toying with history

Shawn Graham@electricarchaeo

Carleton U

What Sid Meier & Bill Murray Can Teach Us About the Past

-or-

In Three Acts

1. On playing games2. On building games3. On simulation

Drill ‘n’ kill. Just say no.

What makes for a good game?

26 of the 133 on this list with historical themes or settings (at my last count)

sold > 1 million copies

We’re frightened by historical games

What if people learn the wrong history?

• Globe & Mail, Editorial, ‘Assassin’s Creed III video game distorts history’ Nov 14 2012.

• “[…]Assassin’s Creed III is just a video game. But given the dearth of history instruction in our schools, it might be the only place that Canadian young people are learning about the Revolutionary War. At very least, they need to be equipped to separate the Ameriphilia from the facts.”

They’re immoral!

But wait! They’re educational!

, Sid Meier, & Kurt Squire

Writing history is every bit as synthetic as this:

HISTORIAN

Even Wikipedia is a kind of MMO

2. The real game is in making the game

Year of the Four Emperors

Close Reading

Open the hood.

JFK: Reloaded (Traffic, 2004)

marginalia in JFK Reloaded source code

// —————————————————————// Jackie cradling JFK before the money shot// ——————————————————————

[ACTION]<NAME>JackieCradleJFK<CONCERNED>00

Game & Worldbuilding software with affinities to how we’ve always written history

#hist38123812.graeworks.net

The Medic’s War

http://chadblack.net/moctezuma.html

chadblack.net/cortes.html

3. Toying with History via the Action Figure Curriculum

Toying with History via Simulation

• Agent based models as the ultimate playset• A formalized ‘let’s pretend’• A making explicit in code of what we believe

to have been true about some phenomenon in the past

• An impartial referee to work through all of the unintended consequences

Raise some zombies and set them to work.

Agent models: your own personal Groundhog Day

Characteristics of an ‘agent-based’ model

The ‘environment’

The Antonine Itineraries as Network

A limite id est a vallo Praetorio usque mpm clvi A Bremenio Vindomora viiii Vinovia xviiii Cataractoni xxii Isurium xxiiii Eburacum, leg. vi victrix, xvii Derventione vii Delgovicia xiii Praetorio xxv

The model code:

to go ask romans

[ pass-the-word ; if somebody here hasn’t heard the idea, tell them! move-forward ; then follow the route of the itinerary to somewhere else

]

update-plots ; plot the percentage who have now heard the ideaif everyone-heard-it = 100%

[stop] ; if everyone has heard it, stop the simulation

set ticks ticks + 1 ; update the clock.

end

Results – JMA 19.1Internal Dynamics of Provincial Information Diffusion

0.1

1

1 21 41 61 81 101 121

% Who Have Heard the Message

Prop

ortio

nal o

f Tim

e Ste

ps

"1" r

epre

sent

s the

initi

al nu

mbe

r of t

ime s

teps

to g

et th

e m

essa

ge to

10%

of t

he p

opul

atio

n

Iberia

Britain

Italy

Three Gauls

PatronWorld A Rather More Complex Model

Published as ‘Behaviour Space: Simulating Roman Social Life and Civil Violence’ in Digital Studies 1.2 (2009)http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/172/214

Why doesn't it all collapse sooner?

Begin with something fundamental: salutatio

Networks derived from central Italian brick stamp data

PatronWorld Modelhttp://www.graeworks.net/abm/3.1/PatronWorld.html

When Digital Romans Go Bad

When Digital Romans Go Bad

Oppression

DeathsModel runs where violence emerged

Final Word to Phil Connors: I am a God.

Key bit is at 1.35 – 1.40

The Point.

• Toying with history encourages love & mastery of the materials.

• Toying with history allows for expressive, lively, and emotional engagement with contingency in the past.

• Toying with history confronts the ways we share authority with algorithms to create knowledge.

• Toying with history forces us to be explicit about our ‘let’s pretend’ stories.

• Toying with history allows us to explore the consequences of those stories.

• It might be toying, but it’s anything but a…

Acknowledgements & thanks• Title slide image: “It belongs in a museum!” cc by Puuikibeach, Flickr• Shadows of War, Spanish civil war game screenshot,

http://www.vandal.net/cgi-bin/vinot.pl?n=29250&i=5• ‘Great game’ cartoon http://

www.nuklearpower.com/2007/08/01/civilization -daydreams-failure/

• Zombie legos cc by Pedro Vezini,Flickr• Classic photos in LEGO c by Mike Stimpson

http://www.mikestimpson.com

• Thank you to Elizabeth Andrews, the College Libraries, and the Bregman Humanities Series for having me.

shameless plug.

www.playthepast.org