Concept Courses
Recently, I've been thinking about a handful of" concept courses," probably because the school year just ended and so right now I'm about as far from facing a real classroom as the calendar lets me get. My next couple of posts, then, will be ideas for university classes that are interesting (to me at least) to think about and with. How they'd really work in practice, how they'd get approved by an education policy committee, whether I'd be qualified to teach them, are all of less importance than the notions themselves, the fragile but lovely potential of shiny soap-bubble ideas.
Here's the first:
The Great Game: Simulation, Gaming, and History
In time, those unconscionable maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations ... saw that the vast map was useless, and ... delivered it up to the inclemencies of sun and winter. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.
-- Jorge Luis Borges,"On Exactitude in Science"
I've talked before about my interest, and at the same time my doubts, around simulation gaming as a way of teaching history. The map is not the territory, as they say, and a perfect simulation would require rewinding and replaying the past itself. Even the best simulation game, I argued before, becomes more and more about itself and its own assumptions the more you play. The discussions I'd really like to foster in a classroom are the ones faced by the designers, rather than the players, of a game. What factors and options should we include? What behaviors might be allowed or encouraged? How do we tweak the simulation and to what end? What is the logical scale at which to simulate a given event? (A student of mine made the casual observation, to me pregnant with significance about war and American popular memory, that there are umpteen top-down strategy games about World War II, but that computer games about the Vietnam War are invariably first-person shooters.)
This course would have three braided strands. The first would be a history of simulation games and of ideas about the simulation of history, from China's go and India's chaturanga, to medieval pageants and tournaments, to the Prussian kriegspiel and mechanical merry-go-rounds. We'd zero in on the zenith of simulation in the mid 20th century: nuclear strategy games at RAND, economic games at the Harvard Business School, and the electronic computers for which the simulation of war was the first true killer app. The second strand would be a critical analysis of simulation itself. We'd take apart some modern computer games and some older efforts at simulation to figure out what they do and don't say about history and causation. Why do we so often play at war and so rarely at peace? Can sim games only recapitulate drum-and-bugle history? If every move in the game alters actual history, what standards are there for judging a simulation plausible or realistic? The third strand would be to enlist the entire class in creating a game that simulates some moment or aspect of history, whether from scratch or by modding a sufficiently customizable game engine. Could we create a game of class conflict: Howard Zinn's A People's Civilization? How about a game simulating race and gender history: Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization? Or, inevitably, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization, a game about social systems of power and knowledge that simulates simulation itself?