History or fiction?

Along with a couple other classmates, I attended an event the other night in Second Life. It was a lecture by one Spiff Whitfield, of the Virtual Pioneers, about using online games to teach history. This was my first experience actually attending to a teacher for an extended period in a virtual world. One thing that's certainly true for me is that it was an improvement over other online lectures I've attended that used the more standard webinar software.

The slide show was there (and could be opened in a browser) but it was embedded in an environment that also included a 3D model of a building relevant to the subject under discussion, as well as other objects that could be explored.

Spiff projected himself as an avatar of the historical figure he was discussing, along with the rest of us projecting our own avatars. This made for a more lively online experience, which is always good for a history lecture.

I lurked silently, not wanting to impose too much of my presence in a context where I still felt very much a guest. But one topic that came under discussion had me thinking even after I logged out. An important point that Spiff stressed was that he found troubling the fact that there were historical inaccuracies in a supposedly historical game. I wasn't sure whether he thought it was something game companies should be careful not to do, or that it was a thing history educators should watch out for - their students learning the "wrong" history from the games they play. Pragmatically, I think the latter perspective make more sense. If games are indeed a modern fiction genre, at least in some instances, then we should give them as much credence as we give Dickens, for instance, in the liberties he takes with the French Revolution in "A Tale of Two Cities". It actually made me remember a project I did for a high school history class, in which I tracked down all the events in E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" and attempted to verify their historicity.

Maybe someday games will be taught in one type of humanities class, as written fiction is today, and can be evaluated in history or social studies.

One comment I remember about William Johnson, the figure supposedly maligned by the game: "His descendants should sue them for slander."