Historical Video Games Have Promise—but Only If They’re Honest

You can almost smell the drying fish as you step into Ubisoft’s latest Discovery Tour, Viking Age, a free add-on for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (also available to play stand-alone, without the game). Previous Discovery Tour titles have allowed players to take a combat-free jaunt through Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece during the Peloponnesian War, and now early Viking Britain—all “curated by historians and experts,” according to Ubisoft. In partnership with UKIE, the British gaming trade association, the game developer wants to introduce Discovery Tour to 52 schools across the UK.

But this isn’t the first time someone has deployed a video game for education. As early as 1971, when Paul Dillenberger showed The Oregon Trail to his students, the effect gaming could have in a learning environment was apparent. As he recalled for Motherboard: “Kids would gather around [the game’s teletype] to watch what was typed out on the paper. They would come in early to school, and they would stay late to play the game.”

For decades since, developers have tried to bring gaming and education together. Whether it’s learning to type with Mario or exploring the world with Carmen Sandiego, or researchers at the University of Arkansas recreating Pompeii in Unity. Yet academia has consistently failed to grasp the potential of gamifying learning as a way to help people learn history or study historic events.

When I asked game developer Becky Reeve about her experience learning history in school, she told a familiar story. Textbooks remain the primary vehicle for education, which left her struggling “to interact with the work,” she says. Instead, she preferred the history she found in video games because it placed her “directly into the world.”

Whether it’s the untamed west of Red Dead Redemption 2, the wind-fed fields of 13th-century Tsushima, or the bustle of Renaissance Florence, games are becoming more photorealistic and increasingly rely on historical settings for their narratives. Now, you’re more likely to be introduced to a historical subject through gaming than traditional education.

Unlike academic curricula, games also have more freedom to explore ideas that history students might not encounter. David Hopkins, a history teacher in Dublin, says that “women, the history of minorities, LGBTQ history, are all shamefully absent from our courses”—an absence felt across the UK for decades and only recently experiencing reform. Paul Fletcher, a professor of health neuroscience at Cambridge University and consultant on Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, told VentureBeat that games can also play a positive role in “representing mental distress and allowing it to be communicated to others.”

There is room in gaming for narratives that don’t fit the sanitized, conservative history taught in Western classrooms. However, this doesn't mean that games always get it right. The trans narrative in If Found feels real and affecting. But one of the few trans characters in triple-A gaming, Lev from The Last of Us Part II, is, according to Waverly in Paste, not “a character to be respected but investigated.” His trauma is almost a collectible, his presence making “cis voyeurs feel good about themselves.”