A Historian's Guide to Researching Your Historical Game

[Music] thanks for coming to my talk a historian's guide to researching your historical game uh my name is James colrain I'm an assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska and I'm also a game developer um I'm currently working as a solo Dev on a first-person narrative exploration game called casassus in which players explore and evacuated Plantation estate during the American Revolution to confront our memory of the founding fathers and there relationship with Colonial slavery the game is based closely on historical research and every plot Point environment and object is based on a documented analog from museums archives and historic sites it's not yet formally announced uh but if you're interested you can see some screens and a draft trailer uh on my studio site at historiated docomo settings have long been popular topics for games and recent years are no

exceptions so today I want to talk to you a little bit about how you might begin to research your own historically themed games and I'll use some of my own examples but I'll also talk about how thinking like a historian as you're researching might give you some really cool and thought-provoking ideas for your game narratives it's a lot to do in 30 minutes uh but you should at least have an idea of how to get started once we're done okay but first let's talk a little bit about the way that history works sometimes we team to tend to think that the past is very set and established only occasionally updated with new discoveries but in reality history is very messy right from the beginning if you look at any claim made in a normal textbook the evidence often begins to look more like this a messy pile of garbage which historians must then piece together to construct a narrative of what happened so this leads us to some key principles about the way history works the first is that history is not the truth okay we are only following traces and even if we could get inside the mind of historical witness this still wouldn't be the truth

because other people would have experienced the moment differently right second history is a discussion and that's because every uh historian who looks at the same pile of garbage is going to draw different conclusions okay finally history is always changing because each generation of historians will view their garbage piles differently okay uh for instance historians in the early 20th century would have rid Andrew Jackson as one of our best presidents for his military victories and his role in expanding democracy while contemporary ones rightly criticize him uh for his slave holding and rooll in the Trail of Tears uh leaving room for other Alternatives there's Andrew Jackson and proposed har Tubman $20 bill okay okay let's talk a little bit about how to structure your research okay when you're choosing a topic it's important to lean on the work that historians have already done for you there's no shame and focusing on topics with accessible resources and historians often make the same Choice when we're choosing our own projects for for instance I chose Eastern Virginia

for the setting of my game cassus in part because I could draw on the expertise of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation where I had a research fellowship and learned from the restored buildings an ample library and hundreds of expert interpreters and this is especially true for Visual Evidence if people have already reconstructed the settings you're interested in in museum exhibits or for documentaries this can save you a ton of time right it's also important to remember that just like in other aspects of game design your research is going to be an iterative process so remember you'll likely be skipping back and forth between the next few steps that I'm going to go through uh and you're you're going to have new ideas which point you to new evidence and then back to new ideas right so if we're looking for a place to start right getting your hands on a broad accessible book from a reliable scholar is a pretty good first step for instance when I wanted an introduction into Aztec culture for one of my history lectures the short sweet book by archaeologist Michael Smith succinctly covered almost every aspect okay but how do we know

that what we're reading is reliable and not absurd as pseudo history okay well good history Works under pure review where before publication other expert historians critique a draft which offers some insurance against fraudulent or other unreliable interpretations books from University presses are all peer- reviewed and uh you can just see also if you have a book that's not from a university press if it's been blurbed or positively reviewed by working historians or if it's connected to an established Museum or a government agency right once you've read broadly in a book or two you should be full of ideas and also topics that you'd like to investigate further so now's our time to start Gathering sources and historians divide our sources into two types primary sources which are things like Diaries letters records interviews Maps photographs but also artifacts art and architecture that come directly from the period that we're studying um for instance this slave pass that featured in uh the research of my game and also

this map of the area surrounding B surrounding Williamsburg both of which were um featured nearby in Virginia um and of course you're also going to use a lot of secondary sources these are things like books and articles by historians and other Scholars who interpret primary sources and draw their own conclusions and there are some things like the historical newspaper which actually qualify as both okay secondary sources are pretty easy to come by via your books bibliographies but there may be a lot to process so a couple of tips first if even just looking at the recommended books that come up uh on Amazon or some other site uh can give you a pretty good indication of important books in your field especially if you're already starting out with a respected title okay also Google Scholar is a very useful tool because it can show you the most cited books in your topic and that can give you a sense of both the reliability of the scholarship and also how prominent the interpretations you're considering are okay primary sources on the other hand are going to take more effort the most obvious place to find original

documents is to actually visit the archives and the libraries that have the originals but that's a lot to ask of a busy developer instead you can start in your bibliographies and see which manuscript collections were used in writing the book and look up those archives online many are going to have the actual documents available to read um and in some cases uh this will be available completely for free so here's that past that I showed again you can view directly on the Williamsburg website uh um in addition bibliographies will also so show published primary sources like collections of letters and even books and other print uh media from your period uh these are available in public domain and many of them complete online like this collection of Thomas Jefferson's letters some great sites to check for these TS of types of public sources include archive.org and the digital Public Library of America and even in some cases Google Books here's the digital Public Library America for cassus I found many complete digital cop of books that were actually owned by

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson like this gardening manual which was available complete and for free online Additionally you can search for modern primary source collections targeted at high school or college students you also want to visit the websites of the relevant historic sites and museums for Visual Evidence the online collections at the Williamsburg Museum have been invaluable for me in making casses and many incredibly important museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art the Art Institute of Chicago and the British museum have nearly their complete collections viewable online sometimes with royalty-free images in addition to these sources you're want to get you're going to want to get help from experts right so there are two broad categories of historians who can potentially help you scholarly historians like me are mostly University professors and these are people who are actively trying to produce totally new interpretations and discoveries based on original research so they probably won't be able to fact check your game uh and in some cases they may know even less than you do about some of your topics however uh

because academics are in the habit of uh extrapolating very large themes from their areas of original research they're going to be very good for helping you with things like uh politics economics Empire religion race gender um and especially also debates and controversies that may be happening in the academic field that you're going to want to be aware of the other kind of expert that you'll be looking for are public historians and these can include archists Museum officials Park Rangers anybody else whose task with preserving and educating the public about history these are experts who are likely to be able to tell you about the everyday life in your period and these days even bloggers YouTubers and pinest Boards can be helpful and sometimes even pretty reliable for instance Townsen and Suns a company that makes props for American revolutionary enactors runs an awesome YouTube channel on 18th century life and cooking and yes this is can where this is where you can get all your pressing Earth and ovens questions answered okay uh and even though he isn't a

professional historian uh he routinely cites peer-reviewed Scholars primary documents and also collaborates with public history officials okay now a few pieces of advice when you're reaching out to experts okay first do as much research you can especially about the expert in question before you make contact look up their books and articles and go on YouTube and see if they have any lectures so that if they give you the time you're not asking about things that you could have easily learned yourself second ease them in into the idea of your game if somebody looks particularly cranky maybe don't even say game in that first email okay uh lots of experts may not know how far games have come as a serious storytelling medium and they need may need a few quick examples to know that you're not doing something totally trivial right also keep in mind that the most famous experts may not always be as useful as young upand cominging scholars who may be more open to sharing and possibly be more up to- dat on recent discoveries you can find these experts by looking through your list of second authors on

the websites of public history institutions and also by Looking Through The Faculty pages of your local universities um finally if you're a bigger Studio paying a small consulting fee can go a long way also be prepared and respectful if the expert isn't enthusiastic about your game and make sure to credit them but only after you've allowed them to see the final project and make sure they want their name associated with it okay now one important way that experts can help you is in dealing with cultural sensitivity and now of course we don't have time in such a short talk to adequately cover very complicated issues like representation diversity and cultural appropriation but a few points of advice first pitch your idea early to as many experts from as many different backgrounds as you can and get their gut reactions if they're critical at first but you still feel really confident in your concept you can try again once you've put together mockups or prototypes but you need to take their advice seriously

also it's really important to talk with people who have different sets of expertise your game design peers may have very culturally thoughtful suggestions that um uh for your game that don't actually turn out to be historically accurate and while the historians should be able to help you do justice to past subjects they may have game design ideas that are either artistically unworkable or even clumsy and offensive when you actually put them into practice you'll need to get a lot of feedback from a lot of people and use your own judgment to balance all of that input okay so now that you've gathered a lot of evidence and you have people to help guide you let's talk about how we actually interpret that evidence first of all no matter how silly or weird your game idea I always encourage everyone to read at least a little bit from primary records of that period in my experience nothing is going to spark your imagination faster or show you the weirder side of your topic quicker than reading directly from the past but we also need to keep in mind some principles to help us evaluate what we're reading

first we need to remember that if our documents are sometimes that our documents are sometimes going to contradict one another or just not make sense and we're going to have to use our secondary sources and our expert advice to try to figure out uh what they mean or which are more accurate and when we consider a given document we want to think about the biases that every author has right and not just whether or not they're being honest with us but broader questions like why is the author even writing this who are they writing it for what does that audience expect of them how does the author's identity affect what they're saying what societal pressures are on them to say things a certain way there are also biases that are present in the documents themselves one is survival bias this means that the more likely a kind of document is to survive the more disproportionate influence it will have on our record of the past a great example of this is Neolithic cave art most prehistoric people lived Outdoors but because the objects they left in caves are much more likely to survive until today we give them such outsized attention that the

public often refers to these people colloquially as cavemen another important bias to watch is for document bias if the only records you have from a town are from the church you may be tempted to overstate the importance of religion in daily life because that's all those documents are intended to tell you let's look at an example of an excellent primary source uh one of the most valuable kinds of documents for my game cassus and for the history of slavery overall are newspaper advertisements for escape slave slaves like this one placed by Thomas Jefferson from these short ads we can extrapolate all kinds of details that we wouldn't otherwise have about enslaved people's daily lives including their diet clothing Health family structure names spoken languages ethnic backgrounds personal properties punishments skills and more but the ads are obviously subject to significant biases first they're completely limited to only things Masters knew about these people and wanted to share in public but second

we also have a document bias and that's the generalizations that we make from them may only really apply to Slaves who run away rather than the broader group of enslaved people it's important for us to think about how we interpret evidence because when we recreate a historical World in our game we're actually creating our own historic interpretation so let's talk a little bit about the issue of accuracy a lot of game designers get excited about a quote unquote hardcore approach to realism this instinct is already common to war games and survival games and sometimes that mentality carries over into history themed games but while this might work for little details like sword pommels or dress floral patterns these aspirations usually break down and prove insufficient once we start trying to depict effectively larger social and cultural realities and of course complete accuracy is impossible and that should be obvious to us as shown in this classic onion video sterzing a super realistic Iraq war game where you sit board for 8 hours fixing

trucks thus even the quote unquote super realistic games have to make a lot of compromises to be anything somebody is going to want to play right there are also different kinds of accuracy that we can consider sometimes it may make sense to choose accuracy in tone rather than accuracy in detail be it using an EDM track for a decadent Roman Feast instead of the possibly shrill and unfamiliar ancient music that actually would have played or skipping the EXO POS Elizabethan Pleasant trees not to mention all the things we'd have a hard time depicting the accents the cadences the unfamiliar vocabulary that might slow uh NPC dialogue to a crawl but that doesn't mean that we have to abandon deep historical engagement just because we're willing to make some sacrifices in the name of making our games more playable despite interdimensional travel and robotic song birds BioShock Infinite directly engages with 19th century immigration racism and colonialism and even though there is very very Fierce debate over this its success in dealing

with these topics uh it makes much more of an effort than the supposedly sturdy Oregon Trail which significantly overlooks the presence of Native Americans uh themes of colonialism and all kinds of other important elements more recently the return of the oberen mixed Fantastical horror elements with a great deal of pretty accurate daily life from 19 century sailing including a really excellent portrayal of Maritime diversity another way that accuracy comes into play is when you're dealing with historical myths there are plenty of Pop Culture bubbles to burst Napoleon wasn't really that short Vikings didn't really have horns on their helmets and Paul Rivier never said the British are coming because he was the British right your commitment to accuracy will help you decide whether you're going to affirm or dispel myths and some of these may just be fun to play with uh with your audience you do however need to think about which tropes like say the common one of Columbus as a historic Explorer may actually be covering up for

historic abuses and whether or not it's desirable to perpetuate those even in a less serious game right and of course no matter how seriously we take the issue of historical accuracy your research is going to provide you with a lot of Rich content to drive your storytelling and your design so let's take a little time to consider how thinking like a historian can help your game let's start with characters it's a common Maxim to say that each character should be the hero of Their Own Story and heroes have goals that they want to achieve and while lots of human aspirations like love and success and family and creative expression excuse me are relatively Universal how your character character seeks out those things is going to be radically different period to period you'll want to know how common uh how common important modern categories like of identity like race class and gender were expressed which sometimes may be very very different than the present for instance let me present you with a very

manly portrait of George Washington from the 18th century uh even though his curvy body relaxed posture and phly clothing might signal femininity to some people in the present in his day manliness was expressed by the ease and Grace powerful people had when they had command over others including uh the people uh he owned unfortunately you also want to pay attention to other categories that may be more important in the past than they are today depending on the area this could include things like religious ident Imperial affiliation tribe language group for instance it may be hard to imagine a Baptist and a Methodist coming to blows today over their theological differences but that was a real Poss that was a real possibility at certain periods in the past your research will also enrich the setting and the environmental design incredibly two great questions to be asking over and over again as you learn about past spaces are number one why is this here and number two how did this get here the why is going to tell you

not only about practical demands the way that societies manage resources and concerns like water transportation shelter security but also their symbolic priorities uh why did they build in a particular place why did they build in the style they did why did they decorate in the style they did the how question is also very important because it's going to reveal how things like agriculture technology and economies work uh but especially how money and labor help produce spaces the secret pirate towns of Uncharted for for instance show a ton of attention to 18th century architecture that afflect reflects a lot of careful thinking about the why um but the how is a little bit hardly to establish I mean who in these secret pirate towns is paying for hundreds of sculptors to produce Decades of work and all of these statues right these Pirates were very committed to public art so it's there's some other statues uh in my own game balancing the questions of scale archit tal style natural light and other practical

concerns in the design of the main house not only made my environmental design more accurate but taught me a lot about how the characters enslaved and free inhabited and lived in this house here's a little bit of that house exterior right and of course what you learn about the past is going to impact the way of what you think is possible for your narrative arcs and plot threads I found a useful exercise to think about is what sort of stories are only possible in your historical moment for instance think of a typical Mission quest in an open world game if your game is set like Assassin's Creed origins in ancient Egypt could this same Mission fit into the Witcher and these are things like find my dog uh could it fit into Grand Theft Auto or when you think about the beliefs and pressures and priorities of your characters what sorts of stories could only happen in your period these may end up being some of the most interesting there are a lot of other question questions we can ask uh people often

critique uh horror movies and say that all of the tension would dissipate in a particular moment if someone only had cell service what stories are possible in Worlds that exist long before electricity or printing how does resource management in your game change when a drink of water means a f mile walk how does inventory management change when objects like silver buttons are relatively commonplace but paper sheets remain expensive just by learning how to light a candle using an 18th century tnder box for my own game had all kinds of ramifications about how I might manage light which bled over into Le level design and even elements of story tension and finally while a lot of historical games concentrate on trying to reconstruct past events in spaces literally I think there's an exciting opportunity to start trying to represent past mentalities worldviews religious beliefs and cosmologies that is to say to try to make our players feel the way historical people did in a place or see historical scenes uh the way that historical actors did for instance we in

the present may be tempted to view a medieval Chapel Cathedral as having a Timeless ethereal Mystique when period visitors may have made viewed it more like this thinking the patronage was T tacky or crass to say nothing of how modern assassin Creeds player Assassin's Creed players view it right or for another interesting example consider the ancient Egyptians who in using hieroglyphs had no formal distinction between writing and art that meant to literate Egyptians this could be writing as could this but also this but even seemingly decorative items like this ptal pectoral from King tutanka Moon could also be writing in this case incorporating the hieroglyphs from his throne name as you can see both having the sundisk the Scarab and the basket glyphs this means that scenes that appear wholly pictoral to a modern audience some Egyptians would have looked at and heard letter sounds and

see and saw words as they looked at these images and these are the types of very core cultural differences that could be really exciting to capture in a game all right to finish let's take a scenario say you want to make yet another pirate themed game okay and you've done your research as we've discussed you have primary documents manuscripts published primary documents you have some visual references you have some secondary sources you may have even found an expert or two to advise I could potentially advise a little bit about Pirates and once you've gotten over the material this is how your research findings might compare to the pop culture uh reality of how people think about Pirates okay so here's a little research diagram okay so we have all these tropes about Pirates okay some of these end up being pretty accurate okay Pirates were often after Spanish loot especially silver they really did use black flags in some cases to Signal uh that they were coming

uh we have from Pirate documents that they were often uh people in an argument were forced on duels especially on uh uh marooned Islands they definitely drank a lot of rum uh we have evidence of eye patches and even a a kind of a quirky theory that uh healthy people may have used uh an eye patch to keep one of their eyes ready for um night vision in the below cabin Blackbeard was a real person with a lot of really crazy uh stories attributed him um and we have evidence of some pretty crazy pirate towns like Port Royal where people wrote about there being so many taverns that the parrots and the monkeys were often drunk um but we have lots of pirate tropes that are myths okay the Yar pirate voice was invented by the actor uh who played Long John Silver for Disney's Treasure Island and of course Pirates were very diverse so they would have had lots of other weird noises if they were French or Dutch um we don't have any evidence of anybody walking the plank uh certainly there were people who Lo their legs as pirates but they're

probably not going to be climbing too many ropes after that um and we have one instance of Captain kid and buried treasure but this probably wasn't a great place to hide your loot in addition to that this we'd find things that we never expected right um the life of pirates is often really unglamorous sometimes when they take City's hostage they would ask for things like food because they were hungry right because they're on the Run they don't get to relax a lot uh a lot of pirate raids were less violent than you might expect akin to you know a mugging where somebody quickly hands over their wallet because they don't want any trouble uh we have evidence of a lot of women contributing to Pirate culture including in some cases women uh who disguise their gender to pass as men and serve on pirate ships there's a tremendous amount of ethnic and racial diversity represented among pirate Crews a lot more religious influence than we see uh exhibited in a lot of games and perhaps most surprising uh a lot of pirate Crews operated as democracies agreeing on a set uh uh agreed terms where they would carry out a voyage uh often times having

pretty equal shares of the potential Loot and many of these agreements even Incorporated health insurance something that a number of us would like to see included in our daily lives right um now there's lots of different directions that you could go with this material you could make a more silly game like sea of Thieves or a more straightforward game like Black Flag but no matter your strategy you're going to have a lot of potential resources to draw upon um and you're going to have a much better uh uh possible uh amount of narratives to draw on because of your historical research um so I hope that regardless of your goals uh that you and your Fearless crew won't be afraid of another trip to the library so thank you for listening and uh do we have time for questions anybody yeah take a couple anybody a little hard to

see you talked a lot about um like accurately representing the like a certain of the visual or physical elements of an era but I guess I wonder about the counterfactual like viable counterfactual outcomes so I'm a huge fan of historical simulations but of course the player is the wild card and will optimize and optimize and so like often like the things that should have been virtually impossible and like you know as far as we know um turn out to be very viable and so like you know like I guess I'm curious about your thoughts about making most more likely or U more common outcomes actually more common in historical simulation yeah I think there's a couple of theoretical approaches to that one is with story a lot of times you may want to feature things that are based closely on historic records but obviously as soon as we have play and reaction we do have a counterfactual so that's something that didn't happen and so I think a good approach to that is by using what I'm doing in my own which is a composite historical fiction where it's it's a

piece of original uh plot but you're drawing from all these influences and then I think uh even though um if we're allowing players to interact a lot that that also generates counterfactuals that we can sort of think about accuracy in terms of modeling a process okay so in other words uh if we build a virtual pirate ship uh no one with the name of our online player ever actually sailed that but we could try our best to sort of duplicate the mechanisms of of it uh and uh the other people that they encounter so that their input is receiving a similar feedback as a historical character in that period might have I see thank you thank you well thank you for the talk I played a lot of C4 and um Gandhi was a Christian and he declared war on me so that wasn't very accurate how how how comfortable are you in Breaking history in Casas or do we have to wait and see um I think you know my particular goals in cassus are really to address a lot of

misconceptions that uh both people get at historic sites when they go visit places like monello and also that I get in my own classrooms so it's got a pretty sober tone and it's designed to uh really put the focus on the scale of enslavement you know in a place like monachello if you go today you'll see a restored house and maybe a cabin or two and they're trying to improve that but a lot of cases you know you would have one white family living in one of these houses there could be up to 1,500 people that are working in the service of that and so but that's my particular aim you know if your particular aim uh in a lighter area of history is to be really really silly you know I think some of those things can be productive um and they can also get people thinking you know when you play Civ and Gandhi is both a Christian and kills you uh that that dissonance dissonance is in itself educational right because you're noticing the difference from reality so yeah hi uh I'm a game designer and also a writer uh so I believe that there's always a fantasy about rewrite the

history uh especially about uh becoming the hero who rewrites history but we rarely see that like coming to part of the game play uh I I believe it's um it's a really difficult like design decision uh since like people like already know what happened in real life but if we like having if we have a reite the history at some point that opens the Pandora box uh to some extent and especially that like kind of uh when we have that in the game play uh we find that it's not that actual it's not as uh impactful as we expected so how do you think about like uh what could like what could you change about it uh yeah that's I think it's just a really important thing to know what your goals are um and also to manage that tone effectively so I think in all kinds of simulations you know you could have a very respectful tour of like a very serious Battlefield uh where um you know a lot of people died and you want people to have a

somber tone but if you're able to you know like jump up and bounce on the gravestones like Mario or something like that then that that breaks that level of of tone so I think you want to think ahead and account for the types of um unexpected actions that people might have um but then again like I said in other cases that sort of playfulness actually may have its own educational objectives you just want to make sure that it's not sending um kind of uh unfortunate um or even uh uh misg guided um conclusions in the in the experience that players are having thank you so I think it's uh 4:20 now so we're going to go ahead and wrap up I will hang out in the uh breakout room if anybody else wants to chat and thank you so much again for coming