Mission US: Reanimating Social History for the Twenty-First Century

What knowledge and skills should social historians impart to younger audiences through game-based learning? How can game design principles enhance the field of social history? Leah Potter, an educational game designer, will examine key opportunities--and hazards--posed by translating social history themes and narratives into educational video games. As an increasingly popular media form, video games offer historians an accessible, highly flexible, and robust tool with which to disseminate social history scholarship. Games can virtually transport audiences to places and times in the distant past, helping to contextualize the struggles of ordinary people while disrupting presentist assumptions. Character-driven games also facilitate historical empathy by allowing users to make meaningful yet historically grounded choices with consequences. All educational games share common challenges such as the cost of production and the difficulty of balancing content and game play. But historical video games also pose additional hazards discrete to the discipline. For example, how should historians and designers visually represent the past given budget constraints? This presentation will elaborate on these points, drawing mostly on Mission US, a series of online video games, produced in collaboration with public television station WNET/Thirteen, that explore pivotal moments in US history, including the Boston Massacre, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the US-Plains Indian conflicts of the 1860s and 1870s.