History, Biography and Empathy in Inkle's '80 Days'

Inkle's 80 Days, a digital gamebook adapting Jules Verne's novel into a steampunk science-fiction setting, offers players an unusual relationship to history. The authors argue that the game layers real nineteenth-century historical events and figures beneath a fictional world, using its speculative framing to foreground minority perspectives. Its central claim is that the game structures history through two divergent positions: the player-character Passepartout remains a detached witness to large events that rarely affect his journey, while non-player characters are actively immersed in shaping and reshaping history, often through resistance and revolt.

The analysis highlights several features of the game's design. Historical references are brief, episodic, and optional, with no in-game supplementary resources, so players must consult outside sources such as the Internet to learn more. The chronology is loose and cross-sectional rather than causal, presenting history as dependent on framing and perspective rather than as a clear sequence. Historical characters appear mostly by name or in brief, often humorous, textual portrayals, and their interactions have little consequence for the protagonist. The fictional layer also features prominent female engineers and pilots, and the authors illustrate how encounters with Jewish communities in Romania and Ukraine prompted them to research neglected histories.

The authors conclude that the game's fragmented, perspectival treatment of history makes it a resource for developing what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination, the capacity to connect individual biographies with broader social forces. Their analysis is a qualitative, reflective study of the game's narrative and structure, with the authors' own gameplay experiences serving as the primary evidence rather than a systematic survey or sample.