Simulating History

Since posting the 60-second “Simulating History” video on Youtube and our website, I have turned my attention to exploring the manner in which our work may be expressed through a short documentary. Having generated some questions with our brief “teaser”, I am now focusing more on the ideas and the practices of The Simulating History Research Lab.

Simply put, our work in the lab is to employ technology for the purposes of learning and teaching, and our way to reach others with this message is shaped by my understanding of technology as inherently liberating (McClean, 2007)[1]. For example, working with a high-performance nonlinear editing system such as Final Cut Pro and its Motion application is indeed liberating in the sense of gaining more audiovisual eloquence. McClean rightly describes the technological power of visual effects in filmmaking as liberating — the virtual camera (computer generated camera effect) opens the door for different ways of expression. Another example that I have experienced closely is connected to Final Cut Motion, with its wide array of options available for controlling and combining layers of different media into one video segment.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29758453@N08/2778401068/

Having the ability to restructure media components in real time and virtual space augments the message’s communicative power, rather than just increasing the levels of interaction. These new, liberating tools help us release our imagination, and communicate our thoughts more compellingly.

[1] McClean, Schilo. T. (2007) Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

My current research at Brock University centers around the ability of computers and games to simulate and represent how systems work in the context of history. Many historians have used agent-based simulations to represent battle scenarios or migration patterns. But these simulations have limited interaction: essentially the researcher interacts (or plays) with the system to test his scenarios. In contrast, games can allow historians and their audience the opportunity to explore counter-factual scenarios. Games are also ‘persuasive’; they can represent how an argument about how a system works (see Ian Bogost). I am using Benjamin Franklin as a case study of the spreading of enlightened and revolutionary ideas. My research project describe a game based on this case study where the main game mechanic is the spreading of ideas. In this way, I am looking to the past to find new forms of interaction and game play.

(cross-posted from Electric Archaeology: Digital Media for Learning and Research)

PMOG: the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. This is a game you play while browsing the internet, going about your daily internet related tasks… think webquest with mines, treasure chests, and quests.

You play the game by adding an extension to your Firefox browser. This browser lets you ’sense’ the game world, the activities overlaid on the plain old mundane net. Then, in the words of the game’s creators:

“This unconventional massively multiplayer online game merges your web life with an alternate, hidden reality. The mundane takes on a layer of fantastic achievement. Player behavior generates characters and alliances, triggers interactions in the environment and earns the player points to spend online beefing up their inventory. Suddenly the Internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but rather a hackable, rewarding environment!”

What does this entail? Again, from the PMOG site:

Prank Your Friends Across the Web< Using Mines that steal Datapoints	Leave Gifts on Web Sites Using Crates to hold Tools or currency
Make or Follow Paths Online Missions!	Develop a Rich User Profile Passively, just by surfing the web.

So what does this have to do with internet research skills? Well, it occurred to me that I can tell my students over and over again what constitutes a ‘good’ site versus a ‘bad’ site, but if I’m not there watching them, it never sinks in. Given that a lot of my teaching is done via distance, this is a problem.

But what if, as a class, we were all PMOGing? I could imagining setting a question the students would need to research in order to write an answer - maybe leaving their responses on a wiki somewhere - and then sending them out into the net with PMOGed enabled browsers. The game’s stats would instantly record how much work online the students were putting in, and if I set mines on all of the lousy sites I can find - the ones they typically go to, like the wikipedia page on Julius Caesar - and treasure chests on the good ones (like say a page from the British School at Rome, or from an online journal) they’d soon learn the difference. I could also set up quests that would take them to a number of good sites, or sites with opposing points of view, and require them to go to pages supporting or contesting the views… and of course, students could leave their own mines and treasures, and so hindering/helping their peers…

It would be quite neat, actually. Almost like laser tag in the library, capturing-the-flag…

For the past several months I have been exploring different ways to promote the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 in Niagara. To date, my research has been largely devoted to academic articles investigating hybrid and virtual reality along with historical research aimed at key people and places in Niagara during the War of 1812. The greatest challenge has been finding a way to bridge Niagara’s rich historical background to the digital world so that visitors can explore and learn about Niagara’s history in an immersive and entertaining way.

My research has led me to focus on hybrid reality, which would take key historical sites in Niagara and combine them with relevant digital content. The goal is to encourage travelers to discover Niagara’s historical sites in a traditional fashion while employing the latest virtual technologies to make it a rewarding and enjoyable experience.

The class projects from this year’s crop of students in the Interactive Arts & Science program at Brock University are now online… full details here. The theme is ‘Niagara 1812′, when the Niagara peninsula (location of Brock University, no coincidence) was the flashpoint for hostilities between the young American republic and Great Britain. Lundy’s Lane, Queenston Heights: famous battles every Canadian should know!The projects are very impressive. They come in a variety of flavours - flash, 3d, a mix of text & bird’s-eye battle… the games are aimed at the secondary school level, and each game’s website comes with suggestions for student or teacher use. Well done!

“From November 2006 to April 2007, Brock University students in Professor Kevin Kee’s IASC3F90 course (”Survey of Humanities Computing”, in the Interactive Arts and Science Program) and Professor Vladimir Wojcik’s COSC3F00 course (”Software Development”, in the Department of Computer Science) developed these computer games for elementary and secondary school history education.”

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From Emily Short, a premier writer of Interactive Fiction:

Interactive fiction is increasingly being used in junior high and high school classrooms to encourage reading and teach problem-solving skills; it is also approached critically in college and graduate courses on digital and new media studies, and used as an example project in courses on computer programming and game design [more]

* “Exploratory Learning Through
Educational Simulation & Games”, San Diego State University, 2006
* “Interactive Fiction Gaming for the Classroom”, TexasGames.net
* Voices of Spoon River, an IF game designed to instruct students in literature
* “The Pause that Distresses”, Brendan Desilets on using IF to teach literacy

A mod for Civilization III - The History Canada Game

“The year is 1534… Play the New World

A strange, pale-faced man named Jacques Cartier arrives on the shores of the Baie de Gaspé accompanied by a crew of 61 men. He raises a cross on the shore emblazoned with the French coat of arms.

To Iroquois chief Donnacona, whose 500 followers live just down the St. Lawrence, Cartier’s intentions couldn’t be clearer. But these settlers bring with them powerful weapons, advanced technologies, and promises of great partnership to come. All they want is to take Donnacona’s two sons back to France with him.

What would you do? Welcome the French as your newest allies? Or defend your homeland with extreme prejudice, and probably your life?

Whats next? You decide.

The History Canada Game lets you relive, replay and even rewrite Canada’s history. Play as the English to expand your empire. Play as the Huron to defend your homeland. Wage wars, make peace and explore new lands…the future of Canadian history is in your hand.”

The decisions we make when we try to simulate an historical period - especially in a video game - are only part of the ‘rhetoric’ that playing the game embodies. If we are making the game from scratch, like our game set during the Montreal Plague of 1885, we can control that rhetoric from the word go. The other strategy is to employ an existing game and to modify its rules and behaviours. One of the most sophisticated examples of this latter strategy is Revolution. The full article is part of a series; some food for thought:

Our first decision was to forego coding Revolution from scratch and make it as a mod of an existing game. Using an existing engine enabled rapid prototyping and design. Using an existing engine also improved production quality - graphics and sound would already be at a level students would associate with professional games. Since many game companies offer modification tools to consumers for sharing new content, we wanted to explore the advantages of modding for developing serious games.

After much consideration, we settled on the Neverwinter Nights toolset. Neverwinter Nights is an RPG series for the PC that was specifically designed by its makers, Bioware Corp., to support modding projects. There was already a very robust culture of player-made NWN mods, which we could tap for inspiration and experience. We wanted to create a socially dynamic world where students would interact with both player-controlled and non-player-controlled characters, and NWN was built for character conversation, a feature we felt was crucial to the social world we wanted to model.

Camper and Weiss continue -

We wanted students to learn how a colonial society worked by interacting with a system, a system designed to embody the ideas we intended. Yet we didn’t want the conventions of the NWN toolset (shaped by the commercial role-playing game genre) to transform our historical content in undesired ways. It was not always easy to leverage NWN’s existing design limitations in ways that helped, not hurt, our pedagogical goals.

Accurate historical dress, for example, was challenging. In Colonial Williamsburg, men would remove their hats when entering a house. However, in the NWN toolset, hat models are not separate from head models. We could not effectively remove a hat without removing the character’s entire head. So we were stuck with characters that either wore hats or were perpetually hatless. We decided to have hats on at all times. This was not 100% historically accurate, but it was less inaccurate than the alternative.

We also had a great deal of difficulty managing violence in NWN. Leaving violence out of a revolutionary setting would not convey the proper historical content. On the other hand, we’d have a disaster if we let students fight whomever they wanted at any time. Our solution was to allow students to be violent, but to have consequences. If one character punches another, they will be briefly arrested and released. While the law in 1775 was not nearly this forgiving or swift, this solution at least kept the students in the simulation and engaged with the historical setting.

Given that there was so much of NWN we could not change, we wanted to at least ensure that the conversation system would enhance the fidelity of our historical simulation. Luckily, it turned out to work better than we ever imagined.

We have posted a ‘white paper’, a discussion piece concerning the Theory & Practice of History Simulation, over on the ‘Theory & Practice‘ page. We’d appreciate any discussion or comments you might have!