War and Pieces: Using Games to Teach the History of the World Wars

The poster presents, in a visual and engaging format, an exposition of the use of games in teaching about the two World Wars. Gameplay as a means of learning about war remains compelling as a field for exploration and utility in the classroom. This poster focusses on the use of games as a means for teaching on the World Wars, based on practical experience that has demonstrated immersive and deep learning through students playing, analyzing, and designing games.

With a focus on what players are to learn from a given game, games offer much for the teaching of strategic thinking, addressing history, and in providing representations of the past. They range in scale (and physical size), complexity, time to play, focus, and theme. There are games that cover an entire war, an individual theater of that war, a single campaign or battle, a single arena of operations (land, aerial, naval), and those that address non-combat aspects of the war such as diplomacy, role of resistance movements, or human interactions in the context of wartime. Some provide abstractions, while others comprise of detailed real-world maps and representations of units and individuals, often the product of meticulous historical research and the input of subject matter experts.

Games provide a range of opportunities as a tool for teaching and learning, not least as they ask the player to put themselves in the position of a historical situation. While this can raise ethical questions surrounding playing the role of protagonists, and rightly so in the context of the Second World War, those ethical questions become a point for understanding how the past is represented in wargames and what can be learned from that representation (with the attendant discussion of what subjects are not suitable for depiction in games). So too, questions of “what if,” the vagaries of fortune, the uncertainties of war, decision making with incomplete information, and counterfactual history loom large in some wargames, but this should be seen as something of an upside when using games to have student’s address the how and why of a situation and what alternatives there might have been as approach or outcome, and to test hypotheses. A variety of scale in games allows for students to appreciate the different ways and levels at which the subject can be understood, and to see how the same aspect can be understood in different ways.

The poster makes a case for the of games as representations of the past at different scales, in different contexts, and with a focus on how they can deepen understanding of the World Wars with the aim that others may consider using games in their own teaching. Learning through playing and analyzing games is engaging for students and offers experiential learning of both the subject matter and the ways in which it can be effectively represented.