Press Start to Learn: Long Beach State University Historians Create New Center for Video Game Study
LONG BEACH, Calif. (Oct. 25, 2018) – From the frontier camps of 19th Century America to the battle lines of 20th Century Europe, video game designers have often looked to history for inspiration. Now, Long Beach State University historians are taking critical looks at how video games use polygons and interactive narratives to interpret historical events.
History lecturers Jeffrey Lawler and Sean Smith established the CSULB Center for the History of Video Games and Critical Play as a place to examine how electronic entertainment and board games can shape players’ views of the past. The Center is a physical place to play and study games, and also has an online presence allowing its founders to post their thoughts on the intersection of gaming and history.
“Using all these types of games in the class can be very interesting, because it allows for a lot of questions and discourse about how games are using and talking about different forms of history,” Lawler said.
Lawler teaches courses in California history and the American West, a fictionalized version of which is the focus of Rockstar Games’ new Red Dead Redemption 2. Its predecessor drew heavily upon cinematic depictions of western outlaws and the end of frontier days. Trailers for the new game hint at similarly bloody imaginings of a lawless world.
“I teach a class on the American West, and pretty much to a person, everybody that takes that class comes in with the idea of gunslingers, saloons, and brothels. It’s if they just walked away from playing ‘Call of Juarez’ or ‘Red Dead Redemption,’” Lawler said. “And after a few weeks, they start to get the idea that their idea of the West itself has been mythologized. This really gets to the point where games inform a lot of our cultural understandings about the past and therefore, reading them critically becomes important.”
Smith teaches a course on early U.S. history, as well as a class called “Playing the Past,” which focuses on the way games represent history.
Popular franchises like “Assassin’s Creed” and “Call of Duty,” not to mention the classroom classic “The Oregon Trail,” draw upon imaginings of long-ago times. Students taking Smith’s class are themselves challenged to not only consider how games’ narratives may influence popular understandings of history, but also to design their own game with the intention of teaching a historical concept to players. Students design their works on Twine, an open-source game engine employing hypertext, a la a digital reinterpretation of the format “Choose Your Own Adventure” books made famous.
“It’s a real necessity to have a kind of lab space for them to come play games and have some experience so that they can develop that vocabulary and game literacy,” Smith said. “The hope of the class is kind of twofold: One, where we can encourage the study of video games as primary sources and as cultural objects for study. The second is teaching our students that alternative forms of history and historical narrative are important pedagogical tools, are important tools for learning history.”
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