I like reading Clive Thompson’s blog, and this recent article is a good example of why. Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games is a great post. A “counterfactual historian” is someone who specializes in the re-imagining of major historical events.
Niall Ferguson is just such a person, and a well known economic historian at Harvard. He writes essays on these alternate histories; one of his essays posited that WWII could have been prevented is Britain had confronted Germany over its invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
These essays are largely based on thought experiments, but what these historians are finding is that games are a “superb vehicle for thinking deeply about complex systems.”
When a game company called Muzzy Lane approached him with a game they had created called Making History, Ferguson’s son got to test his theories out in a simulation. He found whole new ways to test out his theories - his son actually found a clever way that the war could hypothetically have been avoided. Rather than attack Germany, he set up trade routes with France first to make sure the company would help with the fight. This sounds just like a good game of Civilization to me…
Now he is working with the creator of Making History to design a new game. These type of games are important for historians, and students, because they allow the player to build a model and test various scenarios against it. This builds working models of the economic and military situations and allows players to see what would happen under different conditions.
This is one of the many examples of how I think the right computer games can help teach our kids how to think better!