What is my plan for Wives of Agency: The Video Game?

The Idea

Last semester I set out with the intention of creating a video game where you play as the wives of Henry VIII and have to make choices that have in game ramifications on stats like “English approval” or “Henry’s Affection” which if not kept over a certain threshold would cause the player to potentially be divorced or beheaded as an Game End scenario. If the stats are kept in the favorable zones, then the player may win, by outliving Henry.

Last semester I decided to do the majority of the content research for the project and created an interactive timeline, but this semester I hope to prototype a tutorial and demo of the game.

Intended Audience

I aim for this project to be the most useful for high schoolers taking European history and their teachers. I personally think I would also find this sort of game fun, as the structure for the video game is loosely based off of an actual video game that I enjoy playing, Long Live the Queen by Hanako Games. In that game you play as a fictional princess preparing her coronation against a number of conflicting forces: assassins, magic, war, and more. The princess must gain skills and make beneficial choices in dialogue checks in order to avoid danger and live long enough to be coronated. I would greatly simplify these mechanics, removing the Princess Mood mechanic, simplifying the number of skills, and of course making the dialogue checks based on Tudor history, and informed by primary sources and historical understandings of the period and its major figures. Because of this, I think there is the potential for the game to find an audience within strategy game players who are not coming for the educational experience, but rather the type of gameplay. I will keep this audience in mind, but I will make the choices best for the intended student audience even if it would be a detriment to the casual player due to the nature of the project.

Learning Goals

I want this project to contain teaching materials for potential highschool European history classes. While semi-unrelated to the product, I think it would be helpful for me to gain practice trying to describe, market, and assist teachers with using my product as a learning tool.

I also hope this project will help me better understand the creation and use of educational video games for classroom use. While I have taken beginner programming classes in the past, this would be a great exercise not only of my public history skills, but also my media and programming skills.

Some of the things I hope to teach the students:

• A feminist understanding of Tudor History, that shows the wives of Henry VIII to be unique figures who have agency and are able to accomplish much more than the short rhyme they are associated with.
• I am to introduce students to primary source text and images surrounding Tudor history, to engage students with critical and historical thinking skills, and apply them through game mechanics.
• I am to help break down some of the complexities of English Reformation, so that students can compare it to Catholicism and other reformist denominations contemporary to the Tudors.

Potential Pitfalls

At this time I do not have a sure answer over what engine I would want to build the game in, but I’m still looking and playing around with different programs to see which is going to be the best option for me. It is possible I won’t be able to find an ideal engine and will need to build from another engine, which may slow me done or limit my vision in some way.

Another pitfall: This class is two months long…I don’t think I can design, write, program, and quality test an entire video game along with my other responsibilities in just two months. So I’m going to try to keep my goal quite small, I just want a tutorial that allows the player to learn the rules, try the features, and play for a few “years” through the game. If I can’t achieve this, I plan to pivot into creating design documents and thorough storyboarding to show what the project might look like with additional time, resources, and potentially professional programmers. (I’m just an ambitious novice at this point).

Potential Sources

Unluckily for me, much of the primary sources directly created by the wives of Henry VIII have been destroyed or lost to time. But some of the sources that do remain are incredibly interesting in various ways. The speech Catherine of Aragon made at the Legatine Council recorded in The Life of Cardinal Wolesy by George Cavendish, Anne’s letter to Cardinal Wolsey about Henry’s advances (Henry’s creepy and aggressive love letters to Anne), Katherine Howard’s love letter to Thomas Culpeper, and Katherine Parr’s published religious texts. There’s some interesting materials here that help to paint a complex tapestry of the wive’s whose texts survive. I think it would be interesting to have players interact in order to “write” some of these texts and see how their choices fare against the actual decisions made by each woman. What outcome would happen if the student decided that instead of asking what she did wrong, Catherine of Aragon would have accused Henry of adultery at the Legatine Council? Would he have instead beheaded her? Would the country praise her? What would the student think would be the right choice in her position. These are some of the choices I want the players to think about. I also think that being able to read from the perspective of each woman will help to humanize her to the students, and the playing as the queen might show them the complexity of their lives and the time period.

Conclusion

I’m really excited to start working on this project, it’s been on my mind since at least December last year, and it would be great to see even a sliver of it become reality. I love game-ified, interactive, and fun learning, so I hope I’m able to create a product that showcases the potential for a project like this.