2 ms·

What Happens When Kids Get Their History from Video Games?

6 points by bpierre 5y ago

noduerme 5y ago
I'm a big fan of Paradox games, particularly Crusader Kings 3, but I don't think anyone should approach these without already having a pretty firm understanding of history and expect to learn anything from them. CK3's engine is fantastic at spitting out personalities, but the way it functions if you're playing as an English lord is exactly the same as it plays if you're Spanish or Indian or Mongolian; only the titles are different. Obviously, once you start tinkering with history, anything that happens in the game is an alternate timeline. I think most players understand that. But what they likely don't understand is that embedded deep in the game, where it's not obvious, there are value judgments and things which are both ahistorical and somewhat hostile toward non-European peoples. The most glaring one I've discovered is the fact that the Kingdom of Jerusalem is the only kingdom-level territory you can't declare even if you own all the land, unless you convert to Catholicism. I learned this the hard way after conquering most of the Middle East and Egypt starting as a Jewish vassal in a single county - and it pissed me off. (What happened immediately afterwards, when every Muslim empire declared holy war on me at the same time, seemed somewhat realistic). Anyway, that isn't how people should learn history.
gus_massa 5y ago
I was going to complain that the article focus in videogames and does not mention movies, but I noticed that it has a few paragraphs about Bret Devereaux that wrote a serie of post about the differences of the movie 300 and the real Sparta. [warning: the blog is a huge time sink!] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
hulitu 5y ago
> What Happens When Kids Get Their History from Video Games? The same like when adults get the truth from media.
credit_guy 5y ago
Well, normally kids get their history from the history class. That's not really history, but patriotic indoctrination. I'll give you an example from the country I was born in (Romania). My Dad was a kid during WW2; he asked a soldier returning from war, did you kill anyone? The guy answered that he killed more people than he had hairs on his head. How could that be? It's impossible to know now, my Dad died a few years ago, and that guy probably many decades prior. But it's likely the guy didn't lie. I think he probably took part in the 1941 Odessa massacre [1]. An odious even where Romanian soldiers murdered tens of thousands of people, mainly Jews. Care to guess if I learned about this even in my school history classes? Well, maybe Romania has a particularly shameful history, and other nations don't have such events to report to their school kids. Well, here's [2] a list of historical massacres. I wonder if: - Russian kids learn about the 1794 massacre of Warsaw, where Russian soldiers killed 20000 Polish people - Turkish kids learn about the 50000 Greek people murdered in 1822 by Ottoman soldiers - or if Greek kids learn about the 3000 Turkish people murdered by Greek people one year before, in 1821 You can go on and on. Bottom line, chances are history learned from Europa Universalis is probably more unbiased than what you learn in your history class. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_Odessa_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_Odessa_massacre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_events_named_massacres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_events_named_massacres

6 points by bpierre 5y ago

I'm a big fan of Paradox games, particularly Crusader Kings 3, but I don't think anyone should approach these without already having a pretty firm understanding of history and expect to learn anything from them. CK3's engine is fantastic at spitting out personalities, but the way it functions if you're playing as an English lord is exactly the same as it plays if you're Spanish or Indian or Mongolian; only the titles are different. Obviously, once you start tinkering with history, anything that happens in the game is an alternate timeline. I think most players understand that. But what they likely don't understand is that embedded deep in the game, where it's not obvious, there are value judgments and things which are both ahistorical and somewhat hostile toward non-European peoples. The most glaring one I've discovered is the fact that the Kingdom of Jerusalem is the only kingdom-level territory you can't declare even if you own all the land, unless you convert to Catholicism. I learned this the hard way after conquering most of the Middle East and Egypt starting as a Jewish vassal in a single county - and it pissed me off. (What happened immediately afterwards, when every Muslim empire declared holy war on me at the same time, seemed somewhat realistic). Anyway, that isn't how people should learn history.

gus_massa 5y ago

I was going to complain that the article focus in videogames and does not mention movies, but I noticed that it has a few paragraphs about Bret Devereaux that wrote a serie of post about the differences of the movie 300 and the real Sparta. [warning: the blog is a huge time sink!] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

hulitu 5y ago

> What Happens When Kids Get Their History from Video Games? The same like when adults get the truth from media.

credit_guy 5y ago

Well, normally kids get their history from the history class. That's not really history, but patriotic indoctrination. I'll give you an example from the country I was born in (Romania). My Dad was a kid during WW2; he asked a soldier returning from war, did you kill anyone? The guy answered that he killed more people than he had hairs on his head. How could that be? It's impossible to know now, my Dad died a few years ago, and that guy probably many decades prior. But it's likely the guy didn't lie. I think he probably took part in the 1941 Odessa massacre [1]. An odious even where Romanian soldiers murdered tens of thousands of people, mainly Jews. Care to guess if I learned about this even in my school history classes? Well, maybe Romania has a particularly shameful history, and other nations don't have such events to report to their school kids. Well, here's [2] a list of historical massacres. I wonder if: - Russian kids learn about the 1794 massacre of Warsaw, where Russian soldiers killed 20000 Polish people - Turkish kids learn about the 50000 Greek people murdered in 1822 by Ottoman soldiers - or if Greek kids learn about the 3000 Turkish people murdered by Greek people one year before, in 1821 You can go on and on. Bottom line, chances are history learned from Europa Universalis is probably more unbiased than what you learn in your history class. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_Odessa_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_Odessa_massacre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_events_named_massacres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_events_named_massacres