Choose Your Own History Path

 “Historical game design is the ultimate historical research project for non-specialists!”

— Dr. Jeremiah McCall

I love interactive fiction, both narrative programmed stories like the Choose Your Own Adventure and Endless Quest series and similar fare incorporating basic game rules, like the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I enjoy exploring numerous historical periods. And I’m an advocate for using games for learning with various age groups in different environments. What better way to learn about history than explore a specific topic and incorporate it into a game activity. Dr. Jeremiah McCall has developed a history assignment for his high school students integrating all these interests. His Student-Designed Histories are a model educational tool for exploring historical topics and sharing that knowledge in an engaging interactive format.

McCall’s no stranger to using history games in his courses at Cincinnati Country Day School...and advocating for educators to use game-based approaches, analog and electronic, in teaching history. He’s designed several games used in the classroom, looks to adapt commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) games for student use, published Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History, and developed the Historical Problem Space as a means to analyze and even help design history games. His Gaming the Past website is a treasure trove of insights and inspiration for using games in the classroom.

McCall’s Student-Designed Histories assignment is a long-term project running across two academic quarters, giving students plenty of time to research a historical individual and the times and issues they experienced. Students write a short essay early on and provide a bibliography to guide their progress. But rather than presenting that knowledge in a lengthy research paper, students craft an interactive fiction piece placing the reader in the historical person’s shoes (or sandals, as the case may be) and making decisions about the challenges they faced, all based on information gained through researching the complex choices made during key points in their lives...and their implications.

Dr. McCall’s Cycles of Gameplay
and Analysis

It’s one thing to use games for learning: understanding the rules, engaging in meaningful play, and reflecting on the experience afterward. It’s another challenge to create a history game; so many options exist, entire volumes discuss numerous mechanics and graphic design elements, and it can seem a daunting task in the face of today’s very slick professional game offerings. But the interactive fiction format remains accessible to high school students, requiring an understanding of their subject and the flow of choices and consequences. While students have to chart the actual historical decisions and outcomes, they must also understand the period and people enough to present an informed picture of their predicaments and the consequences of choices taken, extrapolating the ramifications and further decisions to make when taking counterfactual paths. The assignment starts students thinking — and gives them practical experience — how to model situations and the choices they offer, early steps in deeper involvement using and developing games to explore historical and real-world issues.

Students use software tools like Twine, which helps organize interactive fiction entries, map decision pathways, and transform them into hypertext-driven web pages. It draws on historical research and channels that into an interactive experience showcasing their knowledge and imparting it to others in an engaging format. It’s an excellent first step for students wishing to explore history through games, both as players and designers. The project’s ultimate format — a web-based interactive fiction adventure — doesn’t simply include links to choices and their consequences. Students include their bibliographical sources in links from the title page. Highlighted links offer insights about possible decisions, concepts and terms unfamiliar to the average reader, and even analysis of the reader’s choices in relation to actual historical outcomes.

The histories engage readers at a personal level, giving them a front seat to larger events. They explore macro-level history through the perspective of micro-level individuals who lived through these tiems, who had to navigate them with their own choices. From the reader’s point of view it brings history to life in a very direct, personal way. One might not have much control over the greater events at the moment, but their individual response can make a difference in their own lives and the fate of others.

I wish I had an assignment like the Student-Designed Histories in my own, distant high school days. Sure, I attempted to interject my personal game-design ideas into class (though without very encouraging results). But on the whole the best history projects consisted of writing assignments beyond the straight research paper, those in which I could immerse myself: the ones I remember include a series of diary entries for settlers on America’s frontier and letters home from a soldier on the Great War’s western front. When I was in the early stages of writing this feature, I described the assignment to my teenage son who also has a deep interest in history. He got very excited about it — “That sounds really cool” were his words — and he wished some of his assignments in History and English were more engaging in this way.

The Student-Designed Histories assignment demonstrates the best writers advice I can give: “Write what you know.” That advice comes with the caveat that, if you don’t know about something you wish to write about, go find out. This project illustrates that concept: research a topic and use that to develop an interactive fiction piece demonstrating one’s knowledge and imparting that understanding to a reader, enough for them to make informed decisions that historical figure faced.

You can explore the Student-Designed Histories at McCall’s Gaming the Past website (a treasure trove of material about games for learning), including several exemplary projects by students. The ones I’ve played through don’t have an exhaustive number of entries — certainly nothing as comprehensive as a Choose Your Own Adventure book — but they provide good impressions of historical figures, the times in which they lived, and the choices they had to make. I read a few that piqued my interests in various historical periods: Hannibal, Cicero, Hatshepsut, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Boudicca. They’re the kind of assignment attuned to my own teenager’s abilities and enthusiasms history. In the interest of encouraging other educators to use this technique to engage students, McCall’s website not only features notable stories from students over the past years but includes his assignment and grading rationales to guide teachers as they incorporate Student-Designed Histories into their own curriculum.

Dr. McCall’s Historical
Problem Space Framework

McCall’s an exuberant proponent for using analog and especially electronic games for learning. His Gaming the Past page offers numerous resources for exploring history through games beyond the researched interactive fiction from his students: pieces explaining his Historical Problem Space framework; lists of computer and analog games about history; essays on the theory and practice of using games to explore history; and games he’s designed for the classroom (in various stages of development). His upcoming book, Designing Historical Games for Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Educators (published by Routledge later this ye. The book promises to serve as a useful resource for enterprising teachers seeking to infuse more experiential learning and greater challenges into their classrooms.

When I look back on my own high school days — and certainly as I see my son’s own experience in a very different high school environment — I regret many educational institutions focus more on “teaching to the test” and fulfilling the barest minimum requirements as dictated by government institutions. Few challenge students to to work toward an understanding beyond parroting back names and dates and facts...to collate information and perspectives, learning how to evaluate them, how to estimate situations (historical and current) and formulate effective courses of action. Our students needs more thoughtful and creative challenges to nurture their intellectual capacities, along with a little compassion for the perspective of others. McCall’s Student-Designed Histories accomplishes these goals (and no doubt more than I can comprehend). The project serves as an effective example that, given the proper guidance and encouragement, students can meet the challenge and think beyond the most basic assignments. It offers new ideas for educators to think outside the box, expanding their own curriculum and enhancing their students’ experiential learning.

“There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.”

— John Stuart Mill