Shawn Graham @electricarchaeo Carleton U
May 16, 2015
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
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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