Are games purely meant for fun, or can they be used as tools to educate and inform? Once the backlash toward the digital demon of interactive entertainment died down following the initial popularization of video games (an attitude which has never fully gone away), this question rose to the surface of the minds of teachers, psychologists, and numerous other experts. Rather than shun this new form of play as a mere distracting pastime, there are those who saw the impact and merits games can have on those willing to put the time into studying and deconstructing them. Just in narrative terms, a game with a strong story can leave players thinking about it for months or even years following. Just consider the thesis I wrote on Mass Effect. But this can be the case with gameplay, too, as seen with the Tetris effect. With such an ability to impart and impact, an important question, similar to the initial one I raised above, comes to mind: what responsibility, if any, do games have toward the truth? Or, rather, what is the role of video games when it comes to representing a verifiable event or once-living individual?

A short answer, in two words, is simply: it depends.

For the most part, games tend to care more about verisimilitude than veracity. It is more important to create a world that seems true to the player and does not tear them away from the experience of the game than it is to be authentic and real to the experience being represented. It’s easy to argue that there isn’t any inherent obligation to here-and-now, to what was, or to what will be; that entertainment exists inside of a vacuum and, once something leaves a creator’s hands, it’s up to the audience to create meaning. While it can be comforting to separate art from the artist, it’s important to not entirely deny the context in which something was created. That context can be valuable in understanding why something was created or how it will impact those who are exposed to it. To that end, historicity, the quality of something being authentic or based in fact, may not appear at first glance to have anything to do with digital entertainment, especially when the main pillars of gaming right now involve hijacking cars, partaking in warfare, or carefully maintaining a fictionalized world. However, there are three general groups of games which deals specifically with what could be historical, which I term: educational games, historical fiction games, and “what if?” games.

As the name entails, educational games are first and foremost about instructing and teaching the player a certain slice of actual happenings. The whole point is to impart this factual knowledge, so ensuring the information’s accuracy is imperative. When something claims to be an educational game, it’s essentially stating that what it’s presenting can be confirmed with additional sources and is agreed upon by scholars at large. However, that doesn’t mean it has to be something boring or meant only to tutor. While something like Mario Teaches Typing has just the veneer of gaming draped over it to distract children from the game’s true goal, the Carmen Sandiego series has players following the crimson criminal across time and space, learning about the places and eras in which she’s committing heists in order to solve puzzles and nab the perps. Personally, I still share information I learned from Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? when it applies to my conversations. Learning about the origins of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, or the Mali Empire’s trade routes made renowned by Mansa Musa as a young kid vastly supplemented and enhanced my own education, preparing me with knowledge many of my peers did not have. The Oregon Trail would even count as an educational game, in its portrayal of the settlers’ attempts to cross west across the United States. By wrapping this sort of information in a fun and engaging game, players are more motivated to persevere through, and thereby retain that information, than attempting to glean it from a textbook.

Then, there are historical fiction games. Much like the name would suggest, they are fictional stories that take place within a historical context, so even though the stories being told may not have actually happened, the events surrounding them most certainly did. The characters and what they do may be original and unique to the specific story being told, but the setting has to be, at the very least, verifiable. Valiant Hearts: The Great War, as an example, tells the story of four people, a French farmer, his German son-in-law, an American soldier, and a Belgian nurse, as their lives intersect during the First World War. Another fantastic example would be Ghost of Tsushima, transporting players to the 13th century off the coast of Japan and taking control of a samurai fighting against an invading Mongol warlord. Or LA Noire, which depicts Los Angeles in the 1940s from the perspective of a hotshot detective. While these characters never actually existed, what happens to them throughout the game is reflective of the lived experiences of real men and women. Therefore, they do not represent any one person’s life but rather the lives of many, showcasing to players what may have happened in the time and how those who were there may have responded, along with transpiring within a real-world place and time.

Lastly, “what if?” games take some historical tidbit and then layer it in fictionalization and gameplay for the sake of keeping the player entertained. History may be the background for the stories, but that’s generally about it. Otherwise, the developers mess with the timeline and play with history as much as they see fit, whether creating an alternative universe or an original one with only elements taken from our world. This allows the creators to take their story in wildly different directions while maintaining a core historical foundation which gives the player familiarity. By taking that with which the player may be familiar, the developers can invert that thing on its head, presenting to the player something new or a new way of looking at something old. The Assassin’s Creed games are all set during famous historical eras and even involve famous people from those times, but between the inclusion of an extinct forerunner race and being able to dive into a person’s genetic memory, no one takes what they teach as outright fact, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value. The newer entries include a gameplay mode that lets players explore the world and learn about the actual history of the cities they climb around, but even just watching the cutscenes and wandering through the streets made me want to learn about Renaissance history when I first picked up Assassin’s Creed II in high school. Then there are the Civilization, Age of Empires, and Europa Universalis series, which allow you to take control of a nation or famous leader and influence the direction of history. Literal alternate timelines are being played out, ones where Gandhi can be scarily aggressive with his nukes or the Ottoman Empire colonizes Hispaniola. They really make you wonder, hence the name of the category.

I ask my question once again: what responsibility do games have to the truth? And I answer yet again: it depends. The responsibility comes from how or why history is being used. Educational games are meant to teach, and so they have to use the truth as much as possible in order to get their point across. Historical fiction games are meant to inform, to use the setting as a way of initializing those teaching moments without forcing them upon the player. “What if?” games are meant to intrigue, getting players to ask questions and consider how small changes could drastically affect their experience with the media. Ultimately, when you use history to tell a story, you can’t help but ground it in fact and truth, even if you then go off the wall with it. While truth is becoming a rarer commodity in today’s world, we can’t help but draw upon what we know to try to make sense of what is yet to be understood.