Greetings from my desk at Penn State. Sitting before me, and on top of the, um, upper top of the desk, are perched all but one of the commercially-published games on the whole Civil War to appear in English. (I also have one in French, and missing one in Japanese.) I'm working on ways to compare these things. Do I focus on particular design issues--how to integrate emancipation, the draft, etc--or the trend towards the "academic" in these things--having a patina of seriousness? I want to talk about everything, but I only have twenty pages...
At the California University of Pennsylvania--not to be confused with the Indiana University of Pennsylvania--there's a class on Military History being taught by Paul Crawford, a medievalist. It's of interest because of its attempt to integrate games in the syllabus. Games present kind of a problem for the professor, at least one of a largish class. (An eight-person seminar is no sweat; two teams and away you go.) The rules have to be easy enough for them to be grasped by a kind of cross-section of undergraduate humanity...who are not famous for reading things carefully for class. The big problem, though, is that they take up a lot of time. With all the hoo-hah associated with new gamers learning a new game, you have to figure on three hours for even a "short" game by our standards. That's two movies' worth, and every hour you spend on the game is an hour you can't lecture. I want to use games in my own teaching, so I'm following this class closely; I'm going to see if I can head out to see the class in action some day. My hunch is that "Military History" is too broad of a topic; it's just too much time spent on games (three of them--Commands and Colors: Ancients, Crusader Rex, and Conflict of Heroes 1). It seems like it'd work better with a class on the Civil War--you wouldn't lose as much context.
I mentioned that Paul Crawford is a medievalist. This is relevant, since a large percentage of professor-gamers are medievalists, I've found. The two most prominent professors are Warren Treadgold (noted Byzantinist) and Tom Madden (noted, and controversial, Crusades scholar)...both at St. Louis University. I suppose you might add me; I have more medievalist DNA than anything else. A student here is a medievalist gamer. There's enough people for a panel, honestly; I'm going to see if I can get the band together for next year's Society for Military History conference.
The collection has been creeping up towards the cap. I have room for three more games, then they need to get sold off to bring new ones in. I'm pretty sure I can keep to this regimen, since I recollect vividly how miserable it got to have 1200 of the things rather than a "mere" 300. The thing I'm torn about is how, if at all, to count the games I have just for this or that academic purpose. Of these two dozen games in front of me, I own one because I enjoy playing it. Another one is there because of cherished childhood associations. I might, I guess, keep one or two more? But probably not. The rest of these are getting sold as soon as I don't need them anymore...especially since some of these are among the worst games ever made. One or two I might have to just pillage and pitch, they're so unsellable (they're worth less than the cost of shipping). My hunch is to not count the ones I won't play, but I worry that that might become a crutch for full-scale cheating.
That, or I worry too much.
I should mention, too, that I'll have a new blogging outlet starting up sometime in October. Penn State's history department is starting a blog on Civil War matters; it's mostly just about relevant news stories...except for me, talking about games on the Civil War.
I'm not exactly sure how it's going to develop just yet, but I'm grasping any opportunity to bring gaming to the attention of academia. I think gaming deserves comparable (not equal, but proportionate) attention as movies, novels, or--the closest connection--reenacting receive, which is a good healthy bit of attention. I think I can pull this off, with some carefully-aimed academic darts. If I get what I want--scholarly attention to the hobby--I'm curious how gamers are going to react. As of now, the ones I've heard from are enthusiastic...but I can essentially guarantee that the coverage of the hobby is not going to be uniformly positive.
The big challenge for an academic studying games is that they have to be at least vaguely versed in how these games actually work. They'd have to play a few games themselves to understand how games get put together, what you can and can't do, and so on. This is by no means an insuperable difficulty, but it requires more "inside knowledge" than studying books or movies. Anyway, I'm vastly curious how this could all play out.
|