Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games Edited By Patrick A. Lewis & James Hill Welborn III
published by LSU Press (2024)
Back during the Civil War Sesquicentennial I was writing a popular blog series called The Immigrants’ Civil War. I had over 250,000 readers every year. I was approached by a representative from an academic book publisher about putting out a book on immigrants experiences during the Civil War. I asked him how many books the volume would be likely to sell. He said about 1,000 copies in its first year! Since I was getting tens of thousands more readers for each of my blog posts< I said “No Thanks.” Blogging seemed like a better way to reach large numbers of people than publishing an academic book. However, this year I was reading about Red Dead Redemption 2 which has sold 53 million copies and I thought I might have been a little more forward looking in the change that electronic developments would have on how people learn about their past.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is set thirty years after the Civil War and seems to follow a standard Western shoot-’em-up video game, however there are many Civil War and Reconstruction Era themes in it, including veterans from both sides whose minds have been clouded by the horrors they have seen on the battlefield, formerly escaped slaves, the Ku Klux Klan, and the discovery of slave pens at a home. I felt secure that I was educating a quarter of a million people every year about immigrants during the Civil War, but the team at Rockstar, the makers of the game, were impacting how 400 times more people than I was!
LSU Press has a new book looking at how the video game industry has influenced our understanding of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction over the last forty years. The book is an edited collection of short essays by historians of the Civil War Era, both from the academy and from public history. Essays were contributed by fifteen scholars, and like collections of essays from a wide variety of authors, some are very good and others are only passable.
I first started playing Civil War games before there were video games. My friends Greg, Tim, Vinny and I would get together in the late 1960s to play Avalon Hill or Strategy & Tactics games which had cardboard counters on fold out map. Sometimes we spread the games out on my living room floor. The maps were so large that we had to remove the furniture! Other times, we played on a game the size of a card table. To us twelve year olds we saw it as a way to pass time in a creative endeavor, learn about history, master the inner meaning of rules that sometimes came in fairly long books, and cement friendships (or break them off if someone tried to cheat). from the authors of Playing at War, modern players of the video games get some of the same satisfaction as wee did half a century ago, although most of the modern games can be played solitaire and, if a player become addicted, it may limit how many friends they can make.
No before we proceed, I want to confess to having played more than half of the games that are discussed in the book. Video games really arrived when I was in my Twenties, in law school, planning to marry, so I did not welcome the digitalization of games the way some of my friends did. I was way too bust. I really only started playing them when my kids, born during this period, became a bit more self sufficient and did not need me all the time. The book is interesting if you have played some Civil War games, no need to have played them all. But it might be confusing if a reader is unfamiliar with these video games. In fact, if you have never played them before, my guess is that you will be lost in trying to reflect on the games being discussed.
One game that I have played a fair amount is Ultimate General: Civil War. A 2017 release, it has very good maps of historic battlefields and generally does not freeze up as so many games of the last three decades have. Unlike the old paper games of my youth this is a Real Time Strategy game which shows live action from the brigade level. David Silkenat and Holly Pinheiro write in their essay on this game that:
[Ultimate General] “allows players to command enormous armies and fight in more than fifty battles on accurate and artfully rendered maps. As a simulation of Civil War combat, the game gets much of the detail right: the units march in column and transition to line when in combat, green recruits are more likely to panic and run than veterans, and overwhelmed soldiers flee or surrender rather than fight to the death. Compared to other RTS games, the pace is pretty slow, which reflects the actual movement of Civil War armies. Best results are obtained by building a large army, occupying defensible fortified positions, and advancing cautiously, a tactic that many officers implemented during the war. As an introduction to Civil War military history, students could do far worse than this game.”
For all the game gets right on the Civil War, it renders African Americans invisible and except for some introductory remarks, slavery is not remarked on. The are no United States Colored Troops in any of the battles, nor are their any enslaved African Americans providing compelled work for the Confederate army, which allowed the Confederate generals to use a higher proportion of their soldiers for actual fighting than their Union counterparts.
Like many Civil War games, Ultimate General was made by a European designer. Nick Thomadis, a Greek citizen who had never been to the United States, was behind the creation of the game. While he used very detailed maps to construct the game boards, he may not have been familiar with the current discussion U.S. of race and the Civil War. In addition, he relied on Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! as his inspiration. That game had barely a mention of race or slavery. Reviews of the game from European writers said that slavery was a secondary issue during the Civil War. I doubt that most Americans would characterize it that way.
The was an expansive essay by John Legg on the game Oregon Trail. I played that with my two boys when they were in grammar school. It was the real beginning of historical gaming and, while it encourages students to learn about westward expansion, it almost totally left out the indigenous population that were being pushed aside by the new settlers/colonists. Legg gives kudos to the non-profit that created Oregon Trail and made it both a school instructional game and a home video game, but for most players, the students never went beyond the text of the game itself. Simply putting a list of recommended books at the end of the game manual will not outweigh the learning of players during the game itself.
Let us remember that Oregon trail was first developed in 1971 and its creators did not have any guide on how to provide context.
Nick Sacco, who does public history for the National Park Service, has an intriguing history of a game developed later on by the same company that developed Oregon Trail. The game Freedom looked at an escaped slave trying to find refuge in Canada. The non-profit game developer hired the educator Kamau Sebabu Kambui to help design the game. Kambui was an outspoken African nationalist who had made it his career to spread the news about Black history. The company worked with him to develop an Underground Railroad simulation which was then released for free to many schools in the United States. After only a few days, school districts started receiving complaints from Black parents about the racism involved with playing the game. In those days very few school made computers available in classrooms and students would often play the game in computer labs that did not have any history teacher in it. Black students were often tormented by their fellow players and the students played the game without any historical context. The non-profit recalled the game or asked schools to destroy it.
With Freedom, the developers not only had an African American Studies person as a paid consultant, they also incorporated African Americans to respond to the game before it was released. However, what they did not realize was that a Black student in a majority white school might be taunted for being a “slave” and for speaking in stereotypically Southern Black language. I think that if the designers had seen the game played out by a mix of Black and white middle schoolers they would have seen why it would upset some children and they could have found ways to mitigate it. Unfortunately, after so much work, they had to kill it.
There are also several essays on the mechanics behind the games, changes in technology that make games more popular than they were in the past, and the “instruction manual.” If you played games back in the 1980s, those instruction manuals could be bigger than my old Strategy & Tactics rule books. Now, of course, most games do not have any printed manuals, just tutorials incorporated into the game.
Other essays consider the pro-Confederate slant of several games. Since most of the games were designed in Europe, why would they favor the Confederates? It could be that to Europeans, there is a certain romance about the Confederacy which the game designers try to exploit. Most of the fans of these games are not following the “Lost Cause” view of history, but they are in love with the massive plantation homes (without the slaves) and the relaxed life of Southern whites, at least as it appears in American films made before 1985.
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