One of the more unusual and neglected aspects of history is the aspect of the historical research in making games realistic.  There are a variety of different approaches that one takes to the historicity of games.  Between the two extremes there are those that care very little about it to those who care a great deal about it, involving careful research of the historical period and its setting in order to try to make a balanced and accurate game.  Let us examine these approaches and their results briefly.

Koei

The four letters above stand for one of the companies that cares the most about accurate historical simulation.  If you’re looking for role playing games with a historically valid perspective on a wide variety of eras, even including Irish Myths (the Eye of Baldor), then Koei was your game company.  Koei is responsible for some classic games–Nobunga’s Ambition (about 16th century Japan), Romance of the Three Kingdoms (about 3rd and 4th century China), Genghis Khan (self explanatory), and even including an excellent game on the American Revolution.

What made Koei so unique was the attention to historical detail, including the boundaries of provinces, the names of their rulers, the basis of economies, the technology used in armies, the food crops, and other similar details.  The result was a series of games that was rewarding, challenging, and very historically accurate, prompting research on the part of the player into the time period and its historical situation.  The result was both enjoyable and educational gameplay, and that is something that deserves high praise.

SquareSoft

SquareSoft is another one of those video gaming companies whose work is justly famous.  Unlike Koei, SquareSoft does not tend to make historical simulation games, but usually envisions a sort of parallel world with magic and some particular kind of development, whether industrial or medieval, always with a history and a complicated “back story” worthy of interest.  By visualizing an imaginary world and filling in the details, the effect is usually one of acceptance of the reality of the world presented, as it has enough depth and complexity to accept.

Celsius

This may be a somewhat obscure game company compared to the other two, but its games (Renaissance Kingdoms and Native Kingdoms are two of them) both aspire to the sort of historical accuracy of the Koei games, but fail because of insufficient attention to detail, especially concerning social class and gender roles.  No one wants to be a peasant and no one wants to be a woman with the gender roles of history, but part of the challenge of a game is making it realistic, and that means putting more attention into the design of a game to make it balanced without making it anachronistic.  That’s a big challenge with dealing with the historical past in a massively multiplayer online role playing game (or MMORPG for short). For this reason, it is easier to create such games in an egalitarian fantasy world rather than deal with designing the reality of sexist and racist and rigidly stratified social systems in our present day and age which considers such qualities too distasteful to examine or play around with.

A Modest Proposal

My modest proposal is the following:  as the creation of historically influenced video games is very high, I propose that game makers make it a priority to hire qualified historians who are capable of providing a solid research foundation to a video game as well as enough historical detail to provide possibilities for historically accurate expansions, spin-offs, and commercial products.  The attention to detail that historians are trained to provide also allows coders and graphics people the tangible vision of the past to create more vivid and enjoyable worlds.  Additionally, even video game makers who are making fictional worlds would be wise to hire historians who are capable of creating the histories of such worlds given their insights to the patterns of human behavior as well as insights about potential ethnic, religious, and social fissures within imaginary societies that would allow for a satisfying and rich game play experience.  The result would be beneficial for both the historical field as a whole–especially those historians who are interested in narrative and the “artistic” side of history–as well as for video game designers looking to ground their visions with substantial historical data with the corresponding opportunities for further development and profit.  Who is willing to take me up on my suggestion?