"A Nice Tasty Cottage" and Zombies

When I started using SketchUp to do my Digital History project, I didn't realize how time-consuming the process would be. Because this museum is very dear to me, I want to do it justice, and because the Pinhey's Point Foundation has provided me with a set of architectural drawings, I am able to be very precise in my measurements.

However, I ran into many difficulties while working in Sketchup as I believe anyone who has used Sketchup has. But you work through them, and with the help of the internet and a little patience and perseverance, you start to feel like you can do anything.

In the end, the model I created of Horaceville sits nicely into its Google Earth environment, but the job is not done! In exchange for the wonderful pictures and architectural plans of the house, the model has been promised to the Pinhey's Point Foundation. I hope they will be able to put it to good use somehow. I think it can be used to entice people into visiting the museum. It would be nice to be able to offer virtual tours of the museum available on the internet, especially since the museum is only open for about 4 months of the year. It might also be used to allow disabled visitors to experience the second floor in some capacity, if not in person.

The model is still under construction though. Here are some cross sections (thanks Nick C. for showing us how to do this!) of the house so far.

One of my goals in making the model was to gain an appreciation of what the house looked and felt like in its prime before it started to fall into ruin. I want to communicate this to museum patrons so that they can get a deeper appreciation for the history of the house, and I would like to make it interactive and engaging for anyone who visits my model.

I am still exploring ways to do this. We could just take pictures or a video tour of the completed model, narrate it, and either integrate it into the Pinhey's Point Foundation website or into the exhibits themselves, but I think we can do more. Interactivity is the way of the future and I want to future-proof my model as much as possible.

I want people to be able to walk through the model virtually and experience what the house might have been like in the past. A virtual living museum of sorts. So what are my options for making my vision into a reality?

Once I have uploaded the model to the SketchUp Warehouse, I will in theory be able to embed it into a website or blog post. Let's give it a try with an existing model in the Warehouse. Here is attempt #1.



This is a model of another museum in Ottawa: the Bytown Museum. Situated next to the Ottawa Locks, this museum interprets the history of the development of Bytown. The building is of about the same age as Horaceville. As you can (hopefully) see, you can zoom in and out of the model and rotate it. Unfortunately, you can't  view the inside of the building and the backdrop is static and boring. I would prefer my model to be geolocated and integrated into its virtual surroundings.

Another way to make a model available to the internet is to get it published in Google Earth, which makes it visible to people who search the address in Google Earth and Google Maps. But once again, you can't really view the inside with this option.

Right now, my best option seems to be LightUp for Sketchup, which allows you to save a number of scenes as .luca files and play them on the LightUp player that can be imbeded into a website. This would allow visitors to explore the model for themselves; unfortunately you still have to move from scene to scene to explore.

The option I am most excited about is that you can use SketchUp models as levels in open source video games, such as Left 4 Dead (learn how here). Although this may not be the best option for the historical visualization project, it is on my list of things to do over Christmas! I look forward to shooting zombies in the virtual 180 year old house.

The Hope of History Gaming

In a very recent post, I was critical of "Computerized History Games: Narrative Options" by Kevin Kee. I found his take on the history video game to be too academic. But there is still hope for history gaming! One big problem that historians often see when looking at a historical game, book, or movie, is the plethora of historical inaccuracies. This is a fact of life. It is, in fact, impossible to create an accurate representation of the past because history itself is an interpretation of biased sources years after the fact by biased historians, and leads to much controversy and debate.

Nevertheless, it is through these media that many of us first fall in love with history. (Let us know how you came to love history! Take the survey on the right!) Furthermore as Nicolas Trépanier points out in his article "The Assassin’s Perspective: Teaching History with Video Games" (Perspectives on history, 2014) these inaccuracies can be harnessed to teach historical method by using the video games and their inaccuracies as a starting point for discussion on sources and historiography. This is exactly what Trépanier does in his seminar on video games at the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the ­University of Mississippi. He enumerates a number of benefits that result from this kind of teaching including student motivation and engagement with the subject matter, as well as the development of critical thinking abilities. Trépanier's approach is quite beneficial to the study of history and more should be done regarding integrating video games and history in this way.

However, the course described by Trépanier is a university level seminar. Can we integrate video games into history teaching in the lower levels of education? I believe so, but I do not believe that they should have a central place in the classroom. In primary and secondary school, students are often learning the established historical narratives from books, projects and teachers. This is when students get a grasp on what happened in the past and contextualize it with what is happening today. Unfortunately, this kind of teaching can be dull. Incorporating a video game such as CivCity: Rome, Sid Meier's Civilization V, or any other age-appropriate history video game into free time at school, or as a reward, could help positively prime kids for later history learning.

In this scenario, it would not matter that the game was riddled with inaccuracies because the purpose would be to get kids familiar with the concept of history and to instill in them a love of history. Later on, as they are formally learning history in the classroom, they will be able to relate it back to their in-game experiences and learn to recognize the inaccuracies for themselves.  After all, where would we be without these historical inaccuracies? What would historians talk about in their spare time?

The Misplaced Hope of History Gaming

History gaming is a topic I have always found very interesting and I must admit that before I started reading "Computerized History Games: Narrative Options" by Kevin Kee I was all for using video games to help students learn and engage with history. This is because history video games are one of the ways I engaged with history when I was young and they helped spark my interest. One of my favorites is CivCity: Rome (2006). This City building game places you at the very beginnings of Roman history and tasks you with building cities for the budding population while defending it from hostiles.

The game allowed me to learn about Roman daily life and customs, social hierarchy, myths, religion, military, architecture, agriculture, and geography while keeping me engaged for hours on end. One of my favorite features is the ability to zoom in on the people in the game and see what they are up to and to follow them around while they get on with their day. This game also gave me some context and visuals to refer back to when I was learning about the Romans in school. Of course, it is riddled with historical inaccuracies, which are now plain to me as a classist, but none of those problems detracted from the immersive experience, even when I went back recently to play the game through again.

 

     

However, since reading the article by Kee, I question whether historical games are a good idea at all. To be clear, I question if the type of game Kee is describing, which is one that puts the student in the place of the historian to examine a certain event or product of history with the goal of teaching them how to think like a historian, is a good idea. I still strongly believe that historical games are awesome.

In his article, Kee describes a game that is designed to teach high school students how to engage with history. He intends to accomplish this by presenting them with scenarios that require them to question historical events and sources and to collaborate with a global and/or the local community of the classroom. He is operating on the principle that history learning should not be so concerned with presenting the "correct" version of history but should allow the student to question history's interpretation.

This is where my first bone of contention lies. I agree that there is objectively no correct version of history and that we should not push established convention as truth onto students but instead encourage them to think critically. However, this is not how history is presently being taught in the classroom before university. Teachers, in general, still teach students about dates and events more then they teach them to engage with sources. This leads to problems in university when students don't know how to think, but it is a wider problem in education that we must address and it cannot be solved by good educational video games. Once we as a society have tackled this problem, we can begin to develop games to help support the classroom teaching. I fear that if we neglect to establish proper history education standards in the classroom and use video games as the way to teach these skills, it will be a lesson lost once the course material moves onto other more traditional ways of engaging with history. Furthermore, it should be the responsibility of the teacher to teach these skills in an engaging way, not that of a video game.

My next issue is that I am skeptical that scholars can produce a game designed to teach students to engage with history while still ensuring that it is fun. Can they compete with the game companies in attracting attention to their games? Where are they getting their money and is it enough to produce a good game? I don't think this type of game will have a large appeal outside of the classroom especially to teenagers who have games like Assasin's Creed and Halo at their fingertips.

I think the purpose of history games should be to help people imagine what the past might have felt like. It is also useful for teaching universals, such as what elements a civilization needs to develop, or how ancient economies worked. It is not as good for particulars because it can never be entirely faithful and can never accurately depict the world as it was. A video game is akin to a historical novel. It is immersive and incorporates many historical elements but somewhere along the line, creative liberties will be taken. This is not a bad thing, but we have to keep it in mind. And this in itself can be an important lesson that students have to learn. Educational historical games are fun, but they should definitely not replace classroom learning and I feel that Kee's article is going to far in trying to understand and create the perfect video game to teach history. Let us not forget that we have to keep the fun in the history game, and perhaps making it too realistic will detract from that fun.