How can history improve your games? Presentation for CSU Monterey Bay Introduction to Game Design class.

1. History skills for
game developers
Zoya Street @rupazero

2. I want to help you to:
● Rethink how games relate to history
● Use historical thinking in game design
● Navigate resources to find untold histories
● Avoid common pitfalls

3. Who am I?
Business
● Deputy editor at
Gamesbrief,
business resource
● Production and
consumption in
history
Criticism
● Hyper, Comics and
Gaming, Memory
Insufficient etc.
● Historically
informed criticism
of games
zoyastreet.com

4. Stuff I make
Dreamcast Worlds
History of the Sega
Dreamcast told
through close
readings of games
and documentary
history

5. Stuff I make
rupazero.com

6. Missed
opportunities
Or, getting history wrong

7. Missed opportunities
“Certainly there are both
heroes and villains of all colors
throughout American history,
but this norm of setting games
in time periods where white
heroes are the only “realistic”
choice is an industry-wide
filtering that once again
privileges whiteness.”
Sidney Fussell, Can
Videogames Teach Us About
Race?
Memory Insufficient, Issue 10

8. Missed opportunities
1849, a historical
simulation about the
California gold rush
“There were only 10%
women”
“We didn’t want to
deal with racial
issues”

9. Missed opportunities
“We actually never thought,
‘could this be a woman?’
…from the pirate perspective,
there were a few famous
women pirates. But it wasn’t
common. So we didn’t want
that element to be a detail
people got stuck on.”
Ashraf Ismail,
Assassin’s Creed IV director,
interviewed in IGN

10. Missed opportunities
“Look at its win states and
where it places value.
Military Conquest,
technological superiority…
you don’t win by eliminating
hunger or poverty… you get
it for very American goals”
Errant Signal (4.57)

11. Missed opportunities
“Westerners in general, and
Americans in particular, are
enamored with the universal
progress viewpoint probably
because it means that they’
re winning the footrace.
Civilization reinforces this
viewpoint.”
Rowan Kaiser

12. Missed opportunities
‘I gave an in person demo
of Escape Goat 1 to a Valve
employee at GDC in 2012.
When the first screen
loaded, he turned to me and
said “Just so you're aware, I
dislike games that are trying
to look like NES games.”’
Ian Stocker

13. Interesting uses
of history
Or, getting history right

14. Interesting uses of history
Fez doesn’t just pay
homage to the games
of the past; it imagines
what those game-
worlds are like for the
people who live inside
them.

15. Interesting uses of history
In LA Noire, people
are suffering from the
effects of war on
American culture:
trauma, drugs,
violence.

16. Interesting uses of history
Papo y Yo tells a
personal history of
gaming as an escape
from abuse. The link
to gaming as
escapism is made
more explicit in the
trailer.
Watch here

17. Interesting uses of history
Papers, Please
humanises the
infrastructure of
oppression. Is it just
about the Eastern
Bloc?

18. Interesting uses of history
Dog Eat Dog is a
tabletop RPG where
players act out the
asymmetrical
relationship between
colonisers and
natives.

19. Getting to grips
with history
Resources

20. Museums and archives IRL
● When you go to museums for research, go
beyond the exhibitions: contact curators, visit
archives.
● There are lots of stories that are difficult to
tell in an exhibition, but might be perfect to
tell in a game.

21. Museums and archives online
collections.vam.ac.uk
si.edu/collections
fieldmuseum.org/explore/our-collections
rijksmuseum.nl/en/explore-the-collection
...and lots more
Lots of images as well as links to research

22. Historical critical writing
memoryinsufficient.rupazero.com
playthepast.org
critical-distance.com
...and lots more
Read critical writing on how games have dealt
with similar histories already.

23. Arguments on the internet
● Observe arguments without wading in
● What’s at stake here?
● e.g. why does it matter how we define
“game”?
● How do different people end up with very
different perspectives?
● History is intensely personal

24. Email relevant people
Ask open-ended questions after getting pretty
familiar with their work.
● “Why does ~ continue to be contested?”
● “Has ~ changed since you wrote your book?”
● “What do people consistently misunderstand
about your work?”

25. Getting to grips
with history
Questions to ask yourself

26. Questions to ask yourself
● What are my assumptions?
● How are they affected by my history?
● Who wrote the dominant narrative?
● What systemic problems are revealed by this
historical source?
● Who was gaming the system and how?

27. Gamelike (systemic?) histories
19C Japanese
used games to
reverse social
hierarchies.
19C British used
games to
reinforce them.

28. Gamelike (systemic?) histories
“I’m excited by the
possibility of a new age of
game design, an end to the
dominant era of object
collision. We may not be
able to palpably experience
jealousy through crashing
pixels. We may not be able
to sense what it it was like
for Read to pass as a male
pirate through a
conversation wheel.”
Samantha Allen

29. Gamelike (systemic?) histories
“Power is a type of play; it’s as creative as it is
limiting. We are formed by the rules social
systems set for us, but we aren’t fatalist
automatons. We are messy and shape each
other.”
Mattie Brice

30. What are your
assumptions?
Turn retro on its head