What is HRIVG?

Historical Representation in Video Games (HRIVG) is a course designed and taught by myself, Dr. Andrew Behrendt at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Its creation was funded by an eFellows Grant from S&T's Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence awarded in 2019.

Though its origins run deep -- at least as far back as playing Sid Meier's Colonization in the back of Ms. Schiller's 5th grade Social Studies class -- HRIVG's fundamental purpose emerged as an answer to immediate, specific pedagogical questions. How can I properly use video games as a tool for teaching history? And how can I get undergraduates, especially ones at a STEM-focused institution, to think of history as a form of intellectual creation; that is, not only as an academic discipline, but as an account of the world driven by inherent frames of mind? Put even more simply: how can I make engineering students encounter Hayden White without scaring them off?

In my view, video games are excellent vehicles for doing just this. It's not only because they're popular -- although that's plainly the true. According to a recent survey conducted by the American Historical Association, more young people get their knowledge of history from video games than from college courses. It's also because all historically-themed games necessarily on some assumptions about the past to function, and in that sense are historiographical texts. Games, as systems, at their core, must model vaguely coherent -- if not accurate -- versions of bygone societies, cultures, economies, and polities. Their rules perforce embed understandings of how these things used to be. They are, no less than any other historiographical form, representations of the past. But because their systems are intrinsically so palpable, so stark, so interactive, they are easier to dissect and talk about than other forms. They lay bare the fictive nature of historical representation, and do so with many hooks for students to hang onto. Asking students to deconstruct games as historiographical texts is not only a way for getting them to critique the games themselves; it's a way to have them interrogate all historical representations in a similar fashion.

I hope that anyone else using, or thinking of using, games as teaching tools will find something helpful on this site. Please feel free to contact me at behrendta@mst.edu.