William Uricchio, "Simulation, History and Computer Games"

(In Handbook of Computer Game Studies)

- Sierra's Grand Prix Legends - demands for historical accuracy from fans, source of pleasure
- What are the claims and implications of historical games?
- Interaction between present-day player and representation/simulation of historical moment challenges fact/fixity
- Tension between the ludic and documentation (specific vs speculative)
- How do human subjects encounter textualizations of the past/how are they "written into" the past -> "interactions with the process of historical inscription"
- New ways of understanding history and historiography
- Two extremes of historical computer game approaches - specific events (accuracy, structured by re-created conditions) and historical process (abstract, simulation games, long-term historical development, structured by historical principles/ideology)
- Both extremes paint historiy as a multivalent process, many possibilities, interpretations, outcomes
- Some parallels to filmic representations of history, but the crucial difference is that games also simulate process
- Poststructural turn in history -> historical endeavour as play ("what if?")
- Destabilize heirarchies, subvert master narratives
- Some historical games value both accuracy and opportunities for creative intervention -> play emerges in the space between detail and improvisation
- Non-specific simluation-oriented games are less detailed, more abstract, but encourage broader engagement with historical process
- Civilization: broad epochal development
- Actual complexity of lived historical events vs the mediated snapshot of representation (inevitably partial, deforming, delimiting and presentist)
- Poststructural critique of re-presentation (how?) and of authority/objectivity (by whom?) "question reality, question authority" (Berkhofer)
- Coincides with the new representational possibilities of computers
- How do historical games mediate the past? (As opposed to textual mediations)
- "History as time-bound meaning situated in an ever-changing present"
- Simulation as process guided by certain principles -> pedagogical application
- "Virtual history," speculative
- Problem of a fixed beginning to a historically-specific game (where does an event actually begin?) -> structuring assumptions branch into an array of possibilities (hindsight)
- Simulation approach allows radical reframing -> structuring assumptions about long-term historical development, "ideologically-positioned maxims," organizing principles
- Poblocki: Civilization as the history of the Western state (implicit and explicit)
- Historical games fulfil demands for historical reflexivity, subjectivity and possibility but adhere closely to historiographic status quo in other ways (working against the speculative "freedom" celebrated by the games?)
- Uricchio thinks they succeed more generally as a means of reflecting on the past
- What if historiographic epistemologies were used as structuring agencies for games? Explicit and reflexive rather than underlying assumptions (What would this look like? Civilization could be customized to follow a Hegelian or Marxist theory of history rather than a Heideggerian technological determinism?)