Investigations of a Dog

Still catching up on things that I meant to write weeks ago. Last month there was a post at Glod’n'Epix about First World War computer games. Esther linked to this Guardian article about a planned WWI FPS and was rightly critical of its assumptions that there aren’t any WWI games and the spurious reasons for that. As she points out, there are loads of First World War games, but I’m going to attack from a different angle.

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Now that I’ve got a lot of other things out of the way I can get back to posting more regularly, and there’s a lot to catch up on (although I’m still slightly confused – this post was going to be about something completely different but wandered off in a slightly bizarre direction and isn’t very coherent!). Via Break Of Day In The Trenches there’s an update on Niall Ferguson and Muzzy Lane at Wired. Ferguson’s misplaced enthusiasm for the game Making History: The Calm and the Storm got a lot of attention in the history blogosphere last year (for example see Airminded, and my posts here, here, and here). There was some suspicion at the time that Ferguson was probably being paid by Muzzy Lane to big-up what is a pretty mediocre game, and now Wired reveals that he’s teaming up with them to design an ultra-modern counter-factual game.

It’s good that the Wired article focuses on chaos and complexity, but I think it’s a bit too optimistic. As far as I could see from the demo, Making History didn’t capture the chaos and complexity of war – it was simplistic and predictable. It’s true that strategy games can get people used to dealing with chaos, but Making History isn’t a very good example. If this is the main educational value of a strategy game, then that game doesn’t need to be historically accurate, and doesn’t even need a historical setting. There are plenty of commercial Real Time Strategy games available which are not based on historical research and which don’t claim to be counter-factual tools for historians. In my experience, this kind of game can be so complex and chaotic that even its designers don’t fully understand it.

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Brett at Airminded has produced statistical evidence to show that Investigations of a Dog is the third most popular military history blog. It’s nice to be popular, but beware of the truth effect. As Brett says, the figures have their limitations, and a lot depends on how you define a military history blog. I’m all too aware that this could make me complacent. When I started this blog last year I worked really hard to build up a reputation, but recently I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been busy moving websites to a new server, setting up the Military History Carnival, writing an actual article for an actual real journal, and various other things. But when I haven’t got much to write about, I can always fall back on computer games…

Just after Christmas I wrote about Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30, a World War 2 first person shooter which is, unsurprisingly, an incremental improvement over Call of Duty. After finishing that (only on “normal” difficulty though — “authentic” must be insanely difficult!) I moved on to the next instalment: Earned In Blood. In a lot of ways it’s the incremental improvement over Road To Hill 30 which I was expecting, but the designers also did some surprising things with narrative.

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Last week I played and finished Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30, yet another First Person Shooter set in the Second World War. It focuses on a squad of the 101st Airborne Division over a period 8 days in Normandy in June 1944. From what I’d heard about the game before I bought it, I was expecting it to be very different from Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. The biggest difference is that it’s a tactical shooter in which the player has to command a squad rather than doing everything single handed. In some ways Brothers In Arms lived up to my expectations, but in other ways it didn’t.

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I think the series of posts on cavalry charges is more or less finished now (although there might be occasional sequels in the future). This is my last post before christmas, and what better way to get everyone in a festive mood than… writing about the Holocaust?

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[Edit April 2012: I now regret posting this as it may have given trolls ideas...]

More on cavalry charges later this week, but today I’m taking a break from that to write about virtual reality. This was one of the many interesting things that Wulf Kansteiner talked about at the Institute of Historical Research the other week. He pointed out that we are now very close to the point where virtual worlds become indistinguishable from reality. Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games are increasingly popular, and have both a bigger and more diverse player base than the strategy games and shooters which are the focus of my (stereotypically male) gaming interests. Second Life has moved the genre away from Tolkienesque fantasy worlds towards a simulacrum of a more familiar reality. He also suggested that Artificial Intelligence is reaching a level of sophistication at which it becomes difficult to tell the difference between computer controlled and human controlled characters.

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I went to London yesterday to visit the Public Records Office and the Institute of Historical Research. There was no service record for William A. Wenham, but the battalion war diary mentioned him by name, confirming that he was the missing man from the patrol on 6th December. I also got a copy of his medal card (20p to print it at the PRO, £3.50 to download it at home!) which shows that he was in the French theatre of war from 1st March 1915 and was therefore lucky to have survived some extremely bloody battles. Meanwhile, back in the seventeenth century I looked at some wills of London saddlers, including the original will of John Gower. I had to check it to see if it differed from the probate court’s copy, but in the end it didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t worth getting them to bring it all the way down from a salt mine in Cheshire, but it was interesting to see John Gower’s signature (he didn’t write the rest of the will himself). It would be even better to have Jane Gower’s signature, not least to see if she could write, but she wasn’t one of the witnesses.

After that I went to the Philosophy of History seminar at the IHR to hear Wulf Kansteiner talking about computer games and historical consciousness. I can’t give a full account of it because I missed the start and had to leave before the end of the discussion, but he raised lots of interesting points. He’s definitely among those of us who realise that gaming culture is becoming increasingly hard for historians to ignore, and that it creates both new opportunities and new methodological problems. I sensed that a lot of people in the audience just didn’t get it. I was particularly amused by someone who laid into Wulf for not mentioning gender, but then proceeded to perpetuate some very out of date and ignorant gender stereotypes (apparently women don’t play games!), and also had a right go at bloggers (we’re anti-social egomaniacs!).

Anyway, the whole thing has given me plenty of ideas for future blog posts, so I won’t give too much away now. I’ll just make two quick points. First, the experience removed my doubts that my interest in studying games is a sudden and cynical jump onto a fashionable bandwagon. This is far from something that everyone is doing. It’s still a niche, and still a long way ahead of the academic mainstream with too many people thinking it isn’t proper history because “it isn’t real” (er, religion anyone?).

Second, Timothy Burke at Cliopatria mentioned that it’s very difficult to study and understand the history of virtual worlds unless you were there. Last night it struck me that gaming is largely incomprehensible to non-gamers. This is one more nail in the coffin of objectivity and neutrality, because gaming culture might have to be studied from the inside more than from the outside. But for me that’s more of an opportunity than a problem.

Since last week I’ve been playing the demo of Making History: The Calm and the Storm. My first impressions are that it’s a good game, but it is very much a game and not a simulation. It’s hard to believe that this is what Niall Ferguson was getting so excited about, or that he could be in awe of anyone who has won as Germany. If you approach the game on its own terms (as I suggested in my first post about games and simulations), the initial strength of Germany and the inherent weaknesses of Artificial Intelligence make it quite easy to win.

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The free demo of Making History: The Calm and the Storm 2.0 is now out, but be warned it’s 251MB! I talked about the game and Niall Ferguson’s view of it it two previous posts (games and simulations, and more games and simulations). Now I can try it out for myself, so expect to see another post when I’ve played it.

Other news:

Children’s history writer and researcher Gary Smailes has started a blog at Breathing History, which is well worth reading.

History Carnival XLIII is now up at Axis of Evel Knieval (clearly the best name for a blog ever). Next edition is on 1st December at Barista. Submit posts about any aspect of history using the submission form.

Since my previous post about Niall Ferguson’s article on computer games and the Second World War I’ve had some more ideas and found some new information. While I was searching Google for something else, I came across the article Theatres of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex by Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood. This article looks at the development of computer simulations for training the US military, and the relationship between the defence industry and the games industry. It includes a particularly interesting account of an attempt to reconstruct a battle from the 1991 Gulf War.

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