peer reviewedThis paper discusses the development of an educational historical game, called The Migrants’ Chronicles: 1892 and suggests a series of best practices for a collaborative co-design process to balance engagement and playability with historical authenticity.in the development of historical games

Funken, Franziska

Guardiola, Emmanuel

Jungblut, Marie-Paule

Mason, Austin

Pause, Johannes

This paper discusses the development of an educational historical game, called The Migrants’ Chronicles: 1892 and suggests a series of best practices for a collaborative co-design process to balance engagement and playability with historical authenticity.in the development of historical games

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Balancing education and engagement: A suggested co-design process for historical game development

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Balancing education and engagement: A suggested co-design process for historical gamedevelopmentAustin Mason, Carleton College, @meDHieval, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0906-1398Franziska Funken, TH Köln - Cologne Game LabEmmanuel Guardiola, TH Köln - Cologne Game LabMarie-Paule Jungblut, University of LuxembourgJohannes Pause, University of Luxembourg, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5953-4005In the past several decades, history-based video games have become increasingly popular,sophisticated and economically successful. Games like the Assassin’s Creed series or SidMeier’s Civilization are eagerly played by millions. History Respawned and similar YouTubechannels feature playthroughs with running commentary by professional historians thatgarner thousands of views, while sites like Play the Past host essays that dissect theintersection of cultural heritage and games for a public audience.1 Academics and educatorshave taken notice. There is a large and growing body of literature that tackles the challengesof teaching history with and through commercial video games, where historical accuracy hasoften been sacrificed for the sake of entertainment.2 This paper discusses the co-authors’recent digital humanities collaboration to develop a balanced educational historical game,called The Migrants’ Chronicles, and suggests a series of best practices for a collaborativeco-design process for historical game development.The Migrants’ Chronicles is a digital history game aimed at middle grade students (11-14years old) in which players actively learn about migration history. Like the classic text-basedgame Oregon Trail, The Migrants’ Chronicles allows players to confront the difficult choices2 Kevin Kee et al., “Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming,” The Canadian HistoricalReview 90, no. 2 (2009): 303–26, https://doi.org/10.1353/can.0.0164; Matthew Kapell and Andrew B.R. Elliott, eds., Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York:Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Kevin Kee, ed., Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History withTechnology, 2014, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.12544152.0001.001.1 Bob Whitaker, “History Respawned,” accessed January 20, 2023,https://www.youtube.com/c/HistoryRespawned; “Play the Past,” accessed January 20, 2023,https://www.playthepast.org/.historical migrants had to navigate in order to successfully leave their homes, travel longdistances, and arrive safely in a new country, but updated to reflect the latest advances intechnology, game design, and pedagogical strategies. The first installment is set in 1892 andtraces the historical journeys of Luxembourgers to the United States in the latenineteenth-century.Pedagogical ConceptThe game serves to activate the students as part of a teaching unit on the topic of migration.The general learning objectives of the lesson include the students' ability to name reasons foremigration in 1892, to describe the migration process as an intercultural experience, and tocompare historical and contemporary migration movements. The game fulfills two goals withthis approach: First, it aims to create cognitive empathy with the migrants of the 19th centuryby adopting a migrant’s perspective in a world characterized by hardship and the need tomake decisions.3 Secondly, it is supposed to pose example situations that raise furtherquestions - for example, about the differences between Luxembourg and the USA, or abouthistorical events, cultural trends, or technological inventions.In order to achieve these goals, the game focuses on concrete historical situations, such as thearrival of the migrants on Ellis Island, during which the difficulties of immigration to theUSA can be demonstrated. At Ellis Island, immigrants navigated issues such as citizenship,national borders, language barriers, currencies, cultural and gender identity, or economicinequality. These situations are translated into gaming mechanisms that make hardship3 Jenny Kidd, “Gaming for Affect: Museum Online Games and the Embrace of Empathy,” Journal ofCuratorial Studies 4, no. 3 (Oct 2015), 414–32, https://doi.org/10.1386/jcs.4.3.414_1.tangible and force decisions, but also allow insights into a context that requires furtherexplanation. These mechanisms include, among others, a resource system that allowstime-critical decisions to be made, a dialogue system that contextualizes these decisions, andan exportable diary that informs the follow-up of the game experience in class.Key to the success of our project has been assembling a transdisciplinary international andmultilingual collaboration between humanities scholars, game designers, cognitivepsychologists, and students. Two ‘best practices’ have emerged from our process, which wethink would benefit others as a model for historical game development: Successfullytranslating historical situations into gameplay requires 1) a clear guiding principle, and 2) afundamental collaborative approach to making the game.Guiding Principle: Authenticity over AccuracyIn order to create an engaging and balanced historical game, developers should embraceauthenticity (recreating conditions that historical actors would plausibly have encountered)over accuracy (exactly capturing every attested historical detail).4 A player must be able tomake non-trivial decisions with unsure outcomes in order to play a game; if the outcome iscompletely predictable, it is no longer a game. For example, in our historical period, mostmigrants booked a pre-planned travel route paid in advance from an agent, but in our gamethe player makes decisions about type and direction of travel at each stage of the journey inorder to better understand the differences between our world and that of the latenineteenth-century (see map image).4 Jeremiah McCall, “Playing with the Past: History and Video Games (and Why It Might Matter),”Journal of Geek Studies 6, no. 1 (2019): 29–48.Since the agency of the individual is important for both good history and good game design,it is sometimes necessary to change aspects of the historical record in order to teach a morehumane history through the game. A loss in terms of accuracy can often be a win in terms oflearning outcomes.Collaborative Mode of ProductionTo balance playability and historical authenticity, the production of the game follows aniterative process of true collaboration that involves continual co-design at all stages of theproject. This is in stark contrast to the usual development process for such projects, whereeither a game development studio has an idea for a project and hires historical advisors asconsultants, or a historian / educator has an idea and hires a game studio to build aneducational game to their specifications. A successful balanced historical game is best createdby an interdisciplinary team respecting the expertise that different members bring to the table.This includes also the target group of the game itself. The inclusive development process ofthe game makes it necessary that each version of the game is being tested by a group ofpupils. Their feedback is taken into account in the further development. Our project isintended for middle grade students in Luxembourg and the USA and designed with classroomuse in mind, which has informed many decisions about the shape of the project:● An active learning pedagogical approach, positioning the teacher as a guide for jointexperience, rather than a one-way transmitter of information as in the traditionalclassroom.● An awareness of sensitive content, shaping which historically attested experiences areaddressed and with what levels of appropriate care (e.g. suicide or assault).● Localization and language translation — both as relates to users in Luxembourgish orEnglish, and playable characters, who crossed borders and had to grapple withunfamiliar languages.

Balancing education and engagement. A suggested co-design process for historical game development

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Balancing education and engagement. A suggested co-design process for historical game development

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