Developing concepts and tools useful to electronic

The Computer Games Journal: Whitsun 2012

Developing concepts and tools useful to electronic games from and for history Pierre Corbeil 1 1

Drummondville, Quebec

Article Information Received: February 2012 Accepted: April 2012 Available: online May 2012 Key words: game design, time, feedback, technology, history About the author: Pierre Corbeil holds degrees from the University of Toronto (Canada) and from the Université de Montréal (Québec). With a career in war gaming, historical games,and inter cultural games, he became interested in entrepreneurship and has published a collection of games on that subject, Entreprendre par le jeu. Recently, he received NASAGA's coveted Ifill-Raynolds Award for Lifetime Contribution to the field of gaming. He believes games favour invention over classification and defines history as the illusion of reality recreated generation after generation. He still plays war games and writes science fiction novels.

Abstract The effort to develop specific games to help specific learning is a serious and promising endeavor. Like any serious endeavor, it requires application and concentration over generations. The experience of one generation must be made available to help the next avoid certain pitfalls and traps. The author's experience, which includes some deliberate research and some theorizing, has led him to identify traps that menace the computer game designer, from and for history, but also in other fields. The traps discussed here include going too quickly from good idea to game, the neglect of the variables of time and feedback, the desire to communicate a right answer, the desire to be fun, and the trap of cool technology, particularly the fascination with graphics. . Copyright of the authors ©2012 • Reproduction rights owned by TuDocs Ltd ©2012

1: Introduction Almost twenty years ago, Schick (1990) identified four major fields in which the computer would be helpful to the teacher of history: class work, including authoring tools, study guides, and diagnostics; communications, using word and idea processors and telecommunications; information management, by which he meant mostly databases (the field is somewhat wider to-day); and simulations and games, for experimentation and understanding. Corbeil (1999) a decade later suggested that computers offered to historians two possibilities that were new additions to the armory of the science, as opposed to faster or better tools for doing the same work, such as word processing (basically a better typewriter): the interrogation of databases in a semi-experimental method, with statistical tools for example, and simulation games as a study of possible worlds. The present work poses the further question of how electronic games can contribute something new to the study of history, though the question is valid for all sciences that attempt to study human societies and human behavior.

Copyright of the author ©2012 Reproduction rights owned by TuDocs Ltd ©2012 www.computergamesjournal.com

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Offering an answer to the question requires firstly an answer to questions about the use of games and simulations as tools for the study of history. The question about electronic games is essentially the one originally asked about games and history: how does electronic technology add something to the use of games that is really new to the practice (as opposed to simply doing something more efficiently, such as the acceleration of settling combats from an hour long process to an almost instantaneous one)? Since the gaming industry appears to be essentially technologically driven, by both graphics and game engines, this fundamental question must be addressed, as part of any serious effort to build up a body of experimental observations and, hopefully, theoretical tools and measures. Young game designers, or young educators attempting to use electronic games, have the possibility of retracing the steps of the gaming field from the days of the pioneers, which I will identify as the decade of the 1960's. For these younger designers, it is useful to summarize some basic definitions that have been hammered together since those days, definitions of games, simulations, puzzles, and other works. The paper will explain briefly what the author has discovered about the impact of games on learning, drawing from his experience and experiments; it will point out the principal traps that today's cool technology lays for teachers and designers; finally, the author will conclude with some musings concerning the addition that computer games could add to the conception and methods of history.

2: Understanding games requires a lifetime I remember a friend of my father's, in 1954 I believe, explaining his apprenticeship as a painter in Ireland, when Ireland provided artists and artisans, and not technical support. His first job had been to grind up the chunks of color powder to mix the paint. Similarly, I trained on cutting and gluing the game maps and counters of the first paper and cardboard battle games. The 1960's gamers tried many approaches to their designs, and the hopeful and innovative would provide materials for assembly, often because they simply did not have the resources needed to actually publish finished materials. My first games were actually battle games played with lead soldiers, properly called miniatures. In 1962, the Avalon Hill company, since swallowed by Hasbro, published the classic Gettysburg battle game. Since then, Simulation Publications (Decision Games now owns the right to most of Simulation’s titles) and other smaller companies have published hundreds of paper and cardboard battle games. As a college teacher, I naturally experimented with several paper and cardboard (sometimes wood) games in most of my classes. I did not become a teacher so that I could experiment with games, but as a teacher I determined to experiment, originally because I remained unconvinced that all the lectures I had attended had been very efficient as learning tools. Facts, or data, can often be simply transmitted or read, but the construction of knowledge requires experimentation, or trial-and-error. I suppose this makes me a kind of closet constructivist, though my models and opinions are usually the result of my own experiments or mistakes. A useful impact of games, I think, is that they vaccinate against group thinking. My students clearly learned when playing the games in class, but they did not necessarily all learn the same thing. Of course, this explains most of the resistance to the use of games in schools or even training, since the objective of most teaching is to move the group toward the right answer.


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3: Games, simulations and puzzles War games have structural constraints. They are complex, detailed, and time-consuming. War games also have a predictable format, since units, terrain, and weaponry are historical facts. They must respect a rationalist point of view, since action and result must be linked in an understandable manner. They have as their subject matter, by definition - aggression and struggle - more than the usual competition of games, it being understood that competition is a defining characteristic of games (Simonsen, 1978). While a war game is a particular type of game, it is also a defining paradigm of games. The game must be an activity, in which the participants are competing for an object. The activity is governed by rules that are susceptible to explanation and that are clearly described for the understanding of the participants. To be worth playing, a game must provide a challenge, choices of strategy, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, some sense of personal risk taking based on analysis and some visible, or at least perceptible, feedback (and striking feedback is a plus) (Corbeil, 2000). A key element of a game is, therefore, that many tactics and many outcomes are possible. When only one solution is possible, we have before us a puzzle, and not a game. Solving a puzzle is backwards engineering, in which the solver reconstructs the steps taken by the creator of the puzzle. So-called cooperative games, popular when games first entered the consciousness of teachers, are not games, because of this principle. Since there is in fact only one solution, that which allows the players to work together, a cooperative game is in fact a puzzle. Bernard Suits (Suits, 1982) defined game playing as follows: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by the rules, where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such an activity.” Suits (1982) reminds us that the frontier is between reality and games, not between some games and others, or between some activities and others. Playing a game is always a chosen activity, and the results are not transferable into the real world. It may seem that the results are transferable in such games as baseball, in which some participants receive fabulous sums of money, but the salaries of professional players are a reflection of their symbolic value to the spectators. Just this year, a group of essays discussed whether the Montréal Canadiens hockey team was not, in fact, the central element of a religious phenomenon. The sports world does not invalidate the basic nature of a game, as written by Suits. In fact, it could be argued that the ease in which professionals move from one team to the other demonstrates the fundamental fact that Suits identifies. The concept of game does not necessarily include the concept of fun. Caillois (1958) divides games into four great categories: i: games of competition, regulated, defined and purged of chance, called agon; ii: games of chance, where the only determinant is chance, called alea; iii: games of imitation, in which there is pretend or role-playing, called mimicry (Caillois uses the English word); and, iv: games which aim to create delirium and temporary madness, called ilinx. Caillois places all games on a spectrum, ranging from paida (pure creativity), to ludus (pure effort). Therefore, any game can be classified according to the relative weight of the four characteristics, and on a scale from pure fun to greater and greater challenges. In actual games, all the elements are likely to be present, defined and limited by each other. Having fun, in the ordinary usage, is what


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Caillois calls ilinx a “temporary madness that generates exhilaration and a kind of drunkenness, like that consequent on the use of drugs or alcohol”. A game player voluntarily makes the effort of doing the activity - doing nothing is the epitome of being unamused - and even a game of chance requires the decision to play by the rules and accept unfavorable results. The pleasure of games is found in the satisfaction of having understood and defeated the constraints of the game, more successfully than ones opponent(s), even when attaining that satisfaction was not much fun. Indeed, play is not about fun: it is what links instinct and imagination with politics and social reconstruction (Cox 1973). The war games on which I trained, and which are still played, are also called simulations. A simulation, according to Barry Lawson, chairman of NASAGA (Kelleher, 1980), is simply a model of something. A tendency to use the word simulation as a synonym or a substitute for the word game has crept into usage in the educational gaming community. I suspect this is because clients, both public and private, are suspicious of a game as a time-wasting activity; the client is conscious of the lack of fit between game and reality, and therefore assumes that it will not be productive in the real world. Some games are simulations, because they construct their rules and objectives from a real situation, and the games I used or designed were simulations of a historical context, which my students intended to understand. Not all simulations are games, far from it, and most games are not simulations. It is true that some simulations can be turned into games by adding competitive constraints. The distinction between games and simulations, and their occasional intersection, is a major consideration in identifying variables that make games useful as learning tools for history in my experience.

4: Learning with games A game used in a classroom or as a training experience certainly suspends convention and temporarily removes constraints. Removing constraints is an essential part of the learning experience. Weick and Westley (in Klabbers, 2003) have argued that learning and organizing are antithetical processes. Learning requires disorganization and increased variety. To organize is to forget and reduce variety. Participation in a game is a process of disorganization; the variety of situations and variety of approaches to a problem increase. Highly organized institutions, such as large enterprises and educational systems, resist disorganization and automatically resist learning, which may seem paradoxical in connection with schools, although anyone with experience of real schools knows this to be a fact. Resistance to games as learning tools can also come from resistance to disorganization, which may or may not produce temporary madness and fun. Learning with a game is a trial and error experience. To learn from a game, the participant must first learn the game (Laveault and Corbeil, 1990). Mastering the functions and tactics of the game is necessary if the participant is to discover anything useful from the variables that are in the mechanics of the game. It follows that the game must be played long enough for the participants (or most of them, to be practical) to master the game. The more complex the game - and many of the computer games of today are unquestionably complex - the more time is required both to learn the mechanics and to test the variables of the game. Any serious attempt at using games as learning tools must consider time as a central variable, and not just as a practical constraint. Time is required for any organic process, if we assume that learning is an organic process. Also the steps taken by the student from understanding the rules, to understanding the strategies, to understanding the historical process under study, are not regular. Much of the time is spent learning the game, and learning the history is concentrated in the last hours of the process (Corbeil, 1999a).


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Learning with a game must also provide for alternative results. A major obstacle is the insistence of the teachers that the participants ultimately reach the right conclusion. Naturally, they have come to certain conclusions and wish their students to complete their training convinced of the validity of these conclusions. This is a natural sentiment, that of the parent worried for his child, and it is compounded in old age by the sinking feeling that wells up upon the discovery that scientific models confidently explained for thirty years are being dismantled by new data. The importance of dates and facts as the building blocks of history may obstruct understanding a game that helps understand even if the wrong side wins the (simulated) war. In too many games the material is beaten and shaped so that eventually only one type of behavior or only one choice of solution is possible, which brings us back to the puzzle. The participants in such a one-way-only exercise are trying to solve the puzzle of the creator's right answer. Such an exercise is a thinly disguised operation of guessing what answer the teacher wants, the very antithesis of the thinking behind experiential learning, that personal experiment and trial and error are the surest foundations of integrated learning. Too many war games (I will name none) suffer from a tendency to work backward from the result. This is poor history, since no event has only one possible resolution. A good historical game offers paths and options but is not weighted in favor of the actual historical resolution.

5: History is a construction Historians in their daily work gather up bits and pieces of matter, yellowed letters and old newspapers and broken gravestones and out-of-date advertising and rusted weapons, and try to discover something about the owners and users of these bits, asking questions e.g. “How did they see the world, and what was real to them?” “What did they have in mind when they did this or that?” Historians assume that the owners and users under study did actually live, and die, in a real and physical world: they are not figments of the imagination. But documentation only supplies the building blocks of historical understanding. Too much documentation is as bad as not enough. Jacques Le Goff said he was comfortable as a medievalist situated between antiquity's dearth and modern history plethora (Where and when did he say this? Reference please). The key to understanding is neither more documentation, nor even a time machine. Historical actors had less sense of the relationships between variables than later historians, which truth is well illustrated in Connie Willis' novel, Doomsday Book (Willis, 1992). Historians try to understand past situations and actors through the limits of hindsight and contemporary perspective; this is not easily achieved, for example if we imagine a modern North American student trying to understand the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. Consequently, the possibility of using a tool to put on the other fellow's shoes is very attractive. Not only are several outcomes possible, but the improbability of the actual results can be discovered, and the errors of hindsight can be washed away. Much of the so-called history of science, as taught in science faculties, is the description of the unfailing steps in which the heroes worked towards designing the contemporary world. Other important variables are the interactions between and among the students, providing a learning experience free from the right answers that limit true learning and that can sink a historical game.


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6: Promises and pitfalls of the digital game Callison (1989) published a study comparing teachers' and students' preferences for software. The teachers favored tutorials and material that would “be of interest to the students”. The teachers failed dismally in their choices. The students like simulation games, complex simulation games that brought them to interact in small groups and to compare notes and to think – hard! The students may have already discovered that computer games were an otherwise unavailable tool for reducing the historians' unspoken biases and inevitable weaknesses when trying to understand historical actors. A classic commercial game already exists that helps avoid hindsight, puts the player in the unknown of the historical actor and makes the history he will create largely dependent on his actions, according to the rational paradigm that I associated with the war game. The game is Sid Meier's Civilization (1991). The number of variables to be managed occupies the mind wonderfully (Corbeil, 1993) and the setting of the game is a program-generated world. The game begins with a wagon blinking forlornly in a blank screen, the small caravan of the player's people about to start their journey through history. These aspects make the game of great interest to the thoughtful student of history. Mistakes are inevitable, tempered only by the possibility that each one will provide a lesson for future generations. The game reminds the player very forcefully that the world we take for granted was not inevitable and that time, effort, and luck all played their part. Civilization possesses many of the characteristics that explain the efficiency of games as learning tools in history. The game allows the time for experimentation; it works natively by trial and error; it can be played over and over as the rules and mechanisms are mastered; it provides the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat (that is the essential feedback for experiential learning, which is the satisfaction that I opposed to the very different concept of fun). At the same time, the story of Civilization, and its four iterations (Meier, 2005), is a starting point to illustrate the traps into which digital gaming has fallen. A computer game is simply a program. The first trap into which a game designer may fall is that of Artificial Intelligence. For the game to function, the program must receive the player's input, analyze it in terms of the information contained in the program, calculate the result, and emit a reaction from the program controlled players (the other civilizations in this case). A program cannot evaluate innovation and can only respond within its parameters. As such, it is close to being a puzzle, in the sense that there are strategies favored by the program, so that the player in the several iterations possible with the game is eventually looking for the key moves that will succeed. The Artificial Intelligence of the present generation of games has far to go to meet a Turing Test for game play, which could be defined like this: how much like a human player, in terms of non-linearity and surprise, does the computer-controlled player behave? The incompetence of AIs is masked by making their units, their playing pieces, more difficult to kill. A game programmer, or author, must start from the premise that a computer game is more like a complex puzzle than a game, as defined above. If war-gamers like battle games that can be played by email, or on line (though few are available), it is because a game can only attain its potential with human adversaries. The trap set by the AI's limits is well illustrated by the game Colonization, derived from its parent (Meier, 1994, 2008). Since the history of the program is the history conceived, or accepted, by the authors, we are led to exchange one set of presuppositions for another. While Colonization is an excellent game, for much the same reasons as Civilization, the history lesson imbedded in the game is exactly the opposite of the aim of a game, to discover alternate paths and to understand the reality of the historical characters. Colonization requires the player to lead his colonies to independence. This is what happened in Britain's American colonies. But, while the historical experience of the British colonists began with a flight from Britain for religious reasons, the experience and motivation of the


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French colonists who founded New France was completely different. The French colonists were expanding France, not fleeing it, and their relationship with the government of France was that of good French citizens clamoring for more resources in their effort to expand French influence throughout North America (an influence that reached to Texas, Alberta, and Hudson's Bay). This cautionary consideration is also valid for the Spanish colonies, which rejected Napoleonic domination of Spain, rather than Spain itself. Indeed, the premise is not necessarily valid for the British colonies either. It was a king's army, paid by the taxpayers of Britain, which finally succeeded in conquering New France, in 1760; the colonists could never have achieved that objective by themselves, as in fact they were not very proficient at defending themselves.

7: Cool technology The second trap is less inherent in the nature of gaming programs and more a product of the choices made over the twenty years of game development. The energy and the resources have been concentrated on the improvement of the graphic displays. This process may be a question of generations: the young technicians know games as computer games, and lack the wider vision and greater variety of paper and cardboard games. The trap is hard to avoid: wonderful technology is used to compensate for the weaknesses of the variables and structure of the game. There is not exactly an inverse relationship between the improvement of graphics and the quality of the games, but while Civilization IV and Civilisation IV: Colonization are prettier than the original games, they are not better games, and their history is trapped within the same parameters. If graphics were neutral in their impact on games, being merely cosmetic, their impact would merely be a drain on energy and resources. However, since we are considering digital games as learning tools, the impact of graphics on the nature of the games available perverts the basic variables that make games enriching and motivating learning environments. During the creation of this paper, I discovered, by chance, issue 10:6 (February 17, 2009) of Le Mouton Noir (The Black Sheep: student papers are always called some variation of the Mild Rebel), the student journal of the Collège de Drummondville. The technology editor comments on the best games for 2009: Splatterhouse, Madworld, Heavy Rain, Prototype, Call of Duty 6, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV, God of War III, Resident Evil, Burnout Paradise, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, God of War: Chains of Olympus, Guitar Hero:World Tour, Rock Band 2, Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros Brawl, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Metal Gear Solid 4. The games are basically all variants of the same exercise: hit, cut, shoot and destroy what is available on the screen. The content includes pretending to play a guitar, smashing cars, and several horror stories. I do not have the training or the competence to explain the taste for horror stories, especially in adolescents. But these games have three things in common: they use graphics technology to offer shocking images; they are repetitive, with no variation in information or the steps to be taken in the game; and, they are built in direct negation of the qualities that make games learning tools. Some variables in the mechanics of learning have been known since the 18th century, and certainly since at least Piaget. In men, and animals, repetition reduces efficiency in tasks that require attention. New stimuli and new challenges are the motors of learning, and, in the games used for learning history with which I worked, the satisfaction, the discovery, and the motivation originated in the changed scenarios, the possibilities for trial and error, and the experience of testing one's own approach (rational cause and effect followed by feedback). Repetition and automatic behavior are soporific and dull the brain and the senses (Millar, 1971). Those who consider games a drug and those who argue that games help learning both have valid points. My students, who tested their diplomatic skills over a map of the world divided into movement


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spaces, who calculated possible moves, who had to evaluate the feedback of the results of their moves after each turn, and who tried a different approach in the following scenarios, were learning incrementally. Their successors, who go through the steps of destroying horrible creatures over and over again until they can do it automatically, are drugging their senses, unless they are overstimulating them, neither of which is of any help with learning. Graphic-driven games are not of course intended as learning tools. They are created and sold essentially as, well, drugs. To quote Thomas McDonald (2009): “EA and Activision don't need your money, and they don't care too much about you.”

8: Retracing and re-working Games are about discovery, perhaps about discovery of oneself. Their mechanisms reach deeply into the workings of human nature, and even into animal nature, which is part of us. Like any serious endeavor, developing games that help learning requires application and concentration over generations. There are possible means of offering another road than the graphics games. The search for useful approaches does indeed involve going back a generation or two, to the fork in the road and trying to pursue the other path. PC games began on mainframes and research computers. It moved to personal computers when independent developers put their games on floppy disks and sold them in hobby stores. If it is going to have a future that is not yoked to console design paradigms, we are going to have to recapture those roots and start paying closer attention to the small developers who are designing with us, and not 14year-old console gamers, as their primary market (McDonald, 2009). McDonald is thinking of PC gamers, older gamers, and what we might possibly call serious gamers. Designers who are concerned about using games as learning tools must consider primarily the structure of the game, the internal feedback, the obstacles to be overcome by the players, and the possible satisfaction related to accomplishment, to mastering an unknown situation. Improving one's competence in a field is actually one definition of satisfaction. The designer could start from the principle that to learn is to disorganize and increase variety; to organize is to forget and reduce variety. Participation in a game is a process of disorganization; the variety of situations and variety of approaches to a problem increase with the complexity of the game. A game that is locked into one path, such as a series of levels, offers the player only the possibility of organizing the choices toward a fixed aim, which brings us back to puzzles. If possible, research into game engines should examine mechanisms for variables or reactions that change as the situation evolves; if not an Artificial Intelligence, which may be an oxymoron, then a simulation of the processes that a human opponent would follow in playing the game, or making historical decisions. An incomplete, but promising solution is in the computer version of the game Kingmaker (Corbeil, 1997). The original game is a multi-player game, hence a nonlinear, human, complex experience. The computer version cannot approach this, because, of course, it is a program (and from fifteen years ago), but it provides a clever substitute: each noble within the game is programmed to have his own personal quirks, feelings, and ambitions. The program, in a way, simulates a simulation. Going back to the fork in the road could be put into practice by including the extensive play of paper and cardboard games, such as Kingmaker aforementioned, in the training of game designers, and programmers, to learn from the inside the processes that make games tools for discovering alternate routes, especially the importance of interaction among human players. The inherent weakness of a


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program is not easily visible to a gamer who has only played digital games, and the possibility afforded today of contact with human adversaries by online games hides the difficulty, since the human players are simply collectively trapped within the framework of the program's paradigm. There is a vicious circle of misunderstanding in online games from the point of view of a serious usage as a learning tool. Without an external reference, such as monographs, articles, and even complex paper and cardboard games, it is unlikely that the players, alone or as a group, can discover the missing elements in the gamed situation, such as the presuppositions I have described in Colonization. If it is not waxing too philosophical, I would suggest that the phenomenon is a non-mathematical form of Gödel's Theorem. Returning to models of games that were promising as learning tools and that could have been, and could still be, beginning points for building digital games that include the processes favorable to learning that are possible in games is another practical approach to serious digital games. For example, to help his students better understand the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Schick (Corbeil, 1991) designed E Pluribus Unum, or “From the Many, One”: A Computer Simulation of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The game is in fact played by a group, since the author intended to use it in his class on constitutional history. The players use a series of programs, which were not compiled, to choose a state and a delegate, then to consider the proposals that were in fact put forward during the debate. Another program registers the votes of the simulated delegates, and the constitutional project is then submitted to ratification state by state, using historical variables to evaluate the results of the ratifying conventions. Promising approaches are at the basis of the design of E Pluribus Unum. The power of the machine is used to accelerate such time-consuming tasks as identifying proposals, registering votes, writing out a final result, and evaluating success or failure. The game is played by the human participants, whose limits are historical in the sense that the possibilities are those of the actual event. A key factor here, from the point of view of historical understanding, is that all the proposals are available, and the game is not weighed in favor of actual results. Graphics are not a factor, since the information is given as texts, and the results as tables. The game allows the participants to see the point of view of all historical actors, not just the winners, or the subsequently well known. The participants can test strategies, tactics, and the non-linear aspects of political exchange, and can replay the game repeatedly to verify hypotheses or resolve doubts. The game certainly gives feedback, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, and opens debate, as well as minds. Perhaps we could summarize by saying that the technology is at the service of the players, and not a constraint. From the same period, consider the game The Corporate Game: A Computer Adventure for Developing Business Decision-Making Skills (Corbeil 1995). The game is in fact integrated with a book that explains some basic concepts in management (the author sells his game as the equivalent of an MBA library in an interactive business adventure). Like E Pluribus Unum, this game has no graphics to speak of: information comes in the form of tables, and the pages of a simulated newspaper, and action takes place essentially in a series of spreadsheets, in which the player can choose where to invest his capital, such as the purchase of equipment. The player (though the game can be played by two or three persons sitting at the computer), can also call for market studies. Motivated by a desire to win (that is, decode the market and make a profit), it is possible to cover a desk or table with paper and notes outlining possible strategies and listing possible combinations of cost and return. The game would score zero for graphics at Games Radar, but the design offers flexibility in strategy, can be replayed, and gives regular feedback, although it may be repulsive to the mathophobe. The challenge of the game is in the decoding of the information, obtained by comparing sources and not by waving a mouse across the screen. Learning from the game requires understanding the game's mechanics, then using them to test hypotheses and to validate choices.


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Far be it from me to suggest that the 1990s were a golden age of game design: as a counter-example from that period, let me mention SimHealth (Corbeil, 1994). The game was a member of the Sim family from Maxis, including Simcity, SimFarm and others. It was financed and supported by a foundation as a tool to help citizens reflect on the question of a public health-system for the USA. The authors were very serious: no less than 152 variables can be tweaked in the program. But as a game, the result was disastrous. Having tweaked all these variables, all the player can do is watch a graphic image of ‘Main Street’, a display of a typical downtown. As this or that policy choice encourages of impoverishes a part of society, the image corresponding, say the school, shrinks and grows, or lawns become neat or messy. With low feedback, no challenges, no political variables (surely a President must wheel and deal), all in all, SimHealth lacks all the elements that could help to make games valuable learning tools. Clearly, support from a large foundation and design by a well-established company do not guarantee either gaming tension or effective learning. It is strange that a game whose purpose was public discussion should have taken the form of a one-person program. The computer had no real business in the development of public debate, where a simple interactive game that children and grandparents could have played would have better suited the objective; the trap of cool technology is not a recent phenomenon. The story of SimHealth reminds us that a serious game is still originally a game: victory and defeat, tension, feedback, decision-making are the engaging elements of a game. Many so-called educational games, not just computer games, fall for the trap of the right answer and become simply uninteresting. A good idea is not automatically a good game, and discipline and training are not substitutes for the engaging elements. If the gaming material is beaten and shaped so that only one kind of behavior or only choice is possible, we are back to puzzle-solving, which is essentially backward engineering. Too many so-called educational games are simply an exercise in guessing what answer the teacher wants, which is the exact opposite of the idea behind experiential learning, that personal experiment and trial and error are the surest foundations of integrated learning. The concept may seem counter-intuitive, but for efficient learning to result from the experience, the game world should take the participant, become a learner, into an unfamiliar world, so that existing patterns are not confirmed and an effort at mastering the environment is required. Accountants must not play games in which they are accountants: they must be in an unfamiliar universe in which they are, for example, magicians trying to muster the mana to do great deeds. Gary Gygax is quoted as being most proud of the stimulating effect his fantasy game, Dungeons & Dragons, exercised on a generation or two of students, some of whom became accountants. As a working hypothesis, a learning game works best when it is set in an unfamiliar universe.

9: The past as prologue I will end by returning to my question. How does electronic technology add something to the use of games that is really new to the practice, as opposed to simply doing something more efficiently, such as the acceleration of settling combats from an hour long process to an almost instantaneous one? The answer is simple. The graphics driven games add nothing, and can even be obstacles. For the object of learning about history, many of the more popular games are really nothing more than coloring books for adults. Building a building that builds lots of soldiers teaches nothing about the recruiting and training of armies. There are a few good battle games, which offer the possibility of actually applying and experimenting with tactics and organization, or strategy, but they are not different from the games printed in the journal Strategy & Tactics, except that they manage the data and the administration efficiently. This does not mean that they could not add something. A new paradigm cannot be defined in advance, but must result from the attempts and errors of experimenters and designers. If attention is


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paid to the experience gained in the past, the workings of serious games can be taken as a given from which it is possible to define criteria and test results. I have distinguished games from puzzles in terms of the study of historical variables, such as the point-of-view of the losers, but this does not mean that the puzzle, or at least the complex puzzle, cannot be the model for a digital learning experience about the laws of physics or mathematics. Mathematics has been taught backwards, beginning with the answer – the theorem – and ending with the question – the problem posed by the mathematicians who designed the theorem. Why not discover statistical method through a computer game in which the player would confront anomalies in a card game, such as poker, and choose tools that would allow him to unmask chicanery. When the tools were being used efficiently, the program would offer the names and explanations of the tools, such as distribution or correlation. A Myst-like game could be built to review the false starts, dead-ends, and flashes of insight that are the history of the sciences, another subject that is taught as the ‘Pilgrim's Progress’. No wonder physics or chemistry students find the subject dull: they have no opportunity to relate to the actual actors who labored and sweat to understand at least one aspect of the physical world. Such a complex puzzle might also lead to a better understanding of certain physical laws or certain chemical properties. As for history itself, there are certainly some useful games, such as the Talonsoft Battleground series. It will not be necessary to re-invent everything to create electronic tools that offer approaches not presently available. This paper has given some specific models, which can be studied to discover fruitful approaches. Let us end with an ideal of what the history teacher could hope to have as a serious (but engaging) computer game on a historical subject: Why not have a simulation where the players take on the role of Lord Grey and his advisers in 1832 in an attempt to convince a majority of MPs to vote for the Reform Bill? Each interaction with an MP could be linked to the data bank of every other MP, thus creating an ever changing situation in which the participants would learn of the values and methods of early-nineteenth century British gentlemen (or gentle politicians?) and would try to understand alternatives before they are murdered by one of their more brutal brothers. The use of contemporary images and texts, such as Times headlines, registered by scanners and videodisc technology, would give to participants a sense of involvement and would give equal play to all faculties and learning styles. As artificial intelligence becomes as usable part of technology, our interactive historical simulation could progress to the next state of complexity (Corbeil, 1988)

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Corbeil, P. (1999), A Horseless Carriage for the Historian, History Computer Review, 15(2), 31-44. Corbeil, P. (1997), Review of Kingmaker, Simulation & Gaming, 28:1(March 1997). Corbeil, P. (1999a), Learning from the Children: Practical and Theoretical Reflections on Playing and Learning, Simulation & Gaming, 30:2(June 1999). Corbeil, P. (2000), Batting .333, or, 10 years out of 30 ain't bad. Simulation & Gaming 34:1 (March 2000). Cox, H. (1973), The Seduction of the Spirit, (New York, Simon & Shuster). Kelleher, J. (1980), Playing with Reality, Northeast Training News (August 1980) Klabbers, J. (2003),Gaming and Simulation: Principles of a science of design. Simulation & Gaming 34:4 (December 2003). Laveault, D. & Corbeil, P. (1990), Assessing the Impact of Simulation Games of Learning: A Step-by-Step Approach. Simulation/Games for Learning 20:1 (March 1990) McDonald, T. (2009), Grassroots Gaming, Maximum PC 14:4 (April 2009). Meier, S. (1991), Civilization. (Hunt Valley, Maryland, Microprose Software). Meier, S. (1994), Colonization. (Hunt Valley, Maryland, Microprose Software). Meier, S. (2005), Civilization IV. (New York, New York, Firaxis and Take-Two Games). Meier, S. (2008), Civilization IV: Colonization. (New York, New York, Firaxis and Take-Two Games). Millar, S. La Psychologie du jeu (Paris, Payot: translation of The Psychology of Play). Copyright ©1968 Penguin Books Schick, J.B.M. Teaching History with a Computer. Copyright ©1990 Lyceum Books, Chicago, USA Simonsen, R. (1978), Where does it all end ? Thoughts on the Boundary Lines of the Hobby, Moves 41 (October-November 1978). Suits, B. (1982), Games and Utopia: Posthumous Reflections. (Paper presented at the 1982 NASAGA Conference.) Willis, C. Doomsday Book. Copyright ©1992 Bantam Books, NY, USA


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