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 Rokstar, 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.
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