Student guest bloggers is a brilliant idea on a professional blog:
I am very intrigued as to how the ways in which you “live history” in these games end up showing you the ways in which historical events have played out in real life. I wonder if your empathy for the people within this different time and place is higher because of your ability to quite literally walk a (virtual) mile in their shoes.
Although I really enjoyed hearing about how you have taken these historical games and identified interests worthy of further reading and exploration, are there other ways in which these games go further into what is possible for us to understand about human interaction within these contexts. Have you analyzed the ways in which the whole scope of the interactions between in-game characters have to be designed and programmed by a team of people? And what if you were to begin programming a set of interactions that were true to life. Wouldn’t you have to go even deeper still into the history in order to get it right?
I guess all of these questions brings me to the idea that the creation (and playing) of the game itself could be seen as a way of diving into history and understanding it from the inside out. How can we better use video games (and other interactive simulations) to frame our understanding for sociology and history?
via Gaming with the Histocrats: Everything I Learned About History I Learned From Video Games….
