civics lessons they had forgotten through this game and indicated willingness to use this as a teaching tool in the future.

Other positively received elementary and middle school level electronic games included Privacy Playground, and Cybersense and Nonsense. These games help students prepare themselves for the online world with lessons on information literacy, netiquette, and how to protect their personal information. Information literacy education is extended in Plimouth Plantation through its use of primary documents that give accurate and multiple perspectives about the first Thanksgiving. Another well-received game, Panwapa Island helps young learners develop an awareness of the wider world around them, appreciate similarities and value differences between themselves and others, and develop responsibility for their actions.

At the secondary level, preservice teachers expressed interest in games that provided a forum for examination of current or past crucial issues in interesting ways: Dafur is Dying (genocide); Ayiti: The Cost of Life (effects of poverty); Peacemaker (Israeli-Palestinian conflict); Peace Doves (nuclear weaponry); and Food Force (distribution of food by the United Nations). These games involved participants and provoked discussions. In recently published Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011), Sherry Turkle laments that the technologically savvy generation is too busy to truly communicate or think. However, these social issue games have the potential to heighten players' consciousness about serious world issues and raise their concern for others. Because of its rich content, participants also enjoyed games from Making History, which had players inspect leadership challenges during World War II.

Games are so often equated with play that educational games still have an uphill battle convincing teachers and parents that the time expended to prepare and use these materials produces desired results in students' learning. Game advocates argue that a deeper, more satisfying learning takes place through gaming. We believe that the games we have discussed can enrich the curriculum. In order to become part of the educational mainstream, future games will need to have a tight match with the curriculum, be easily available and accessible, require minimal preparation for use, provide clear directions, employ simple navigation, and avoid extensive reading with limited interaction.

Note: This essay focuses on simulation games, defined as those that represent the real world in some defensible ways. Most serious digital games can be considered simulation games.

Without question historical simulation games offer effective tools to learn the skills of a historian and the content of history. Simulation games offer dynamic and manipulable models of the world, interactive interpretations of how and why things have happened in the past.

To offer just a few examples:

• The hypothesis that geography dictates the success of civilizations is    embodied in the Civilization series of games.
• Political Machine 2008 suggests that a presidential candidate can win an    election by saying what the voters in each state want to hear.
• The SimCity series includes the core mechanic that raising taxes increases    the unhappiness of residents.
• Most nation- and city-building simulations advance    materialist/functionalist interpretations of the past where even features    like religion and happiness are measured primarily by their effects on the    productivity and growth of populations.

These are defensible—though certainly debatable—interpretations of the world of the type that can be found in modern historians' writings. They are certainly the sorts of proposals students should learn to evaluate.

...simulations offer great opportunities for students to test out assumptions and dissect interpretations of reality, engaging them in ways that are difficult with other media.

Unlike the text versions of these and other theses, the power of the historical interpretations in simulation games comes from their interactivity. A lecture or reading, for example, can present the problems of scarcity all societies face, but the presentation is fixed and cannot be manipulated.

In an effective simulation game, however, the player can face virtual conditions of scarcity, make decisions, and see the effects of those decisions over time. Better still, a simulation game can be played many times, and players can test how different decisions lead to different outcomes. Because simulation games are fundamentally sets of related variables, the player can set some variables (say, the tax rate), and see their effects on others (say, the job growth rate). This means simulations offer great opportunities for students to test out assumptions and dissect interpretations of reality, engaging them in ways that are difficult with other media.

Games Can Impart Historians' Skills

Playing and analyzing simulation games as dynamic interpretations can help develop important skills of the historian, including the skills necessary to:

1. Pose meaningful questions: The variety of interactive experiences posed     by a simulation game can inspire varied, deep questions from students.
2. Evaluate and analyze sources of evidence: Simulations are    interpretations and models, often made by commercial entertainers. They    must be criticized and evaluated, not taken at face value. Doing so in the    historian's sense requires testing simulations against other sources of    evidence.
3. Analyze dynamic systems: Simulations are dynamic systems that model    real-world dynamic systems. Therefore they are closer analogies to the    world they represent than static (fixed and/or non-interactive) media    forms. This can help learners conceptualize the "moving parts" of real-   world systems more fully.
4. Visualize the social, cultural, and material constraints faced by those in    the past: The prime function of a simulation game is to put players into    the virtual roles of past peoples and societies, and challenge them to solve    problems within constraints.
5. Form and critique arguments about causes and effects in human    societies: Whenever a player feels that something in a simulation game is    flawed or unfair, they are commenting on the models of cause and effect    in the game and, by extrapolation, making a comment about their senses    of cause and effect in the world.

Simulations have a promising future in the teaching of history as a more investigative, arguable, immersive, evidence-based discipline, rather than simply as a subject consisting of established facts.

There are two critical requirements, however, for using simulation games as serious tools for studying the past. First, simulations must be checked against other sources of evidence, not passively accepted at face-value. In such a critique, both the strengths and flaws of the game's models are useful. Students can learn just as much by researching and exposing a flawed model as by supporting a valid proposition.

Second, the teacher must play the critical role as the expert guide to using historical skills in the class. The teacher is the conductor and facilitator, ensuring that students formally observe the games they play, ask questions about the games and the world, and form criticisms based on historical evidence. The teacher reminds students what it means to think as historians and guides them in forming their own evidence-based conclusions.

Employed effectively, simulation games can train students to be sophisticated systems-thinkers and analysts of evidence, open to many possibilities for causes and effects, but knowing the difference between valid and invalid arguments. They can play a powerful role training students how to use the skills of professional historians to be effective and positive agents in the 21st century.

As interactive media, digital history games have the potential to capture students' interest and imagination and engage them in historical thinking in ways that few other "non-participatory" media offer. Broadly defined, games are packaged problem spaces that can require players to apply strategy and disciplined responses to overcome obstacles and achieve goals. Historical dilemmas as posed in games are still ill-defined and subject to the interpretive challenges of a humanistic discipline. But game systems are dynamic in ways that document-based questions and narratives of the past, either in film or print, cannot be. Games can enable students to imaginatively enter a constructed historical world, interact with research-based social and political archetypes, and contemplate the consequences of their actions.

The potentialities we see in digital history games are only partially realized in existing history games. But these possibilities can be seen in sources as disparate as The Sims, the iPad-based Operation Ajax, the classroom social studies simulations of the 1970s, and roleplaying games such as the Fable and Assassin's Creed series of console video games. These are simulation and roleplaying games in which social and behavioral rules and characters' motives are embedded, not obvious, and must be discerned over time.

Historical fiction and primary and secondary documents do not change based on students' readings, nor can they alert students to possible misreadings. That sort of feedback is ordinarily the domain of teachers and peers. But history simulations can become practice spaces in which students work on elements of historical understanding. Much like a well-crafted classroom unit that allows for discovery and meaningful application of skills in context, well-designed history games can call upon students to engage in historical perspective-taking, to consider cause and effect and contingency, and to draw upon warranted evidence to support conclusions—all as means by which to overcome problems. Based on failure (in the best formative sense) and feedback, students can refine their understanding as they play to win, or even play to explore narrative outcomes in an historical account.

However, the devil is in the details of a specific game's design. Like any other instructional medium, digital history games will only be as effective as the quality of design—instructional AND game—underlying them. Further, games are efficacious tools for formal instruction only insofar as their utility is considered in the context of broader curricular activity systems, including students' social and cognitive development, teachers' practices and beliefs about what and how students should learn, and competing curriculum and assessment priorities.

Based on our classroom research around several middle school history games being created by CPB's American History and Civics Initiative, we suggest four broad areas for consideration when contemplating how best to design and use history games for education:

1. Instructional design
   A history game needs an instructional design that links specific features and affordances of the particular game genre (e.g., roleplaying or simulation) to history-specific learning goals. For example, we have found that a historical roleplaying game can foster students' understanding of different historical perspectives on the American Revolution when 1) players interact with characters who represent contrasting positions in the social/political order; and 2) success in the game depends on a player's growing sensitivity to those characters' perspectives (i.e., player loses ground in the game by not attending to those differences).
2. Teacher supports
   Teachers need clear and explicit classroom materials and activities to help them "mine" students' game experience and link their implicit and emergent understandings to more formal history knowledge and skills. Games by themselves don’t teach, but they can create rich conditions for history learning. Effective classroom games will segment game play, allowing pauses for students to discuss their decisions, read primary documents, work with vocabulary, use maps and timelines to generalize from the specifics of the game, and speculate about causes, motives, and outcomes. These activities might all be IN games, but students still need to actively construct historical understandings based on their game experiences. This posits game play as "preparation for future learning."
3. The limits of games
   The limitations of games for history learning need to be kept in mind by designers, teachers, and students. History games generally strive to re-present and re-create historical worlds in ways that are compelling and have immediacy for players. Even though at their best they can put students in an active stance toward historical knowledge, they are themselves constructions and interpretations of history. At some point during a learning experience, critical thinking needs to be turned toward the game itself as an interpretation of the past and students need to ask what its take on the historical events is, what it emphasizes, and what it leaves out.
4. Research needed
   We clearly need research into history games as environments for disciplinary learning. The complex cluster of abilities required to frame problems, attempt solutions, attend to (and filter out) feedback, and modify practices are aspects of metacognition whose presence cannot simply be assumed. To what extent do students connect feedback to practice? Can they reflect on failure in a history game as a means to reconsider their problem solving strategies? How does students' prior knowledge about an historical era, or even literacy strategies, influence their learning with a game? What skills do teachers need to help students mine their game experiences for history learning?

What is history? For that matter, what is physics or civics? These are all terms we often use to name "subject matter" ("content") in school. But there is another meaning to these terms. Physics is a set of tools (and these tools include facts and formulas, but much more) used to DO physics. Civics is a set of tools used to engage in civic participation. And history is a set of tools used to engage in doing history. So let's refer to "history/physics/civics (content)" and "history/physics/civics (doing)." School is usually about history (content), that is, an information-rich record of what (supposedly) happened in the past. Historical research is about history (doing), that is, how one goes about discovering and explaining what happened in the past.

What is a video game? A video game is just a well-designed set of problems (of any sort) that must be solved in order to achieve one's chosen goals, where the price of failure is relatively low so that exploration and risk-taking can be encouraged. The term "serious games" is a bad one, because it implies a high cost of failure, as well as a lack of the sort of "fun" people get when they have chosen to do something they really want to do and like to do. Civilization is a successful commercial game, a history game, and addictively fun to play. Fun, play, engagement, choice, difficulty, and learning are not disconnected things, but integrally related.

Games could be one good tool for learning history (doing). This is so, in part, because there is a part—a very important part—of history (doing) that is already a type of game. I can make this game-like part of history (doing) clear with a story about an encounter I once had at a conference after a talk. Someone came up to me and said Civilization (the game) could not be about history because history happened one and only one way and in the course of a game of Civilization history can have different outcomes.

But one crucial enterprise of history (doing) is asking why things happened the way they did. And a very good way of investigating this question is to ask how things could have happened otherwise. In fact—and here is where games come in—we can investigate this question by building games that challenge players to see how they can get history, or even our present state of affairs, to plausibly have worked out differently. The players could even be asked to work out how different futures might occur and thereby see that history, as an explanatory science, is as much about the present and the future as it is about the past.

One example: The vast majority of the evolution of horses took place in North America (see this link). Only about 10,000 years ago did horses cross into the Old World over an Arctic-Asia land bridge. Then, about 2,000 years later, horses disappeared from the Americas. Perhaps they were hunted to extinction by ever-growing human populations. Whatever the reason, they were gone from the New World. The submergence of the Arctic-Asia land bridge ensured they could not return. Horses were not seen again in the New World until the Spaniards used them to great advantage as they conquered much of that world, against great numerical odds, in the 16th century.

How might history have been different had horses not gone extinct in the New World? What role did the disappearance of the horse in the New World, but not in the Old World, play in the Spanish conquest in comparison to things like native religious beliefs and conflicts among native groups already in place before the Spanish arrived? These are the sorts of questions one could play out in a game like Civilization, though one perhaps made in a more special-purpose way. They are also questions about history when one sees history as an explanatory enterprise. They also let us see that history is not, in reality, the history of humans alone, but of intricate networks of changing relationships between humans, animals, objects, tools, environments, and beliefs. Seen this way, in my view, it is a remarkable achievement we have managed to make history one of the most boring and disliked subjects in school.

The title of this roundtable inquires whether Serious Games are relevant or more "educational fluff." To be blunt, the only way a critic could come to that conclusion would be from complete illiteracy with games as a form of media. There are writers far more persuasive than this author to cover the value of learning games: I suggest James Paul Gee's classic What Videogames Have to Teach About Learning and Literacy. (Editor's Note: James Gee also contributes to this roundtable.)

I hope the reader will forgive the author for treating the "fluff" accusation casually.

When designing a game for learning, the origins of design decisions are the stated learning objectives. But history-based learning objectives often suffer from an identity crisis—some objectives are about reporting the facts of what happened in the past, and some are about performing historical practices (research, source evaluation, synthesis, applying historical models to current events, etc.). A design dichotomy emerges: should the player be embedded in a historical moment in time, or be embedded as a historian? Let's explore both types of games.

Historical Experience Games are games that ask the player to step into an identity plucked directly out of the history books. Oregon Trail would be the premiere example of the genre, placing the player directly into the shoes of a pioneer heading down the historical Oregon Trail.

Historical Experience Games leverage several of the strengths of games as learning tools. Space only affords this answer time for one:

• Advantage: Identity
  Games often ask the player to enter the role of a hero—someone who has a set of abilities and goals in a world. In a game like Nobunaga's Ambition, for example, the player is placed in feudal Japan as a warlord, determined to unify the country under one banner: theirs. This role can be ripped right out of history books, and lets players see the world from whatever place and time that is chosen.
• Disadvantage: Agency versus Accuracy
  Placing the player in a role with a set of abilities empowers them to think and act as a different person than their day-to-day identity. But those choices are in direct tension with the idea of historical accuracy. A game like Civilization, for example, offers the player the ability to march through time as an entire culture and people, but that level of agency can lead to the Incas destroying the world in 1980 with nuclear weapons, or America never existing.

Historical Practice Games are games that take a different tack than Historical Experience Games. These games attempt to place the player in the role of a historian, asking the player to take on the abilities (and limitations) of historical practice itself. This is a much less commonly explored path for historical learning games, but examples do exist.

One contemporary example is the in-development Operation Lapis, which asks the player to (in the words of its project page) "discover and subsequently translate the Lapis Saeculōrum (The Stone of the Ages)."

This game has directly embedded its own reference resource for the player to research and derive information from, which is an interesting starting point for historical practices in games.

• Advantage: Complicated Verbs
  Designers and subject matter experts can work together to create play-based actions in a digital space that embody historical practices. For example, the iCivics game Argument Wars can be used to connect evidence with points of legal argumentation, with a judge providing feedback for each connection the player makes.
• Disadvantage: Abstraction
  Games based on embodying historical practices will likely employ a visual metaphor to express their goals—the cards played in Argument Wars represent arguments and evidence, for example. The model in the game requires the player to be able to think about the practice in an abstract way and transfer that experience into the real-world activity.

There is much more to be said about the design decisions behind historical learning games. However, the fundamental compass to steer design and development choices remains the same: the learning objectives that must be identified before any other design decisions can be made. What the designer intends the player to learn will readily sort out which core direction a historical game should take.