Accuracy vs. Authenticity in Historical Games
Transcript
If you enjoy historical games, board games or video games, you have probably played one and wondered how accurate it is. And you've also probably played one and had feelings about whether that game felt true to the history or not. And I thought that might be an interesting topic for a short video. So this is going to be about accuracy versus authenticity in gaming because those are actually two separate things that are often mixed together and it can lead to some really interesting, I guess, discourse about those games in the public sphere. So just give some general definitions. For me, accuracy means that something is factually true to the time. So if you have costuming on characters that's accurate or if you have art that is accurate or if you have names and time periods that are accurate, all those things would fall under accuracy.
Those are factually correct things that appear in a game. Authenticity on the other hand is different because things can feel authentic without being accurate and sometimes even accurate facts don't create an authentic feel. So authenticity is much more about the vibe of the game and whether something feels historical, whether it feels like if it's of its time. And of course that is a much more interpretive thing than whether something is factually true. So why does this matter? This matters because our perceptions of what is accurate and what is authentic really impact how we receive and think about historical games. One of the things that makes accuracy really difficult is that we can know some things about history but nobody's ever going to know everything. And also nothing is ever going to be perfectly represented in a game.
Partially because if it's a board game, just the whole world can't be recreated in that board game. So you have to think about just what parts of the world that you represent. And so you're going to be missing pieces of context, you're going to be missing detail as a natural function of game design. And you know, in a video game, if somebody's creating a whole world, they can get a lot of details right. But because we weren't there, Uh there's no way that you're going to get absolutely every last little thing correct so that it's perfectly historically accurate and really perfectly simulates a historical time period in a video game, even though I think that you can do a lot of research and do some really, really impressive work on that front. Authenticity, however, I think is a different animal because that depends a lot on what kind of feeling you're trying to evoke with your historical game. So, I think that it's possible to be missing a lot of facts or even not be perfectly correct about your facts and still create something that feels authentic or is getting at something that is authentic to you as you are a game designer commenting on history. So, I think about this a lot in my designs with co-designers like David Thompson or Paul Right. Night Witches is is not an entirely historically accurate game. We had to change things about the way that Night Witches did their sorties in order to make it more fun as a game. At the same time, the game evokes the repetitiveness of those sorties and accurately represents some of the threats and challenges that the Night Witches were dealing.
Meanwhile, Queen of Spies, which is shipping now or will be shipping soon if you're in the United States. Yes.
It's based on a fictional town in Belgium in World War I, but the scenarios in the game, even though they wouldn't have all happened in one city to one group of people, those are all based on actual research that David and I did. So, the reason that we have a pigeon scenario is because people were using homing pigeons to deliver messages and we wanted to create something that actually followed that process of how you train and transport pigeons so they can bring back intelligence. And we also had things like a scenario where you're releasing prisoners of war because that was something that spies in this era were responsible for and there were in fact agents who did a lot of jailbreaks and were noted for that. So, even though Queen of Spies is not based on real history, it is because we are bringing actual historical information to bear in the creation of our work. And, you know, the authenticity aspect of it comes from our attempt to create feelings of pressure and stress and shortness of time and the danger of having an operative captured.
So, those are all things that are certainly authentic to the history of the time, even if the facts of the town and of the people involved are not quite accurate. And then, for me, the most interesting project in this vein so far is probably Foxes and Lions because it's got so much chrome. So, for that one I'm working with Paul Wright, who is a Renaissance scholar, and he knows this period like the back of his hand, and he wants everything in there we can get. Uh but, of course, we still have to cut things because it's a board game, and even if it's a big board game with lots of chrome, you can't just have it all. And so, you know, we are working on creating something that really feels like bringing Machiavelli's political theories to life so you can test them and make decisions kind of within the matrix that he was conceiving when he wrote about Italian history and about the Italian Renaissance. And we're also including as much factual accuracy as we can, uh but all the same, some of it just has to be represented. It can't be fully real cuz even if you have a bunch of different kinds of units, you still need to have a more simplified way of doing battle, um even if you have all the correct leaders in there because it's a game, like the Popes can come in a different order because we're going to have papal conclaves that let you stick the papacy with maybe a less ideal leader given the moment or the situation that you're in during the game. So, the game is super accurate in terms of a lot of the people and places and facts and cards that come up.
Um it's authentic in the sense that it is mimicking some of the the nasty political decisions that you had to make and some of the betrayals that are available to you that real historical people did take advantage of. Um but, um there are also aspects of it that will never be fully accurate because you just can't put everything in a board game. If you want to read some more of my thoughts on this, I actually wrote a blog post for the Historical Games Network on this topic. So you can look into like some deeper thoughts about that from me. But one of the reason I want to make this video is I think that failing to define whether you're looking for accuracy or authenticity in a game and like what that entails for you leads to a surprising number of problems, misinterpretations, or to me just interesting things to talk about. So this is actually connected with a couple of my favorite podcast episodes I've done over the years. So I'm going to cite those and the books that we were talking about in them so that you can follow up and like think about this topic for yourself. So the first one I want to bring up is my podcast on white mythic space with Stefan Aguirre Quiroga.
So he is a scholar who wrote a book called white mythic space and the premise of the book is that it's a response to the Battlefield 1 cover which included soldiers of color and that spot that spawned an online backlash because people argued, well, black people weren't there. So why is this on the cover? Why are you being woke essentially? So what Aguirre Quiroga does with his work is he shows that this is based on perceptions about authenticity that have nothing to do with accuracy. So there were in fact soldiers of color in that war. That representation was accurate that's on the cover. So why are people perceiving it as inauthentic and therefore claiming that it's inaccurate. And he does a lot of really interesting deep dives into how we perceive our culture, how we perceive history, and how race gets mixed up in that thus creating a white mythic space where some people perceive covers like that as inaccurate because their perception of what is historically authentic is off.
So I thought [snorts] that was a really fascinating book and I think that y'all should look into it. Um the other book that I want to talk about in this context is Esther Wright's uh Rockstar Games and American History. Um so this one's subtitled promotional materials in the construction of authenticity. You'll note not accuracy, authenticity. And so my conversation with her I thought was really interesting because she of course is looking at Rockstar games like Red Dead Redemption uh especially, uh but also L.A. Noire. And what makes these games interesting is that they are really positioning themselves as commentaries on American history and true American history. But the way that they're presenting that history um is based very much on film. And so their ideas about authenticity and why those games feel real to people isn't so much their factual reality, but it's their the fact that they're based in our pop culture. And so, you know, Red Dead Redemption seems really real because it feels like a proper Western, or L.A.
Noire feels like a proper noir film. And so it allows their construction of history in these games to feel more real and for people to perceive them as more accurate um because of their grounding in familiar tropes and familiar imagery that people are more likely to swallow. Um and the other thing that was really interesting about that book is that Wright looks at advertising material to examine how Rockstar Games presents itself. And so this is a company that is trying to be the underdog and like the cheeky newcomer even as they achieve more dominance in the video game space. They're also presenting their work as like a true and accurate commentary on American history, even though some key things are left out such as women.
[clears throat] Um
And so uh Wright kind of points out that this is not necessarily truly accurate American history, but that Rockstar is using signals in their advertising and in the way that they aesthetically make their games to give feelings of authenticity that make players perceive the games as more accurate. And so, as you're playing historical games, um this is a fun thing to kind of think about, hopefully going forward, uh which is that, you know, you can look for facts. So, factual accuracy is one thing. But when you play a game, what makes it feel real to you? What makes it feel authentic to you? And how much of that is based in historical factual accuracy, and how much is based on your expectations that you have of that game, um as somebody who's living now and who is part of our culture the way it is now.
I personally find this topic super fascinating, uh and I hope that you do, too. Uh so, feel free to comment, what do you think? Have you read either of the books in question? Would you read them? Uh and I hope this is food for thought that will lead to lots of fun in future games. So, uh have a really great day, everybody, and happy gaming.