The Personal View of Sweeping Events

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

— John Stuart Mill

What's it like to lead the advance at
the Battle of Great Bridge?

Too often I see history education in America focusing on broad events and key figures, the sweeping view of events, with little if any time spent on a more personal perspective of those average people living that history. I fear this has become a greater issue in the age of Standards of Learning (SOL) tests (“No Standardized Test Left Behind…”), which emphasize educators “teach to the test,” covering the basics every student should know with limited time for developing critical thinking skills about that material. (Though I’ll freely admit my own education in the latter quarter of the 20th century bore hallmarks of simply hitting the marks, with a few notable exceptions.) Certainly some exceptional teachers inspire students to take a closer look at historical topics, especially zooming in from the macro view of great events to the micro perspective of individuals who lived through history. A personal view can engage our empathy, give us a more relatable impression of history beyond names, events, and dates, and challenge us to ask questions, investigate further, and reflect on relevant issues...important to better inform our current situation and our inevitable slog into the future. Games can help us relate to that personal perspective, though we cannot appreciate it without at least a general knowledge of history to provide context.

I’m reading Victoria Taylor’s Eagle Days: Life and Death for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. I’ve read a number of very good accounts of the Battle of Britain, many covering the broad history, like Douglas C. Dildy’s Battle of Britain 1940: The Luftwaffe’s ‘Eagle Attack’ (Osprey 2018) and Richard Hough and Denis Richards’ The Battle of Britain: The Greatest Air Battle of World War II (W.W. Norton, 1989), and a few incorporating personal views of British commanders, pilots, and citizens, like Tim Clayton and Phil Craig’s Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain (Touchstone, 1999). Eagle Days provides a look at the Battle of Britain from the perspective of Luftwaffe personnel, German newspapers, and average citizens. It doesn’t focus on operations, but uses that previously well-explored history to provide context for the personal impressions of the campaign: what average people felt about how the war was going, the inconveniences they suffered, the sacrifices they made. What’s it like to be a Stuka pilot desperately making your way across the English Channel after British fighters shot your unit to pieces...all while you’re pretty sure the gunner behind you is dead?

Like non-fiction books, adventure games can offer us a similar experience, covering sweeping events but also giving us a personal perspective within those events...all while more deeply immersing us in different ways than books, visual media, and even classroom activities. I’ve talked about the Battle of Britain in a past blog post, one of my very occasional “Watch, Read, Play” series. Look at some of the games mentioned there. John Butterfield’s solitaire RAF: August 1940: The Battle of Britain provides a theater-level solitaire overview of the campaign covering much of England. But games like Wings of Glory and Fighters of Europe put players in the cockpits of individual warplanes. Engagement in these games forces us to make decisions as if we were flying those planes (in an abstracted, vicarious way), dealing with the emotions of personal victory...and defeat.

Keeping to the World War II period, we can find games that focus on the Special Operations Executive SOE), the French Maquis, and other clandestine resistance across both the broad European Theater of Operations (ETO) and at the individual level...a burgeoning theme in recent game releases. Titles like Ben Hull’s In the Shadows (GMT Games, 2025) cover resistance efforts across France and offer a vast look at the campaign. Given the many individual histories of those involved in clandestine operations, many games focus on more personal experiences: Jake Staines’ solitaire Maquis (Side Room Games, 2019), Brad Smith’s Comet (Hollandspiele, 2024), Dave Neal and David Thompson’s War Story: Occupied France (Osprey, 2024), and even Alex White’s roleplaying game A Cool and Lonely Courage (Plane Sailing Games, 2019). These games put players in the roles of individuals trying to manage local resistance cells and carry out local missions against Vichy and German authorities. They take the sweeping historical context of World War II and drop players into the action at very personal levels, controlling and making decisions for individuals in specific situations faced not by commanders and spymasters, but by ordinary people fighting to resist military occupation.

(I’ll make a quick aside to note that well-researched interactive fiction, similar to Choose Your Own Adventure books, can also involve readers in this personal level of history, though without as much agency and freedom of choice as many games. You might still find titles from Capstone Press’s You Choose line out there. And, of course, exceptional educators use the interactive fiction format to challenge students to research and craft their own first-person historical experiences.)

Games, like other media, can provide us with different perspectives on historical events. Like other media — books, films, streaming series, graphic novels — they portray events with a particular objective in mind which shapes the presentation and hence the experience. A non-fiction account with a bibliography and footnotes approaches events from a scholarly angle, with greater detail and sources one can question and investigate oneself. Other media dealing with historical topics often strays into the realm of historically inspired fiction, however accurate its portrayal might seem. These works often streamline events and present them in a manner suitable to their primary goal...entertaining storytelling. That isn’t to say they don’t have any value beyond mere entertainment; popular media can introduce new issues and inspire people to further explore them, even in games and non-fiction publications. Historical games have their limitations, too, beyond approaching subjects from a particular perspective (often to entertain, inspire, and educate). By their nature, by any media’s nature, they simplify and abstract complex situations so we can experience them in a relatable way and gain a better understanding of their complexity (and in this I’m paraphrasing prolific historical game designer Volke Ruhnke).

Combining games with other media as well as classroom education can enhance our understanding of history...and even other subjects. While I have advocated to include game experiences in local educational programs — schools, museums, libraries — such open-minded efforts have met with little interest. I have filled in perceived gaps in my son’s secondary history education with my own efforts, adding to the work of a handful of his more exceptional teachers who challenged him with projects forcing him to think beyond the baseline standards imposed by the SOL tests. We have always cultivated an interest in history, especially when our knowledge of broad events needed a more informed personal perspective: visits to historical sites, watching historically themed movies, and, of course, playing games with historical themes. I’m thankful we’ve encouraged a spirit of curiosity and an urge to continue learning. I fear our education system today has trained most students to remain satisfied with fulfilling the requirements of a basic SOL test for a grade that too often reflects knowledge but not understanding. Like extracurricular media, games can challenge everyone to gain a deeper, more empathetic understanding of history through their engagement with both the sweeping narrative and the individual stories of those who lived through these events.

“Our education system is increasingly embracing a black-and-white way of thinking, in which ‘learning’ and ‘play’ are diametrically opposed. ‘Learning’ is the serious stuff that happens inside a classroom and can be measured via multiple choice questions and a No. 2 pencil. ‘Play’ is frivolous, fun, and worst of all, optional.”

— Darell Hammond