Professor Explores History Through Video Game Lens

Dr. Bob Whitaker has died of dysentery … like, a lot. 

A professor of history at Collin College, Whitaker uses the classic video game “Oregon Trail” to help students immerse themselves in the lives of settlers on a wagon train headed west in the 19th Century. His students make decisions as a group, and he inputs those decisions into the game. 

“Usually things go very poorly, as they are designed to in that game,” Dr. Whitaker said. “I have died hundreds of times.”

That is kind of the point, to drive home the mindset of the people who gambled everything, venturing into countless perils for the chance at a better life. The video game allows him to do so in a low-stakes and fun way that still promotes empathy for and understanding of the settlers. In a small way, the students are inhabiting those historical characters. 

Exploring the confluence between history and video games is a passion for Dr. Whitaker, who started a YouTube channel called “History Respawned” in 2013. With a current YouTube subscriber base of about 11,000 people and growing, the channel and accompanying podcast with co-host John Harney of Centre College invite historians to discuss video games, their historical settings, and their relationships to accepted history. 

“I was always interested as an undergrad and a graduate student in finding new ways to present history to new audiences,” Dr. Whitaker said. “With ‘History Respawned,’ I get to approach a gaming audience with the kind of scholarship that I think is worthwhile and interesting for them. I see it as a natural evolution.”

Ready Player One
The first video game that Dr. Whitaker remembers playing was the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combination game on the original Nintendo Entertainment System sometime in the 1980s. He said the experience was transformative.  

“I have always been a little bored by TV shows and movies,” he said. “You are passively accepting whatever the story is on the screen. Sure, there might be high production values, but there is just nothing like being able to control the narrative yourself in a video game.

“You do that rudimentarily in games like Super Mario Bros. or Duck Hunt, but in more advanced games, you really do play a role in shaping the story and shaping the narrative.”

While he played video games throughout his childhood and into college, he didn’t begin considering combining his love of history and gaming until grad school at The University of Texas at Austin around 2010. That is when he noticed the most popular titles on gaming consoles were history-related or based in a historical setting – like the Ubisoft title “Assassin’s Creed.” That open world game series transports the player back to historical periods like the Middle East during the Crusades, Renaissance Italy, and the United States during the Revolutionary War. 

“You would inhabit this character who would touch on major historical topics,” he said. “I began to think ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear a historical expert’s ideas on this representation of the past?’”

That is fairly common in documentaries and movies, and history educators often have a section of the class devoted to analyzing a historical novel or film. He thought, why doesn’t anyone do this for a game?

He started writing review articles about historical games for a group blog run by the UT-Austin history department called “Not Even Past.” And while he enjoyed writing the articles, he didn’t feel like he was reaching the gaming audience he wanted to. 

“It was also a little bit weird writing analysis for these games when games are a visual medium,” he said. “I thought, why not do it with footage of the game. That’s where History Respawned came from – taking that same historical analysis, but also presenting the visual material from the game.”

A New Player Has Entered The Game
Dr. Whitaker said finding other historians interested in gaming wasn’t always easy when he started History Respawned in 2013. 

“There was a lot of difficulty finding scholars who are willing to talk about a video game and how it portrays history, but also finding a scholar who actually plays games,” he said. “I have had many failures of trying to get guests, people who I thought would be really good at these topics and found out that they are not willing to engage with video games. 

“They see it as something in the realm of pop culture and unable to accurately portray the past or even encourage historical literacy.”

That has changed over time, as younger historians have begun to make their mark on the profession. Dr. Whitaker calls them “The Oregon Trail Generation” – historians who came up through school playing games not only at home but also in the classroom, like “Oregon Trail” or “Mavis Beacon Typing.” 

“For people of my age group, thinking about games in these ways is not necessarily a foreign idea, but it still seems a bit niche,” he said. 

Dr. Kate Cook, a classics teaching fellow at Durham University in England and sometime guest on History Respawned, agreed that it is likely only a matter of time before video games are accepted as works of “reception” – that is secondary works like novels, documentary films, etc. 

“I think it’s really important for scholars working now to recognize that there is inevitably going to be a relationship between historical video games and the teaching of history,” Dr. Cook said. “So many of our students come to our classrooms with their first experience of ancient Greece, to use my own field as an example, being from a game they’ve played. We have an opportunity to really engage with that experience and help connect what they already know to what they are learning from us.”

A longtime gamer, Dr. Cook said that she first learned about History Respawned on Twitter, where she said scholarly engagement with modern media gets a much wider audience and range of discussion. 

“I was impressed with Bob and the channel from the episodes I’d seen, and so I was very happy to be asked to be a guest,” she said. “I then had a very positive experience both in terms of putting the episode together and in terms of the audience we reached, so that made it a really easy decision to come back for future episodes. From my own perspective, I was also already engaged with gaming both in my personal interests and as an emerging area of my research, so this felt like a really great way of engaging with a wider range of people than just other scholars on these topics.”

Dr. Cook is currently co-editing a book titled “Women in Classical Videogames.”

Achievement Unlocked
While the majority of historians view their discipline as necessarily dealing with historical documents and documentary analysis, there are some indications that history-based video games are being welcomed as a medium for scholarship.

The American Historical Review, one of the most prestigious journals for historians in the United States, recently started publishing video game articles and video game reviews related to history. 

“That just shows some institutionalized buy-in from the most powerful professional organization for historians in the United States, and I would like to think that History Respawned played a role in that,” Dr. Whitaker said. 

More than the acceptance of his peers, Dr. Whitaker said he appreciates the way discussing history in video games opens up avenues of exploration for students. At the beginning of each semester, he begins his courses by asking students why they are taking his class – other than earning a required credit. Often, someone will say something like “I saw this ‘Assassin’s Creed’ game and I was really interested in learning about this particular time period or topic.” Sometimes students reference a historical film or documentary, but most often it is a video game, he said, adding that the scene has played out not only at Collin College but at other teaching posts at Tarrant County College and Louisiana Tech University.

“I have students coming up to me saying ‘I caught your latest episode of History Respawned,’ or ‘I’m taking this class because I came across your show and really liked it.’ It’s been really nice,” he said. “History and video games are not something you would typically put together, but I think there is an audience out there for that kind of material, and there are more scholars playing games than you would expect.”

Level Up
Young scholars at Collin College will have the opportunity to blend history and video games themselves in a Learning Community course named “Playing the American Past?” being offered in Spring 2022. Learning Communities pair two or more courses in a way that complements multiple disciplines.

This Learning Community will include GAME 1303 – Introduction to Game Design and Development taught by Professor J. Marshall Pittman and HIST 1302 – United States History II taught by Dr. Whitaker.  

Students will play through games that depict American history, analyze those games, and develop their own American history games that portray historical events or a historical figure from post-1877 America.

The students who take part in that Learning Community will have an opportunity to explore the intersection of history and video games in a way that is new to Collin College, and which strengthens the connection between the subjects. 

History has long been considered a subject that must be based in text documents and looking at hard copy, thinking about these things in the real world. But as scholarship continues, Dr. Whitaker said it becomes more important for scholars to adapt and adopt different mediums.

“I think as time goes on, and as these old rules are put away about what you can and can’t do as a historian, I think that using mediums like video games will become much more popular and allow more of us to emerge from the darkness and admit to being a gamer.”