Replaying history: learning world history through playing

Making the Tool Your Own

Students developed unique goals and reasons for playing Civilization III that shaped the practices that they engaged in and the understandings that emerged from them. In the Media School (case one), with the exception of few students who were already strategy game players, the students were initially uninterested in playing Civilization III. Despite the intuitive appeal of playing a popular commercial computer game as the basis for a unit, students were not engaged in the activities and even less successful in navigating its problem space. It was not until the students mastered the controls and basic game concepts, and then developed their own specific goals related to the game play⁵⁸ that they became engaged in play.

Students became engaged in the game once they established their own particularized goals within the game space, thereby repurposing the tool in a myriad of distinct ways. Within all three cases, engagement emerges as a process of goal formation and adoption, whereby students learned to find goals in the game playing experience that were worth pursuing. Different students gravitated toward different affordances of the tool, capacities that gave them a “way in” or “hook” and therefore made them “sticky.” For some of the more advanced students, the most engaging part of the game was that it allowed them to replay history, to play-out historical hypotheticals, such as: “Why did the Europeans colonize the Americas as opposed to the Chinese, Incans, or Iroquois colonizing the Americas?” Other students became engaged in the game as a tool for exploring geography. One student simply enjoyed building her civilization and nurturing and protecting as one might a pet, becoming peeved when other civilizations threatened it and engaging in long, contested battles over strategic territories. Two others who also took great pride in their civilizations had similar goals of nurturing their people. Other seemed more engaged in the social aspects of the activity, describing their goals as, for example, “Keeping up with Dwayne,” and “playing with my friends.” Some students, as they became more adept at the game, found themselves interested in it as a system and tested various strategies. Still others were primarily engaged by the competitive nature of the game (and seemed to be somewhat agnostic of content) and chose various win conditions for themselves as goals (e.g., to be the strongest civilization on the globe, to make it to the modern era, etc.).

How students repurposed the game and for what end goal varied not only across students but also over time and with social interaction. Students’ goals continuously evolved while playing Civilization III. These goals were not simply a matter of student-game interactions; rather, they developed in relation to student-student practices and teacher-student practices as well. As such, they should be understood as socially situated phenomena. For example, as one group of students played Civilization III and started to understand its underlying logic, they began using the game as a simulation to test how the game system worked and explore differences between the impact of geography on old world and new world civilizations. This work was wholly collaborative and its fruits were a joint product of each student’s work.

When the game was an effective learning tool, the practices of playing Civilization III and learning world history became entwined. The following section explores in greater depth the nature of the activities that arose when Civilization III was brought into the three learning environments, developing assertions about common practices across them and the necessity of understanding game play as a socially-mediated phenomena.
Game Play as Social Practice

Game play needs to be studied and understood as a social phenomenon rather than a purely human-computer interaction. In all three cases, the game Civilization III was only one component of the emergent activity; classroom norms and cultures, students’ intentions, and communal participant structures were equally if not more important in shaping how the activities unfolded. Students appropriated Civilization III or resisted its appropriation not as individuals, but as members of social networks that were activated through several factors, including individuals’ identities and the affordances of the game. As students decided to participate, withdraw, or reshape the activity to meet their goals, the social construction of the game also changed in dynamic relation with the game affordances. One might expect that local cultures would affect how game play transpired, yet the activity systems that actually emerged were much more complex than I had anticipated.

At the Media School (case one), the individualistic classroom culture was intolerant of externally-mandated activities, and students rejected reading, discussion, or even gaming assignments that did not interest them. On the first day, most students ignored my introduction to the unit, and a third of the students decided not to participate.⁵⁹ Students refused to take the pretest, to participate in group discussions, and, at times, to tell me even their names. Just a few days into the unit, several students were all kicked out off class for disruptive behavior while we discussed the readings, and those who did participate in the activity did so with reluctance and resistance. Participating in externally-mandated activities was not the cultural norm, and it was clear that, in this context, we would have to lower our expectations about the power of Civilization III to attract students’ attention and serve as an anchor for other activities.

In contrast, at the YWCA, students flocked to the game immediately and after 20 minutes all of the students were engaged in game play even though the unit was not a mandated school activity. Throughout the case, students willingly shared information, answered questions, and even brought in outside resources, such as textbooks, into the classroom. One reason that these students’ more readily appropriated the game may have been because their participation in the camp was entirely voluntary, suggesting a greater commitment to the program and presumably a belief that the activity had relevance to their own lives. However, many of these students were enrolled in the program by their parents, and one could have just as easily predicted that students attending an after-school program on their free time would be less likely to participate in structured school-like activities, not more.

In each case, the cultural norms of the given context mediated how students played the game. In the Media School (case one), students showed few inhibitions in their game play. They used dominant, even aggressive, strategies. Their goals were to rule the world, conquer other civilizations, declare war on weaker civilizations, or even eradicate entire civilizations of people. Media students were not at all apologetic for these goals and even discussed them in terms of historical precedent, using American imperialism as justification for their activities or deliberately trying to change the course of history to advantage historically disadvantaged peoples. Consistent with the more “middle class” style of interaction, the YWCA students were generally less combative. Students adopted goals such as protecting their people, surviving to 2000, or discovering a new world. Females dominated the game talk in the room, and the game at times became a mechanism for negotiating social relationships. Students in each case oriented to the game in different ways, and this orientation was mediated by the intersection of personal goals, game affordances, and social relations.

Even though Civilization III is a single-player game, few students actually played the game in solitude. In all three cases, students followed one other’s games closely. In the YWCA setting (case three), most students devised meta-games – activities that spanned across different games, tying together their activity. By the end of the Media school unit (case one), most students in class were intimately familiar with one other student’s game and at least casually familiar with two or three others. Students would examine particularly successful (or unsuccessful) games of their peers, looking for information on how colonization was unfolding and what this might mean for their own civilization. The affect of such sharing was, at times, dramatic. Players, for example, sometimes completely restarted their games after seeing how a peer’s game was going, deciding to switch civilizations for better access to resources or strategic geographic locations or wanting to try someone else’s strategy.

One group of three students in the Media school setting is an interesting case in point: Tony, Jason, and Chris, all of whom sat next to one another, played as the Iroquois. Across all three games, students focused primarily on building a civil infrastructure and exploring their continents for resources. In part, this activity was shaped by the particular challenges to playing as a North American civilization: fewer opportunities for trading technologies, resources, or goods. However, their game play activity was equally shaped by their own individual goals and the joint collaboration taking place. Chris and Tony both reported being “interested in geography” and hence spent significant time exploring their continents. Jason was more interested in mastering the game system itself and therefore spent much of his time calculating the relative strengths and weaknesses of geographic areas and approaches to expanding his civilization. While these individual goals gave shape and direction to each student’s play, their collaboration with one another likewise played a significant defining role. All three students pooled their knowledge about the geography of North and South America and experiences within the game, allowing each to “learn lessons” from the others as when Tony learned from Chris that he could meet other native tribes and profitably fold them into his civilization. This strategic knowledge flowed across the group in the form of colonial imperialist rhetoric, entailing a particular partiality towards certain elements of the game (i.e. power) over others (i.e. humanity) and, therefore, a set of some means and ends over other alternatives.

Other students in the same classroom (i.e. Dan and Shirley) engaged in discourse designed to display social solidarity rather than share knowledge or strategies per se. Though they might play together in casual ways, monitoring one another’s games and sharing general tips and strategies, such pairings typically engaged in a kind of “parallel play” making their games a topic for talk whose underlying function is not to advise but to socialize. Partly, this might be due to students confronting very different challenges within their games, although in such interactions there was little evidence to suggest that they were interested in learning from one another per se. Instead, such talk was more social in nature, designed to maintain social contact.

Students’ activities also clustered around observation of each other’s game play. In some more or less stable social groups in the classrooms, clear leaders emerged. At the Media school and camp (cases one and two), one group of mostly boys clustered together, informally sharing game experiences, with Dwayne clearly at the center of this group and others sitting beside him watching him play. Another student frequently commented that his primary goal was to “keep up with Dwayne.” When Dwayne changed his goals, others followed: When Dwayne started trading luxuries, Bill wanted to trade luxuries; when Dwayne played as the Bantu, Bill wanted to play as the Bantu. In this same context, one student (Kent) who, perhaps more than any of the others, enjoyed watching others’ activities, frequently served as a conduit between groups, sharing information and helping the other students. In fact, the student was such an effective means of spreading information and strategies throughout the class that, within a week or two, both researchers began seeding him with information to share with other students who needed help.

There was a strong positive relationship between belonging to an informal game playing group and understanding how to play the game: Across both cases, those students who learned to play the game most successfully were a part of informal game playing group within the classroom. Students in such groups used the time in-between turns to watch others play, learning information about how to play the game (e.g., building roads with workers), specific strategies (e.g., using horsemen to scout territory and eliminate threats from hostile tribes), and general strategies (e.g., colonizing South America for luxuries) from other students. In the YWCA case, the three students who profited the most from the game were those who played socially, calling out to other students and getting out of their chairs to observe other students’ games while they waited between turns in their own. Students who were lost, still struggling with the most basic game functions weeks into the unit, were those who sat alone and did not talk to many other students.

Perhaps the strongest example of an emergent game affinity group that fostered intellectually productive play was in the Media case where Chris, Tony, Jason and Norman learned from Dan’s experience being overrun by the Celts. Students in this group repeatedly examined each other’s games, noting the consequences of others’ actions in order to circumvent failure in their own. Tony in particular learned from other games quite readily, drawing lessons on the necessity of exploring continents, capitalizing on natural resources, and trading technologies from the outcomes of other people’s actions, not his own. Several taken-as-shared meanings emerged about the importance of trading with other civilizations or strategies for meeting other civilizations. These shared understandings included the importance of horses in colonization, the pitfalls of being isolated in the Americas and unable to trade technologies with other civilizations and the importance of colonization in a civilization’s growth and evolution.

Competitive Groups

Interestingly, the most competitive group in these cases may have been the group of middle school girls – Vicky, Miranda, Sandy, Amy – who were all interlocked in competitions to meet other civilizations, make friends, and make it to the year 2002. Miranda was both physically and socially the center of this competition. She acted as the communication hub, with the other girls either asking her about others or reporting to her their progress. The exact rules of this competition evolved over the course of the term. Initially, Amy, Miranda and Vicky played collaboratively, adopting the goal of meeting as many civilizations as possible. When the girls got their own computers, each girl retained this goal of befriending as many other civilizations as possible, which became the basis for the initial competition. This competition evolved into a race to see who could make it to the modern era. When it became apparent that Miranda was not going to make it to the modern era, she opted out of this competition, revising her goals to “making her people happy.” Consistent with theories of girls’ competitive play (See Laurel 2002), these girls adopted much more subtle forms of competitive play than the boys. Whereas Bill explicitly wanted to “play like Dwayne,” Miranda, Amy, Sandy, and Vicky constantly formulated and then reformulated their goals as a part of the social game play process.

One of the intuitive appeals of using games in formal learning environments is the hope that they will engage learners, motivating them to do academic activities through using fantasy context, curiosity, challenge, and choice (or agency) (Cordova & Lepper, 1996). In these cases, motivation was a complex phenomenon, perhaps better understood as a process of developing and realizing goals than simply one of motivation. Each student in these cases came to the unit with distinct motivations, whether it be to preserve an identity in the face of authority or socialize with peers. Some students were never engaged by the game and rejected Civilization III as both a tool for gaming and a tool for learning. How each student appropriated Civilization III was mediated both by personal goals and by encompassing social contexts. Students’ engagement in the game could be described in a variety of ways, ranging from desire for transgressive play to desire to socialize with peers. When examined in social contexts, these motivations map closely to Bartle’s (1996) model of player types, highlighting the diversity of ways that Civilization III engaged players and suggesting that perhaps motivation is better conceptualized as a series of goals rather than as a single descriptive factor. Most importantly for educators, how students appropriated Civilization III as a means for their own ends within the overarching classroom activity had a profound impact on the kinds of practices and learning that emerged in this unit.

Dan also played the game in order to “reverse history.” Dan was completely disengaged and uninterested in playing Civilization III until day five when he learned that, not only could he play as the Iroquois, but he could also potentially reverse history by conquering Europe instead of the other way around. Dan’s focus was almost exclusively on preparing the Iroquois to defend themselves against the impending invaders; on several occasions, Dan was asked what the game was about and he answered, “overthrowing the colonial forces.” He played the game purely as a military struggle between the Iroquois and the Europeans, focusing his efforts on building warriors and spearmen rather than a robust civilization that might rival the European colonizers along several axes. In the post-interviews, Dan reported that he learned very little about “what actually happened” and instead, learned about specific geographical regions, negotiating with other civilizations, and strategies for defending his cities. It is ironic that Dan walks out with a nascent understanding of important causal factors in “what actually happened” in history believing he learned little, presumably because it was not information in the recognizable form of descriptions, dates, and facts.

For these two students, a critical component of the game playing experience was the opportunity for what Zimmerman and Salen (2003) call transgressive play. For them the appeal of Civilization III was largely how the game could be used as a tool for playing through fantasies of alternative histories where traditional power structures are challenged and historical outcomes are overturned. Interestingly, this hypothetical study of history is increasingly popular among historians as a way of developing deep understandings of historical phenomena (cf. Cowley, 1999).

Exploring Alternative Histories

Tony (case one and two) reported being interested in social studies and seemed to enjoy reading the game off of history and history off of the game perhaps more than any other student in these case studies. By the end of the camp, Tony emerged as a leader in the class, making several key observations about history and geography based on his game play, including observations on the role of luxuries in shaping history and how these luxuries (a product of geography) affected economics and politics. In fact, it was connections among history, geography, and the game that first attracted Tony to Civilization III. His favorite parts were exploring the globe, studying geography and meeting other civilizations. Tony found it particularly interesting to examine how and why different civilizations evolved in relation to their geographical location. As such, he was not primarily motivated by a goal of “overturning history”; rather, he played as the Iroquois primarily because he wanted to start with the geography of North America and secondarily because he liked studying Native American civilizations.

Tony frequently read the game as an historical simulation and noted interesting phenomena that one would not expect. He found pleasure in playing as the Native Americans and seeing how his game unfolded compared to history, particularly how the game forced him to weigh considerations such as conquering other tribes or expand into new continents. He was curious about the underlying simulation properties and became fascinated with studying what patterns of civilization growth emerged, such as the stunted growth of the Aboriginal civilizations. Gradually Tony’ play became more and more historical-question driven as he explored the game world as a simulation of historical events, examining what occurred and why.

Chris was also interested in geography and played as a Native American tribe, but Chris eventually became interested in relations between geography and the evolution of civilizations much more explicitly. Chris spent several hours running experiments to examine how geography had an impact on the evolution of civilizations. Chris learned that Egypt’s geographic location made it grow quickly and quite wealthy, but it also made Eygpt a desirable region to occupy and left Egypt open to attacks. Chris shared these results during group discussions and included screenshots in the group presentation. Playing Civilization III piqued Chris’s interest in geography, and Chris found pleasure in using it as a tool for exploring the impact of geography on history.

Whereas Tony and Chris read the game as a simulation, examining how the rule sets produced emergent action, Marvin approached the game as a much more literal representation of history. His play was mediated by his prior knowledge of ancient civilizations, particularly Rome. For Marvin, playing Civilization III was a chance to be one of the civilizations from his textbook and he used his textbook as a “cheat” for playing the game. Marvin believed that understanding causes of the fall of Rome would help him in the game, particularly as he wrestled with issues of imperial expansion and the defense of his territories against barbarian attacks. He used the text to predict how other civilizations might expand or where natural resources were located. Marvin wanted an even more accurate game, one that would let him try his hand at leading an accurately simulated, historically known civilization. Whenever he could, he reinterpreted the game to meet these needs, calculating the exact size of his army or imagining how his Roman legions were organized.

Building a Civilization

For many students, including Jason and Miranda, building a civilization in and of itself was a primary motivator and the predominant game practice. In the YWCA class (case three), Miranda was at the center of a competitive group of girls. During the unit, she reported finding many aspects of Civilization III intriguing: meeting other civilizations, interacting with other leaders, seeing leaders’ clothing, and exploring the globe. Later in the game, Miranda became divested from this group and focused more on building a rich, powerful, and technologically advanced civilization, which meant attending to her infrastructure, trade, and management of natural resources. When asked to describe her favorite part of the game, Miranda said, “I liked to build the cities and change my cities to making people happy.” This response was not surprising given the consistent focus in her game play on just these activities, her frequent checks to see how big her cities were in actual numbers, and her boasting about her civilization to the researchers.

Jason also derived satisfaction from building a civilization, which manifested itself in Jason’s concern with maximizing natural resources. He frequently started and restarted games because he was not satisfied with how he was using natural resources. For example, early in the term Jason struggled over control of the farmland, timber, and resources of Michigan; later, Jason planned his cities very meticulously, making sure that he was maximizing the amount of production from every city. More than any of the other students, Jason employed a very mathematical approach to the game, calculating in numbers the amount of resources he gathered from the land. Although all of the “builders” placed special emphasis on irrigating land, building roads, and developing mines, Jason was unique in his frequent mathematical calculations and assessments of the most effective use of resources.

Protecting your Civilization

Andrea (MEDIA case) also was interested in building and conquering, although her play stemmed more from a territorial desire to protect her inhabitants than any outwardly aggressive stance toward dominating the globe. Andrea’s war mongering started early in the unit when civilizations moved into her territory to found cities. By Day 6, she could accurately claim, “I guess I’ve been fighting most of the time.” However, Andrea also ran her economy and civilization into the ground from the constant battling with civilizations. Yet, she took this all in stride, laughing at her misfortune and joking about her troubles. She seemed to take pride and pleasure in these battles, bragging to the researcher, “You’ve got that right. You don’t mess with me.” By days 10 and 11, Andrea took more interest in building her civilization, asking me for help understanding the game’s economic and cultural systems (and not just military).

Vicky (case three), who started the unit playing with Miranda, had similar goals. In the post-interview she reported that she liked, “getting to build cities, make friends, and go to war.” During her play, Vicky showed a particularly strong interest in protecting her cities and her peoples. She placed multiple defenders in each city, built city walls for protection, and put barracks in. Rarely was Vicky attacked and, when she was, she defended her cities capably. In class, Vicky said that her goal was “to make people happy” by immediately providing “security for my people.”

Beating the Game

Like Dan or Dwayne, Ricky was also interested in fighting and ruling the world, although he did not read his game off of history like they did and did not show any particular concern for protecting his people or making them happy. Ricky’s primary goal was to beat the game. On a micro level, Ricky struggled to fend off barbarians, build a civil infrastructure, and meet other civilizations. Much of his game play was about building the silk road so that he might trade with Europe. He frequently lost the game and had to start over. Ricky was frequently frustrated and struggled more than most other students with survival. Part of this may been that Ricky played as the Chinese, a civilization whose geopolitical position is somewhat disadvantaged unless the player understands the properties of the underlying simulation (or perhaps Asian history). Although the Chinese have strong natural borders, plentiful resources and fertile river valleys, they are exposed to barbarians in the North and isolated from other civilizations. Ricky’s game resulted in many emergent phenomena surprisingly similar to history, including the formation of natural borders similar to China’s, the barbarian ransacking of his capital in 600 AD, a silk road for trading luxuries, and thousands of years of development in relative isolation. Ricky found little solace in these emergent phenomena. By the last day of class when it was clear that Ricky was not going to win the game, he became increasingly interested in reading the manual to Grand Theft Auto III in class between turns and when teachers were attending to other students. Pulling out a Grand Theft Auto III manual in class allowed Ricky to not just kill time, but also display himself as a gamer before his peers.

For many students, particularly Amy, the game was about trying to last as long as possible. Amy’s primary goal was to make it to the year 2002. This goal of making it to the present day arose from the group of girls (Amy, Sandy, Miranda, and Vicky) that had formed a competitive group at the YWCA site, and at one point or another each girl adopted this goal. Amy held on to it until the end, taking pride in the fact that her civilization made it the longest. She did not seem to care that she lacked a strong infrastructure, was not the most powerful civilization, had a largely unhappy citizenry, was behind in technology, or was clearly not going to win the game. She was not even particularly concerned when the Celts landed on her shores in Nova Scotia. For Amy, the game was all about making it to the present day. She even began disbanding troops because they took too long to control and were not in the service of her goals. The students took interest in Amy’s game and ran over to see her game when they learned that she had made it to the present day.

While each student played the same Civilization III game, their actual activities were radically different. They adopted unique game goals and participated in very specific game practices. On the surface level, many students shared similar low-level goals, such as building a civilization or defeating an enemy, but these low-level goals stemmed from very different meta-goals and in very different game play experiences. While Jason closely examined the natural resources surrounding cities in order to maximize production or agriculture, Miranda closely monitored her people’s happiness, checking the number of content in each location, changing luxury rates and creating cultural structures. While Vicky was defensive, even downright protective, of her people, Dwayne concocted elaborate schemes to dominate global politics. These divergent cases underscore that game play is an emergent phenomena, by which simple rules produce complex outcomes depending largely on the game player and her goals (Johnson, 2002). As Doug Church (2000) argues, authorship of a gaming experience is one part game designer and one part game player, and game play resides at the intersection of these systems.

Social Play

Bill, Kent, and Sandy all were very social players who did not have much success with the game and whose primary interest in the activity seemed to grow out of the social relationships that it fostered and helped maintain. All three students had difficulty learning the game and were frequently lost. For most of the unit, all three had goals directly related to another’s play (i.e. build a civilization like Dwayne’s, last longer than Miranda). Not until relatively late in the unit did they develop more interest in the game itself, as evidenced by their later questions about the underlying game system and its emergent properties. There was little evidence showing that any of these three students learned much about social studies or world history through the activities. Even by the end of the unit, these students were still confused about basic game concepts, where their civilizations were located, and how the game operated as a simulation.

Bill’s game was mediated by his relationship with Dwayne. He only developed goals in the game after he sat next to Dwayne and saw what Dwayne built. He frequently checked in with Dwayne to see what he could learn about the game and used him as a way of seeing the possibility space of the game, developing goals and picking up strategies for achieving them. This is not to suggest that Bill was indifferent to the game: He liked properties such as conquering and building, and getting feedback about his progress in the form of “building his own spot” (i.e. his own castle). However, for Bill game play was by and large a social activity.

Kent was also a very social gamer. In the first several days of the unit, Kent rarely sat down, instead walking about the room observing games. He served as a conduit of information, learning from others’ play and spreading tips and strategies among them. Throughout the unit, Kent was aware of several other games and spent considerable time watching others play. Part of his reluctance to play may have been that the game was too difficult for him; Kent frequently needed help reading the text and had difficulty playing the game. Even at the end of the unit, he was still confused with the game, unable to lead a civilization into the Middle Ages and not really sure where his civilization was on an actual globe.

Sandy was another player whose interest in the game appeared to be mostly social. Sandy also had difficulty learning and understanding the game, and it was not until relatively late in the unit that she started asking for help understanding the basic game systems. Most of Sandy’s talk involved announcing her successes to Miranda or Vicky or asking how they were doing (i.e. what year were they in, whether or not they had discovered a given technology, how many friends they had in the game). Sandy was very competitive with other students and seemed to have a strong desire to show that she could fit into their social circles. By the last days of the unit, she was starting to take a more active interest in the game itself, even noticing that leaders’ attire changed as they entered new eras. This knowledge became a focal point for discussion and quickly spread across the room.

Understanding Motivation

In these cases, goal formation or motivation were socially mediated processes. At one point or another, nearly every student was inspired by someone else’s game, co-opting the goals, strategies, and practices of other players in order to win the game. In the case of the YWCA girls (case three), a fairly close-knit game-playing group emerged, in which the girls were competing with one another along multiple axes at any given time. It was interesting to watch how the group would form around one goal, such as making it to the present day, and then how students would peel away from the group and articulate other goals, such as meeting other civilizations, making friends, making their people happy, or “getting rich.” There was a competitive element to this talk, and girls would frequently revise goals when they saw another girl with similar goals. A classic example of this occurred when Sandy asked the other girls a series of questions with competitive undertones (i.e. What year are you in? How many cities do you have? How many friends do you have?). This exercise can be thought of as a process of querying the group until she finally found an axis by which she was achieving relative success.

For these students, motivation was a complex phenomenon, occurring at the intersection of personal goals and fantasies, the possibility space of Civilization III as a simulation, a desire to learn world history through the game, and at times, the social pressure to complete the presentation for the other classes. This multi-dimensional view of motivation closely resembles Cordova and Lepper’s (1996) proposed framework of fantasy (or context), control, challenge, and curiosity. However, the social situatedness of this activity – the way that the social context of the school and the camp played a role in students’ motivation and the way that students’ goals shifted and changed throughout the activity in response to the context – suggests that framing students’ practice not as motivation, but as goal-driven activity may be fruitful. For these students, Civilization III was an endogenous historical game; studying and replaying history was part and parcel of the fun.

These cases also suggest that no one type of game or game play activity is going to appeal to all players. Richard Bartle (1996) describes how MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) players come to game experiences with wildly different goals, differentiating among socializers, achievers, explorers, and player-killers (or direct competitors). Raph Koster (2001) ties this notion to single player games, suggesting that player killers are frequently drawn to competitive first person shooters (e.g. Quake), while explorers might more likely take to first-person stealth games (e.g. Thief). I would extend this argument further, arguing that the case studies examined here demonstrate that popular games are playable via many different play styles, not just a few. Civilization III held these students’ attention, in part, by being playable several different ways, making the game play experience customizable. Jason might begin by wanting to build a civilization and win the game, but then eventually become more interested in maximizing resources. For Tony and Chris, the game eventually became a tool for simulating ideas – mostly toward the goal of becoming more skilled game players but also, in part, to devise and test theories about history. The ways that gamers customize their experiences through personal goal-setting, means-seeking, and novel problems-solving is not entirely idiosyncratic but does suggest that taxonomies that only include one or two dimensions or axes along which players might be typed are too simplistic to capture the range of ways that students might become engaged in learning through game play. In the next two sections, I turn to the ways in which Civilization III facilitated or impeded learning world history, then to the constellation of affordances and constraints of the game that appear to contribute to this pattern.

Success in Civilization III demanded that students master some basic facts, such as who the Babylonians were and where they originated from, as well as understanding relationships among geographical, historical, and economic systems. Playing Civilization III and talking about their games on even on the most basic level meant that students were introduced to new terms and concepts. As Tony commented, students were “forced” to master some basic concepts for even rudimentary success in the game. For example, if a student did not know who rivaling civilizations were or where they came from, it was often difficult to survive even a few thousand years.

For those students who were successful in game play, knowledge of history and geography became tools that players used to achieve game goals. As students failed in their games (which they often did), they were forced to go back, analyze their games, and see where they went wrong. This debugging-of-strategy process involved constructing an explanation of what went wrong (i.e. losing a war due to a weak economy) and then devising strategies to remediate it the second time around. Analyzing game failure was difficult for students, and the teacher’s role was frequently to help students interpret why they failed and to make analogies between their games and real history as a way of understanding game play. The few students who did become adept at analyzing games and identifying patterns across traditional disciplinary boundaries began using Civilization III as a simulation tool for examining broader questions, such as what is the role of geography in influencing the development of civilizations. Here, distinctions between learning the game system and learning world history broke down as students used the tool and used interpretations of history reciprocally.

Background Knowledge

For the majority of students in these cases, the basic terms and concepts employed in Civilization III were new. A few students simply learned to read or pronounce these terms; others learned their rudimentary definitions and could point to an example but could do little more than that. Still other started to draw connections between game systems and historical systems, and still others developed genuinely robust understandings for what each meant. In one somewhat unanticipated outcome, students reported learning many geographical facts, such as where Egypt, Nova Scotia, or Greenland are on a global map. Some of these labels were names that I introduced, as I tried to give students basic geographical terms as tools for talking about each other’s games. Who the Celts were and where they came from was a common question for students playing in the North America. Egyptian players had to deal with the Babylonians and Greeks. Asian and European players frequently asked about the barbarians. Because political geography is not explicitly covered in the game, we did not assess students’ knowledge of it. Closer examination of students’ pre and post-knowledge of political geography would likely be useful for teasing out what understandings emerged through game play.