Jesper Juul calls the two layers of a game the rules and the fiction. The indie RPG community uses system and color in similar ways. Ian Bogost writes about procedures and contexts.* There are a hundred things to say about how these layers interact, but one of the most basic is this: When you begin to play a game, what you encounter first is its superficial subject matter–the fiction, the color. But the more you play, the more you interact with the mechanics beneath the surface. Ultimately, games become about whatever their mechanics or procedures are about.

(* I think Bogost, who is extremely smart and useful on these subjects, would actually argue that the two layers are much more interdependent than I’ve made them out to be here.)

Designing educational mechanics or procedures is a lot harder than shoehorning desired material into a game. It is almost never enough to slap an educational skin on an existing game or rule set, easy and tempting as that may be. Because the more you play, the more you play through the surface content of a game. If a game is going to teach anything long lasting, its lessons have to be embedded in its very mechanics and procedures, the stuff players manipulate and the actions they perform.

This is my critique of Civilization and similar games, much as I love them, as history-teaching tools. The more you play, the less you think about history, as you learn to interact directly with the game’s algorithms. (One solution to this is to have students design their own mods or simulations, so they can be the ones debating the procedural logics of history.)

The board game Monopoly was once a political critique of landlords and capitalists, designed by a Quaker woman named Lizzie Magie to illustrate the ideas of Henry George. But the game’s procedures contain no real critique of capitalism, and when the original context is forgotten, it is the procedures that remain.

Several tabletop roleplaying games in the 1990s tried to get away from the combat-heavy kill-all-monsters gameplay of their 1970s and 80s forebears. “This game is not just about combat,” their boosters promised. “You can use it to play out epic stories of intrigue, tragedy, and romance.” But the two hundred pages of rules they provided for simulating combat said otherwise. And even though tabletop gamers have a grand tradition of hacking, tweaking, and ignoring the rules, those two-hundred-page combat systems exerted a powerful gravitational pull.

Urgent Evoke is the massive multiplayer “save the world” game from the World Bank Institute and “too cool to be real she must be the escaped protagonist of a William Gibson novel” game designer Jane McGonigal. I signed up to play last week in a fit of enthusiasm about serious games and denial about time management. At one level, Evoke is about fostering social and entrepreneurial innovation in and for the developing world, and it is awesome and inspiring and energizing. But at the procedural, mechanical level, Evoke is also a Frankenstein’s mashup of Twitter, Facebook, and the whole social networking popularity contest that’s invaded every other corner of our lives. Play is, or at it least it felt this way to me, a frantic scramble for eyeballs. I feel old and codgery, but I had to quit after 48 hours.

The things I’m saying here have been around for some time, but “History Invaders”  games (Scot Osterweil calls them “Grand Theft Calculus” games) keep coming down the pike. If public historians and history educators want to be serious about teaching with games and play, we have to inject ourselves deep into the game development process. We have to articulate what we think history and historical thinking are good for in the first place. And then we have to build outwards from the kinds of historical thinking we want to inculcate, creating games and activities whose fiddly bits are historical sources, whose moving parts are historical ideas themselves.

One thing I don’t love about the “who would win” question is the way it tilts the playing field towards military history and the history of technology–worthy subjects, but hardly the only histories worth talking about. It seems like alternate history almost always ends up using the old school, Boy’s Own flavors of history–military, political, technological. I talked about this in the coda to Gernsblack, which was a stab at alternate cultural history (with a crazy technological deus ex machina, I admit). This is going to sound like total name dropping–insufferable to people who know who she is, pointless and nerdy to people who don’t–but I had a great conversation once with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich about whether you could write alternate social history, alternate gender history, alternate material culture history, and so on. I think I almost had her sold on the idea, but I also think she is very good at humoring people.

So here’s another demonstration question, not much more complicated than “who would win?”

When and where would you rather have lived: 18th-century France, 15th-century China, 8th-century Ghana, or 1st-century Rome? What would your life there have been like?

Obviously you can swap in other times and places if you like. As with “who would win,” the question is deceptively deep. As soon as you start discussing it, you’re talking about social history, material culture, and the history of everyday life. One of the first things anyone considering this had better ask is, “What would I be? Can I be born a noble or a queen, or do I have to be some kind of peasant or slave?” And whatever the answer, now you’re talking about class and hierarchy. You’re also thinking comparatively. Whose lot was tougher: the poorest tenth of the world’s population before the industrial revolution or the poorest tenth today?

For a follow-up question you could ask: “if we asked the same question to somebody living in 18th-century France, 15th-century China, etc., what do you think they would answer?” Many of us living in the 21st century would probably choose on the basis of material comfort, and so find most earlier eras wanting. But would that be a universal choice across time? What other criteria might other times and cultures use? Are we certain that the sum total of human happiness has never been higher than it is in 2010?

This question’s grabbiness comes from the second-person pronoun–it’s not “which is better,” it’s “would you rather”–which pulls you in to imagine yourself in history. This is a staple of history at play. Think of reenactors, roleplayers, historical romance readers. It’s also almost totally illegitimate in serious history, much more so than counterfactuals. Niall Ferguson can edit a collection of alternate histories and it merely burnishes his hunky teledon credentials. But don’t hold your breath for the anthology about, say, Patricia Limerick at the Alamo or Tony Grafton’s fantasy life as a Renaissance magus. I’m not saying I really want to read that anthology, but I have no problem with leveraging the roleplay instinct for history teaching and fun.

If you’re getting the idea that what I mean by “playful” historical thinking is known by many as “bad” historical thinking, go to the head of the class.

Here is an exercise in playful historical thinking, based on years of professional training and SSHRC-funded research. You can do it yourself, right now, although like most forms of play it will be more fun and rewarding if you involve a friend or two. Ready?

Here we have a viking and a samurai. Let’s say they had a fight. Who would win? Why?

And here’s the multiplayer version: Find someone who disagrees with you. Try to convince them, while they try to convince you. Find evidence that supports your answer.

Impressive, no? Your tax dollars at work, Canadians.

But seriously, that right there is one of the basic building blocks of playful historical thinking.

Take a counterfactual question–as far as I know, vikings never fought samurai–and have at it. You can enter this debate with any level of starting knowledge, arguing solely from the evidence in the pictures (that samurai looks pretty fierce, but the viking has his buddies with him). Yet there is no bottom to the amount of evidence you could gather or the complexity of the arguments you could marshal on either side. You could talk about military tactics or metalworking technology. You could research the agricultural potential of Scandinavia or the codification of Bushido. You could spin out a whole saga in which a Nihonese armada devastates the Vinlander entrepots at “Perleshavn” and vengeful Norsemen go a-viking into the Inland Sea.

Here’s another version of the counterfactual game, with some anachronism thrown in for good measure:

You are a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. Cases come before you involving matters that the framers of the Constitution did not and could not have foreseen. Make decisions on these cases based on your interpretation of what the framers, and later legislators, would have wanted. Explain your reasoning.

Notice that the question “what would happen” is often a more open, engaging conversation starter than “what did happen” or even “why did this happen.” The practice, so natural to historians, of arguing about what really did happen can seem foreign or nonsensical to students and other non-professionals. It takes considerable training and acculturation to learn how historians argue about the actual past, or why anyone would want to do so.

The standard objections to counterfactual history don’t faze me much. I’m not arguing for professional monographs on alternate history, I’m just saying that counterfactual thinking is a potentially fruitful kind of historical play that people already enjoy and engage in all the time. (Some  arguments for counterfactual history don’t impress me much either, but that’s a different post.) It is not true that there is no way to judge or scrutinize counterfactual arguments. A teacher posing a counterfactual question to a class of students can still demand that they produce real-life evidence for their arguments, make analogies to actual history, and offer logical warrants for their claims. Plus we all have a highly developed sense of what is “realistic” or “plausible,” even when discussing outright fiction (cf the vigor with which fans critique the “realism” of Star Trek or what have you). The fact that we might disagree on what is “realistic,” or that real history itself is “implausible” at times, only ensures that we will have lots to talk about.

“History is not the past,” writes Greg Dening, “It is the past transformed into something else: story.”

You can dress that up in narrative theory, making it an epistemological principle about how we experience the world. You can boil it down to an acronym and write an airport book for business travelers. You can rail against it as a pathology of the human mind. But I don’t think you can deny it. Histories are narratives. We make sense of the present by telling stories about the past.

Don’t want to go that far? How about this: Stories are memorable. To quote that airport book, which is really not bad: “Stories stick.” Our attention spans are woefully finite. There are more philosophies in heaven and earth than there are human brains to dream them. So our memes and ideas and beliefs are locked in a battle to survive and be passed on. In this Darwinian–or is Dawkinsian?–struggle, stories win. And histories that make good stories–those that have compelling characters, satisfying plots, cathartic lessons–have a powerful memetic advantage over those that don’t.

Hayden White says that our grounds for choosing one version of history over another are almost always aesthetic. Romance celebrates the triumph of the good after trials and tribulations. Satire delights in chance and folly. Tragedy laments the costs when irreconcilable values collide.

This seems to me a dirty secret of the so-called “history wars” over school curricula, museum displays, and other forms of public memory. We treat these like political battles–conservatives want this style of history, liberals want this one–but ultimately our attraction to one narrative or another derives from aesthetic grounds as much as anything else. We like that story. It feels right. It does something for us.

Old-fashioned master narratives about How We Got to Be So Awesome–what Peter Seixas calls “The Best Possible Story” approach to national history–are persistent to the extent that they offer satisfying stories, that they are dramatic, retellable, or memorable in some way. Deconstruct them all you want in the graduate seminar room, they still take root and replicate in elementary school textbooks, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, and on the History Channel. And critical counternarratives make their own aesthetic appeals too. Isn’t “agency,” the magic word of the new social history, at bottom an aesthetic or even a literary criterion? Agency means we want the protagonists of our stories to be protagonists, agents of their own destiny.

Among indie roleplaying game theorists (a thrice-marginal community: we play pen-and-paper roleplaying games (like Dungeons & Dragons), but favor small-press “indie” games (ie, not Dungeons & Dragons) and then, weirdest of all, we like to talk and think theoretically about how they work) there has been much talk of “deprotagonization,” which is what you call it when a game’s rules, referee, or other players prevent you from feeling like the protagonist of your own story. I’m struck by how closely descriptions of deprotagonization in gaming–nobody can quite pin down what it is, but everybody knows it’s bad–mirror discussions of agency in history.

But all of the above presumes a world of linear historical texts, like textbooks and movies and monographs. Do the same rules apply to historical games and play? I would say yes, in that aesthetic considerations are just as inescapable in the world of play. But the nature of those considerations may be different. In the world of historical texts, good stories win. What wins in the world of history games and play?

Fun. The history that is fun will win the day. If it’s also true, or useful, or responsible, great. If it’s false, frivolous, or irresponsible, that may be a problem. But for good or ill, fun is very hard to beat.

(Did I just use 600 words to say “play should be fun”? God, I despise myself sometimes. This is the problem with writing about these things in an academic register. I’m off to go play for real with my daughter…)

These user-generated “unconferences” work best when people use their blogs etc. to share some thoughts ahead of time. So here to start is the abstract I wrote for the latter conference with Tim Compeau, project manager for our SSHRC-funded research on “History At Play”:

Rob MacDougall and Timothy Compeau, “Playful Historical Thinking: ARGs and Pervasive History Play”

“Pervasive games,” also known as “alternate reality” or “augmented reality games” (ARGs), move play away from the computer screen and back to the physical world by overlaying game narratives and challenges onto encounters with real world people, places, and things. While the first such games were designed as promotions for commercial media such as computer games and films, designers and players were immediately intrigued by the genre’s potential for education and addressing real world problems. This paper reports on the authors’ SSHRC-funded effort to develop an ARG or pervasive game for history education—a game that uses history as its content, historical methods as its procedures, and museums, archives, and heritage sites as its playing spaces. We believe this emerging genre has great potential for teaching historical thinking and engaging popular audiences with history in the material world. But it remains to be seen if ARGs in their current form are scalable in terms of effort, impact, and cost. Ultimately, our experience may point away from highly-designed games as such and towards a kind of “playful historical thinking” as the way to foster more useful and lasting engagement with the pervasive presence of the past.

ARGs or pervasive games are interesting and fun–I’ve just signed up (*) for Jane McGonigal’s latest, the World Bank-funded “save the world” game EVOKE–but the thing I’d really like to talk about at both conferences is what I bring up in the last line of that abstract: “playful historical thinking.”

I wrote this excited post about the “historical thinking” literature when I first read Sam Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts back in, gosh, 2005. I’m still keen on this literature and a bit mystified it hasn’t been picked up by more historians. How do we think about history? What are we doing in our heads, what cognitive moves are we making, when we think historically? Once you read people like Wineburg (other good examples include Peter Seixas, Denis Shemilt, Keith Barton and Linda Levstik), you start to realize how sterile many of our debates over history standards and curricula and “what history is for” are.

Using games or play to teach history is hardly a new idea, but many efforts in this direction remain rudimentary. I wonder if we can’t connect developments in gaming and other playful uses of technology to the research on historical cognition. If there is a problem with THATCamp culture as a whole–and I say this as a member of, and cheerleader for, that culture–it’s that we’ve been better at building new tools than at identifying crucial or compelling problems to apply them to. (At least, that was my sense at the first THATCamp, in 2008.) Rather than simply shoehorning educational content into existing games or game genres, we should also work backwards from the kinds of humanistic thinking we would like to inculcate.

That sentiment is hardly original to me, of course. Kevin Kee made the point in this recent roundtable on the topic of history and gaming, and he draws it out in this article (subscription only), which matches three computer game genres to Peter Seixas’ three frameworks for thinking about history.

One valid criticism of the historical thinking literature, especially in its first wave, is that it sometimes took as a given that the goal of history education should be to get students to think about history in the same ways that professional historians do. But is that really so? How do we want our students to think about history, not just while they’re in class, but when they grow up, leave the classroom, and set out into the world? Again, it’s a question you can’t fully answer until you think seriously about what history is for.

Professional historians can be playful in their thinking. Wineburg notes the “ludic” nature–right down to reading with silly voices–of a skilled historian’s engagement with primary texts. But playful historical thinking diverges in significant ways from the standard professional stance. Greg Dening, who argued forcefully for a history that is playful, theatrical, and mysterious, nevertheless warned of the prejudices against it: “History-making, whether one understands it as an everyday vernacular activity and/or especially if one sees it as an elite and guilded activity is known to be a serious affair. Vernacular history has created too much pain and division to be clownish about it. Academic history has made too much a science of Apollonian sincerity to be playfully Dionysian about it.”

I want to make a case for playful historical thinking as a healthy, productive, and even responsible way for citizens of the 21st century to relate to the past. Our new digital tools–or toyboxes–are well-suited to fostering historical play, but playing with history is hardly new. So I want to begin by looking for inspiration at the ways people already play with history, with or without digital technologies. That’s why history at play is a running subtheme of this blog. In this post from a few years back, I tried to sketch out some popular categories of history play–simulations, reenactments, fake, secret, and alternate histories, etc.–but there’s much more to be said and thought and done.

The Believer on the Kcymaerxthaere:

The Kcymaerxthaere is a vast alternate universe created by Eames Demetrios, a California-based artist and filmmaker who began installing the plaques in 2003. The premise of the project is that the Kcymaerxthaere exists as its own parallel world, but its remnants are often visible in our own, “linear” world—intersections that Demetrios endeavors to commemorate by physically marking their presence.He has already installed over sixty of these faux historical markers, and hopes to increase that number to seventy by the year’s end. Most are in the United States (that is, Kymaerica), while others dot the globe, materializing in Singapore, Spain, Dubai, and Australia. This August, Demetrios even lowered a plaque onto the ocean floor, under forty-five feet of water in the Garvellach Islands of Scotland. In addition to the plaques, there are lectures, websites, travel guides (including Discover Kymaerica), and bus tours. … Demetrios calls the project “three-dimensional storytelling,” and says that he hopes to mark some two thousand sites before he is through.

It helps to know a few key features of the Kcymaerxthaere: The world there is divided into gwomes, cultural groups that bear some resemblance to nation-states, though they are much smaller. (There are more than 5,000 gwomes in Kymaerica alone.) The great cultures of the Kcymaerxthaere were made up of road builders, and Kcymaerxthaere history is marked by several massive migrations—across both land and sea. Central figures recur throughout the story, such as the Nobunagas, a father-son legacy of warriors whose saga extends from Korea to Texas (or “pTejas”). There has been warfare, including the enigmatic but crucial Battle of Some Times, and the less significant if more colorful Battle of Devil’s Marbles, where thousands of warriors fought astride giant, vicious war-kangaroos.

At times, it can be difficult to follow.