The Challenges of Using Commercial-Off-the-Shelf Narrative Games in History Classrooms

This paper examines the practical and pedagogical challenges of bringing commercial, off-the-shelf narrative games into secondary history classrooms. Its central argument is that historical narrative games, which present history as dynamic and multi-perspectival rather than as a fixed sequence of events, can serve as texts for students to critique and interpret, provided that educators anticipate significant obstacles in classroom deployment. The authors situate their work within a broader Arthur Vining Davis Foundation-funded project conducted with Lynn Public Schools in Massachusetts, which involved co-design relationships with eight humanities teachers. The paper distinguishes historical simulation games, which model economic or political systems, from historical narrative games, whose value lies in cultural symbolism and representation, and it frames both as sources for developing critical reading skills drawn from Common Core standards.

The core case study involved three two-day tests of a lesson plan built around The Last Express, a 1997 point-and-click adventure set on the Orient Express in 1914, with ninth-grade World History students in a vocational school. Students played in pairs on iPads and wrote short narrative essays afterward. The authors report that the most significant early finding concerned usability rather than content. Students struggled with the game's constant-rate time mechanic, which required players to be in the right place at the right time, and many grew frustrated when they could not progress or overhear conversations. Limited class periods of 40 minutes and the inability to preload save points further constrained play, and classroom noise hindered audio comprehension.

The authors acknowledge that writing outcomes had not yet been analyzed at the time of writing, so their conclusions rest on observation notes and debriefing sessions rather than student work. The study is limited to a single teacher, one game, and one school, and the paper presents its findings as preliminary. Next steps include reviewing student essays against prior assignments, formalizing the lesson plan, and developing best practices for future tests using this or other narrative games.