The Fun Stuff: VR/AR and Games

When it comes to public history, it’s not enough to just have the information, or even just the exhbits, you need engagement. One of the easiest ways to engage someone is to give them a fun activity to do. At lot of the times this consist of a typical worksheet or video, which if we’re beign honest, aren’t typically that much fun, just more fun than reading and lectures.

Enter digital interactive experiences. You might be already able to tell from some of my previous blog posts, but I’m a gamer. I love turn based strategy games, roleplaying games, card games, board games, battle games, and maybe most of all: simulation games. I grew up playing the Sims 1 and 2 and I still play sims games to this day (typically hopping between Sims 2 and 4), but I also play city builder games (my favorite is Zeus Master of Olympus 2000), and there’s a handful of other simulation games I’ve played, but I feel like I’ve made my point on the matter.

Educational Games

I mentioned my favorite city builder game being Zeus Master of Olympus 2000, many people would not think of this game as their first example of a city builder. They’d probably say Sim City, City Skylines, or even adjacent Zoo or Themepark builder games (Ex: Planet Zoo, Planet Coaster, Zoo Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon, etc). However, I stand firm in my love for Zeus. It’s an older game so it doesn’t hold up quite as well on modern machines, but the campaign modes are unmatched, they have you play as the ruler of different Greek cities during mythological events such as the lernean hydra wandering and destroying parts of your town, so you have to meet the requirements to summon Hercules to come fight for you, or building temples to gods to get their bonuses over your city. Each of these milestones in the game also comes with fully narrated text describing the myths in present tense to the player in order to immerse them in classical mythology. Unlike some games that are specifically educational, Zeus is also just a solid city builder game, instead of focusing on things like electrical lines and traffic,like modern city builder games, you have to space out your city well so that every shop is close enough to walk to all of the houses, and managing space for resources in storage lots, and trading with nearby towns…I’m forgetting something? Oh yeah, WAR! You can go to war as an ancient Greek city state, and it has actual ramifications such as not being able to trade with other city states that are engaged in war even if you aren’t, or troops invading and destroying your palace so you can’t collect taxes. It’s a multi-faceted game which is what makes it great.

Other educational games that I feel like work fairly well are games like the Nancy Drew Mysteries by Her Interactive. Like Zeus, these games are starting to get on the older side (and if we’re being critical, didn’t advance much technologically from the early 200s games for nearly 15 years). But Her Interactive even self describes their games as “Learn and Play Games”  and has a blog article advertising their best games for education and how they come with free teacher resources and worksheets. While I would say that Zeus is a bit complicated for younger children, Nancy Drew is much better while still retaining interesting concepts for older or more experienced gamers.

Now while I’ve gushed about some of my favorite educational games, I think its time to talk about games that are specifically made for education first, entertainment second. This week for my Digital Humanities course work I was told to play a game titled A Sailor’s Life for Me. This game took me a bit by suprise, I honestly thought it would be less interesting (or at least less intricate as it is). You start with a placement quiz about your knowledge of early 19th century sailing and get your placement (I got placed a “boy” which is the lowest rank on the ship) and after that you get your first paycheck and have to spend your money wisely in order to buy the uniform and equipment you need to perform your job. Then the game goes into it’s typically structure of the work week, where each day has a minigame associated with a common chore on the ship: swabbing the deck, retrieving gunpowder in a donkey-kong esque mini game, trying not to spill a full chamber pot (yes it’s illustrated too), and eventually as you get promoted you get other chores like loading cannons, rigging the flags, and hitting rats in the hull. Most of the games are based on either memorizing which order to perform tasks, or doing a task before you run out of time. Ir’s fairly simple and it does get a little repetitive as you get to the higher levels of promotion, but something about how each week there’s a slightly new event (like fighting a small British ship), and how each chore has its’s own hand illustrated scenes, makes itg feel a bit addictive. In addition, every time you do a task for the first time you get a brief historical explanation of it’s purpose.

I enjoyed A Sailor’s Life for Me, perhaps a little bit too much, especially given that work always seems to pile up around this time in the semester so I probably spent a little too much time “researching” this game. I honestly think that there’s too little high quality educational games like this. In addition, most educational games only seem to cater towards younger students (elementary school, and sometimes middle school), but I feel like there’s a huge population of older gamers who would love to play high quality (non-flash, rip) educational games, but they’re so few and far between.

VR/AR

I need to find a way to transition away from video games, but it’s a bit of a passion for me, so apologies for the poor segue, but I need to also discuss Virtual and Artificial reality for educational purposes. Virtual reality is cool. It sounds so lackluster compared to my enthusiasm for video games, but know that I genuinely think VR is actually cool, but I think it’s easier for me to critisize without also clouding my judgement with nostalgia. First I’ll get to my major criticisms, because they are fewer than my pros for VR.

1) VR looks like it is hard to set up for the digital humanist, especially since it appears very different to code than a typical website or blog. One of the examples which looks simpler to create is the Civil War VR experience on Youtube, which doesn’t always look the best. The user interface is simple once you know what you’re doing as a viewer, but it’s not easy to understand if you’ve never used a VR youtube video before. The video is also kinda blurry, the captions are sometimes strangely placed, because it’s not on a headset, it’s not all that immersive, just kinda feels like you’re watching a low quality reenactment video, and there’s persistant iPhone notification sounds in the recording which also takes the audience out of the immersion.

2) Most people don’t actually own a VR headset. For the people who do, a lot of these experiences are better for the home experience, but clunky for those who don’t. In addition, headsets are kind of expensive, so it would be a difficult thing to budget for on a institutional scale as well as a home consumer.

3) VR is difficult to navigate: VR experiences, especially those hosted by the Google Culture initiative are difficult to navigate, sometimes it looks like you should be able to go to an area you can see, but there is no arrow button, and clicking on that area doesn’t navigate to that area which can cause frustration for some users. VR besides navigation is also fairly light on interaction from the audience, which I believe makes it more forgettable than video game equivalents.

4) Incomplete: VR is often only a part of a whole experience. Even if the VR experience is great, it often needs to be joined with another activity or experience to truly sink in with the audience. For instance the Ford Theatre VR experience is great, it take your through basically a walking tour of the buildings associated with the assassination of President Lincoln, but as much as it is good, it also feels like it needs additional help, perhaps it would be helpful if there was an optional narration with options to choose more about certain aspects of the tour? While ti is the best of the VR experiences we’ve done for this assignment, it’s also less technilogically involved than the British museum, not being fully navigable (mostly being a click through panoramic pictures), which both makes it easier to use, but less satisfying to experience.

Now for some pros because I’m not a monster: VR is great for people who have mobility difficulties. You don’t need to physically climb up and down in the theatre, or down into the trenches to experience these projects. They are also fully online, and available whenever you are, which is great for people who can’t afford to travel to the museum, or have unusual schedules. VR is often more helpful for scale and positions than typical photography which can be skewed by perspective. I also just live interactive experiences, and VR is more interactive than reading a normal blog. I would say the main thing is that VR feels like it still needs more time in the oven for the technology to get to the point where a lot of my issues with it could be solved. There’s also concerns that VR isn’t always perfectly accurate and may mislead some audiences who aren’t able to discern where things may be fabricated or adjusted for ease of the format.

Synthesis

Some students just respond better to more interactive ways to learn. They’re called “hands-on learners” for a reason. Sometimes it just isn’t possible or probably to get a hands-on experience for everything you can learn, but VR and Videogames, are one way to bring the experience to the student even if only virtually. I also think people underestimate the amount of historical understanding can be discerned from these experiences, especially knowing that Booth broke his leg when he jumped from the presidential balcony, ut by experiencing the balcony in VR I can see where the spur of his boot caught on the painting of washington that was hung for that night to celebrate Lincoln’s prescence. Experiencing these locations in this amount of details helps the audience to piece together facts about the history. (I knew about Booth’s bad fall, but not that it was caused by getting caught, I thought it was just because he fell in general, but I was able to learn a new detail.)

I feel like it would be hard to describe which historical events or themes are more suited to this kind of work. I feel like, in theory, any history could be fair game, but I would also be hesitant to work with virtual reality or video games of historical events that include direct hate crimes. But even as I write this, I’m not fully discounting them. For instance I went to an in-person exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016 that involved a completely replicated house inside the musuem that was made to resemble a home in 1940s Germany that was hosting a hidden jewish family, and there were areas of the house where you could interact with objects or panels on the walls to read more about ways that the family would operate while helping the hidden jewish people. It was a memorable exhibit, and one that I think has a strong possibility for working well as a VR or Video Game experience.

I play a lot of option based conversation strategy games as well, and one concept that I think might work would be a video game in the perspective of Henry VIII’s wives, but with a format similar to the game Long Live the Queen. Where the player strategically manages their time to learn skills and options conversation trees to avoid being divorced or beheaded. Of course, this game, being deadly in nature, like the game the structure would be based on is more for an adult or mature audience, but I think it would be an itneresting concept for a history based educational game that I have not seen yet.

Interactive and gamified experiences of history help to connect casual audiences with sometimes more complex historical ideas. This is a topic I would love to research in more depth in the future, and perhaps even prototype my own history game.

 

This post was lasted edited Nov. 17, 2022)