RFC as a teaching tool

[Ekolite]

don't joke, the format of civilopedia is exactly the same of a history book.

Are you serious? Dear dear. When you are studying history, you study events, almost always it is events and dates and time periods, none of which you can read about in sufficient depth in the pedia. For example, if you were teaching medieval history to a bunch of school kids, handing them a couple of pedia entries of the medieval units in the game is not going to help them learn! The information is out of context, vague in many areas, and sometimes completely irrelevant. At the end of the school year, yes they may be able to describe a longbowman, or a castle, but they would have only the vaguest idea of what actually happened during this time period.

If it was in the format of a history book, relevant information would be displayed, with appropriate sources and citations listed, about the crucial events of the time. Events. The Hundred Years War, the Black Death, whatever. This is of course completely irrelevant for the pedia, which serves as a reference material mainly while providing a little bit of background information in each article. Therefore, pedia =/= history book format.

I have yet to hear of a class of students where everyone was interested in any given lesson (except maybe sexual education for teens).

Very few school children would be interested in Civilization. Not everyone is interested in computer games, and of those who are, only a small minority are interested in this genre. Those who do not enjoy computer games would see this as little different to standard textbook work.

I assume that if a teacher uses a game such as Civ to teach, it will use it as a teaching tool, I doubt present the lesson as a hour or more of break for gaming.

This game cannot be used for educational purposes. Games sacrifice reality for playability. History is not a game and does not work like one, therefore games cannot teach history. I do accept that games such as Europa Universalis may be able to give players a feel for the era they are set in, which may help to gain their interest, or gain a vague understanding of how things, most obviously politics, worked in that era, however this is still utterly inadequate to teach with on any large scale. Civilization, or RFC, cannot IMHO do even this. It is just simply not designed to.

Perhaps a game-style medium for teaching could work in certain areas, but these would have to be specially designed for educational purposes and would be unlikely to be at all commercially successful.

 

[Panopticon]

An important note is that the Europa Universalis games, which do indeed educate the player about a certain period of history, are orders of magnitude less popular that the Civilization series because they appeal to only a very small market.

 

[blizzrd]

Are you serious? Dear dear. When you are studying history, you study events, almost always it is events and dates and time periods, none of which you can read about in sufficient depth in the pedia.

That isn't how history was taught to me in my high school.

What you probably meant to say is:

"When I studied history, I studied events, almost always events and dates and time periods."

Presumption to speak on behalf of others is not generally a good idea.

 

[Ekolite]

As far as I know, I speak on behalf of all people who studied in the UK and America. I said in one of my posts that, of course, like everything else, what is taught in schools, and how it is taught, varies from place to place. I would be interested to know how history was taught in your school, did you study in Australia or have you emigrated there since?

 

[blizzrd]

I went to high school in Melbourne. In my final two years of high school, I took every history subject that was available. The courses were set to particular periods or themes but not specifically dates and events. To do well, it was important to be able to critically assess each historical source - what was the particular bias of the author, etc and then put a series of sources together before you could come up with your own interpretation of any particular part of history.

If all you knew were dates and names, you weren't going to excel in the subject.

 

[kairob]

True, but civ doesn't exactly teach you how to assess sources either...

 

[Rod]

I would love to hear from the originial poster the results of his efforts to convince his teacher. However I do agree that the Paradox Games (Victoria, Europa Universalis) are the better choice IF you ever want to use a game for teaching purpose.

They are simulating their respective periods in more detail and with more realism than RFC and thanks to the elaborate event system they would even throw a couple of facts towards the gamers.
If you play a limited round of Victoria in a workshop then you could even discuss about the different pathes that each country had to take on its road to success and which solutions the players applied to different challenges (and whether it worked or not) - so you MIGHT even teach somethin'.

Nevertheless you can certainly not expect a history teacher to ever touch a Paradox Game (especially of she is a woman). You can not expect the class room jesters and the class room sport stars or the class room models and actresses to ever touch a Paradox game.

It just doesn't work for them. Apart, thanks to the lengthy character of god-games (whether Victoria or Civ), you can not fit it into a class schedule.

Last but not least , what do you teach them ? Do they learn any neccessary skills by simulating a god-game ? Do they know better how to run a business or how do deal with media or how to solve scientific questions by "leading" a nation ? As I said you MIGHT teach somethin' about problem solving. But you would teach them same principles if you let them build a tower out of a sheet of paper, glue and a scissor .. you get the idea.

Hobby is hobby and job (school) is job. Let's leave it like that.

 

[Ekolite]

I went to high school in Melbourne. In my final two years of high school, I took every history subject that was available. The courses were set to particular periods or themes but not specifically dates and events. To do well, it was important to be able to critically assess each historical source - what was the particular bias of the author, etc and then put a series of sources together before you could come up with your own interpretation of any particular part of history.

If all you knew were dates and names, you weren't going to excel in the subject.

Yeah, it is important to know a bad source when you see one, although in the UK the actual focus on sources isn't quite so strong as you describe. Still, as Kairob said, you can't really learn much about source critiquing in the game, the pedia doesn't mention its sources anywhere as far as I can tell. So my point still stands.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

The courses were set to particular periods or themes but not specifically dates and events. To do well, it was important to be able to critically assess each historical source - what was the particular bias of the author, etc and then put a series of sources together before you could come up with your own interpretation of any particular part of history.

Sounds like you were in a very good (with small class sizes and probably preppy) private school...(me too but this is probably not the case for most US or British high schools where conformity and churning out test scores matter a lot more)

 

[Arkaeyn]

To put what I said a while ago a better way, Civilization would be a great teaching tool for historiography - that is, how history is studied, and more generally, how history is perceived. What causes what to occur? Why does this nation thrive while another one collapses?

RFC may not be good for high school history as a series of events and people, but it is great for historical geography. Playing it tells where cities are, where and when civilizations arose, how and why borders are created. I wouldn't base a class around it, but a student who was interested in such things could do well with a recommendation.

 

[blizzrd]

Sounds like you were in a very good (with small class sizes and probably preppy) private school...(me too but this is probably not the case for most US or British high schools where conformity and churning out test scores matter a lot more)

No, actually I went to a very good public high school.

 

[ScavengerType]

I've had a similar experience to blizrd. Names dates and specifics of warfare and innovations that changed it, or at least a random assortment of those in my recall. Much more about the social and political situations though than wars.

 

[dragodon64]

I went to a pretty good high school in America, and while the only Advanced Placement history classes were World History and European History, they were quite in depth, looking at change and continuity, cultural perspective, etc. more so than dates and names.

Now was most of this lost on most of the other students? Absolutely.

For the same reason they never cared too much for the class, they also probably wouldn't have cared for civilization. And I seriously doubt that they would have drawn as much from it as a lot of the people on these forums.

Which furthers the point that rfc cannot instill a love of history in people, but it can cultivate it.

 

[Dumanios]

Nope.

 

[Dave_Oz]

I dont think it would help for a classroom setting, but it does give you a better understanding of history, and what historys leaders had to deal with.

 

[OzzyKP]

The information is out of context, vague in many areas, and sometimes completely irrelevant. At the end of the school year, yes they may be able to describe a longbowman, or a castle, but they would have only the vaguest idea of what actually happened during this time period.

Haha, you just described every high school history class in the country. Bravo!

 

[Heathcliff]

When I was in middleschool i remember my history teacher asked me:
"how I could know so much about history".
As I sometimes could answer his hard questions he was giving to the class as rhetorical questions not expected to be answered. With such names as Hammurabi, Ramsses and Montezuma, because I had played alot of civ 1.
I answered him: Ive played the computer game civilization 1.
And he was amazed as he was one of those oldschool teachers who saw computer games as nothing you could learn from or even that they promote violence among young kids.

Later when I was doing my college and university degree I studied economic history. When I did not feel motivated to study, I started RFC.
Then i tried to compare how the UVH was compared to what the books had to write about the civilization. I also noticed how the other civs was doing around me and if something unusual happened. I looked in the books for that civ, if they tried to achieve what they achieved or if there was any reason in the books, why it didn't happen as it did in the computergame. And after it I got new energy to study some more.

I like economic history more than regular history before it focuses more of what's in civilization, what promotes growth, such as technology change. Compared to regular history which focuses on politics and warfare.
I don't know what Rhye majored in might have been computer science, but if he could convince a professor (in either of these three subjects) that RFC was interresting. RFC could have been the base of a PhD project because historians would love to have a simulator for these questions they discuss daily.

You have all assumed above that RFC should be used in high-school.
But that won't work because when you are in high-school, everything that has to do with school is per definition boring, and if you'd force RFC on high-school students 90% would find it boring.
But if you would introduce it at collage it would be a completely different thing, because people choose subjects that they are interrested in there and for example in economic history this game would have caught many students interrest.

Many boys have tried Civ 4, but unfortunatly very few of them has tried RFC. Even many who has played it quite much whom I have asked, has never
clicked on "beyond the sword content". They have mostly played it for some months and when it got boring they switched to another computer game. I feel that this mod has potential, but too few know about it.

Alot of you seem to think Europa Universalis 3 is better for educational purposes than RFC are completely wrong:
Appart from EU 3's obvious flaws that their combatsystem is bad and boring and it's very unbalanced. Merchants are very overpowered that you will spend alot of your time in the game just waiting for you next merchant and examine to which tradingcenter you should apply him to.

But the main reason EU3 is bad for educational purposes is that it is too detail fixed you will get so many details that you will not be able to sort out what's important for each country and what's not, because you will only spend time on details.
Not like in RFC where you only have some things to memories and they are enough to give you a brief understanding of the civilization:
Their UP, UU, UB, UVH, time when they spawn and should end uvhs and how the surrounding terrain looks like and their closest neighbours.
What Im trying to say is that in EU3 you cannot see the forest for all trees, but in RFC you get the big picture of a civilization. That is RFC's greatest strength (far more important than the gameplay) and that's what keeps me coming back to it.

 

[AnotherPacifist]

That is why modmods like RFC:E and RFGW will be much better for teaching, since they hone in on particular periods and civilizations. Not the forest but also not the individual trees either.

 

[Rhye]

wow, Heathcliff, I didn't think about thesis.
Indeed, professors from computer engineering were absolutely uninterested in games and history. If only I had been studying History, this might have gone differently.
I wonder how could I do something useful, in a university context, with the mod. I certainly can't restart studing for a 2nd degree, just because my thesis is already made. Do you have any ideas?

 

[Charles Martel]

I think that it would not be easy to find a history lecturer, either in your country or abroad, willing to supervise a PhD thesis on a computer game. (Difficult, but not impossible: I have heard of Italian professors who have supervised BA theses on Totò films and even trash talk-shows such as the Maurizio Costanzo show!)

If you want to do something with your mod in an academic context, I think it might be better to aim at some interdisciplinary field, such as ‘Computer gaming & Education’ or ‘Computer gaming & Simulation’.

There’s, for example, the academic journal Simulation & Gaming, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theory Practice and Research (http://www.unice.fr/sg/). Apparently, they are now looking for papers on the use of computer games for teaching and research in history:

Call for papers for a special issue of Simulation &Gaming on the use of games and simulations by historians. The papers should discuss practical and theoretical aspects of the use of games and simulations for teaching and research in history. Concrete experiments will be favored over speculation.
Authors should send their paper to both :
Martin Campion, 196 Breckinridge Sq, Louisville KY 420220 USA
Pierre Corbeil, 690 104e avenue, Drummondville J2B 4P9 Québec (Canada)
either as a text attached to an e-mail or on a disquette in a format readable by common word-processing programmes, such as MS Word or Lotus WordPro. Authors should consult the S&G Guide for Authors before writing their text.

They say that they prefer authors who are professional historians, but if you already have something written it might be worth a try.

I’ve heard of a guy, Ted Friedman, who’s written an academic essay on Sid’s Meier Civilization: “Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Space”, published in From Discovering Discs: Transforming Space and Genre on CD-ROM, (edited by G. Smith, New York University Press). This guy is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication of Georgia State University. He’s the author of a book called ‘Electric Dreams: Computers in American Cultures’, and he’s got a blog, http://www.tedfriedman.com/, where, if you’re interested, you may be able to find more information on how to make computer games academically respectable.

Once, surfing the internet, I came across an “Italian Society for Computer Simulation” (ISCS), based at the University of Naples and the University of Rome 2. They describe themselves as follows:

“A scientific non-profit association of members from industry, university, education and several public and research institutions with common interest in all fields of computer simulation. Its primary purpose is to facilitate communication among those engaged in all aspects of simulation for scientific, technical or educational purposes.
For more information, inquiries, membership affairs please contact the ISCS chairman or the secretary:
Mario Savastano, ISCS - c/o CNR - IRSIP, Via Claudio 21, I – 80125 Napoli, Italy
Mario Savastano, mario.savastano[at]unina.it
Paola Provenzano, Paola.Provenzano[at]uniroma2.it