Several years ago McGill University created a simulation designed to teach students about the history of a Quebec. The simulation is free to download on their site. (Windows only.. sorry Mac users! [myself included]) One of the largest problems with the educational use of computers simulations is a lack of augmentative instruction. Beyond the content of the game, students need ideas to be reinforced, or at least prefaced with contextualizing information. The McGill simulation’s site contains a terrific library of lesson plans, activity sheets, and information pages that should be a model for other educational sims. Here is a description of the project:
“A Journey to the Past: A Quebec Village in the 1890s†is a 3D world which recreates a Quebec village of the 1890s, complete with characters of that time with whom elementary school students can interact. You can use this 3D world to teach students about life in Canada (and specifically in Quebec) at the end of the nineteenth century, and encourage students to compare life in that place and time with their contemporary lives in order to understand better the changes that have taken place.
Kevin Kee, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing of Brock University helped develop this simulation while working at McGill, and is currently working on a historical simulation in Second Life. I’ll definitely be posting about this in the future
The Constructivist recently shared a terrific find – a blog anthology from “To Delight and to Instruct,†chronicling the process of surviving graduate school. This is required reading for those currently in, or considering entering a graduate program in the humanities.
On Friday the American Studies Association launched their new website and moved to a new server. Make sure your bookmarks point to www.theasa.net. The site is based on a networking and blogging model to foster the development of “communities†within the site, be that regional chapters or specific projects. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops in the upcoming year, as well as who uses it. Are American Studies scholars savvy and engaged enough to full-utilize the site? Who uses these tools? My personal hunch is that the target audience is primarily graduate level students who are trying to make a name for themselves, but I could be wrong. The success of this could really poise my contribution to the Crossroads Project, the American Studies Web search engine for success if the ASA can foster the kind of community their new site seeks to attract.
Thanks to all who have provided some great feedback on my American Studies tagline so far, keep it coming! I’ve already begun compiling a list of ways to improve the next version of it. Special thanks to the bloggers who have plugged this and other projects recently including Dan Cohen, Rob MacDougall, Citizen of Somewhere Else, historians in Switzerland, Tom Scheinfeldt, and others.
Virtual Powwow was a living museum in Second Life, proposed as a final project in Bernie Dodge’s graduate-level Exploratory Learning through Simulation and Games class. By recreating a powwow, the simulation visualized an environment hosted by Native Americans where students could experience Native American culture and dance.
Although not exactly roleplaying, Virtual Powwow and living museums in Second Life offer a starting point for future discussions of the educational uses of historical roleplaying in virtual worlds. It may also bring together the seemingly disparate topics of this blog, including Wild West and Native American roleplaying in Second Life, visualizing history, and educational roleplaying games. The powwow itself can be contextualized within two pertinent discussions: the shifting of knowledge from experts to amateurs, and innovation vs imitation.
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As previously mentioned, Native American roleplaying in Second Life is a very popular. In order to understand the Sigil Tribe, I’m exploring active Native American RP sims. Last night I visited La Tribu for the first time, a French-speaking Native American roleplaying sim. (Some background: I don’t speak French, so the entire time I was toggling Altavista Babelfish translating what was being said and responding. Thankfully I’ve found an in-world translation HUD that should make this much easier.) Although my French was embarrassing and my computer froze, deleting the chat logs I hoped to archive, I found a level of sophistication in the sim that’s alluring.
When teleporting to the sim, I was given a free visitor’s outfit that’s meant to historicize my character with appropriate clothing. This is a common practice in historical roleplaying sims – however there’s a social stigma associated with this clothing, it instantly identifies you as a newbie. (In a similar vein – in Sigil one of the first things I had to do was purchase a virtual horse. It was a status symbol that, once I had one, allowed me to speak to others more freely.) With tacky pants and paw print tattoos on my chest I explored.
My initial impression of La Tribu (from what I could gather with my limited comprehension of French) was that it has very rigid gender roles. My guide frequently described the activities of virtual natives in terms of gender – men do this, women do that. A first hand account from a citizen historian confirms my reactions by writing:
We are standing on top of a small hill, where a little cascade of waterfalls runs into a few, deep blue pools. This place is for women only. “Men are only allowed up here if the women invite them.” Women are not oppressed in this small French speaking tribe I’ve been invited to visit. They each have their own teepees, with which they are free to do whatever they wish. The teepees are loosely arranged in the vicinity of the common campfire, around which household chores are performed.
I have to brush up on my French, but I hope to explore this further in the near future
Lucy Maddox’s Locating American Studies: the Evolution of a Discipline is commonly required reading in American Studies theory and methods courses because of its breadth and analysis of the evolution of the discipline. What if we could visualize that disciplinary evolution? What ways could we see the shifting theoretical perspectives of scholars, and how can we begin to understand what precipitated those changes? Lastly, what are meaningful ways to convey that knowledge to students? An answer I’ve come up with is the American Studies Tagline – a timeline-based tag cloud that takes the essential American Studies texts in Lucy Maddox’s book and visualizes their contents.
The American Studies Tagline textually analyzes the articles in Maddox’s book and shows the most used words in a larger font and new terms in brighter colors. You can drag the slider to control the year – allowing you to clearly see what critics looked at, and how that has changed. I used open source software, also used by this incredible Presidential Speeches tagline which originally gave me this idea. The process was simple – I copied the contents of all these articles, dumped them into an XML file, and then used a cloud generator to visualize the text. This is something that historians and enthusiasts with limited knowledge of PHP and creating web pages can set up and use themselves.
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Last semester I had the privilege of working under the auspices of Randy Bass at Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship on the American Studies Crossroads Project – an instrumental disciplinary vehicle on the web for American Studies. My most notable contribution to the site was the recreation of a search engine for websites relating to American history and culture – American Studies Web. I remain active as the digital curator of exhibitions on the Crossroads Project, including a series that will be launched over the course of the next year.
American Studies Web was created by David Phillips in 1994. In 2000, Michael Coventry and Jamie Poster revised and expanded the content and Edward Maloney converted it to a new search interface. With the help of Matthias Oppermann, I revised the content this past spring and programmed a Web 2.0 version of the search.
The idea was to create an online space for scholarly collaboration relating to the discipline of American Studies – allowing the building of community knowledge. A tagging system was established, along with the ability for users to comment and rate websites – weighting the search results based upon this feedback. Although we’re still in a testing phase in conjunction with the Crossroads Advisory Board, the site was launched over a month ago and you’re free to check it out.
In addition to studying the confluence of history/culture and information technology, I believe it’s important to create tools for learning. American Studies Web is just one example of tools I’ve created, in addition to my Oregon Trail Survey and a visual historiography of American Studies that is starting to take shape.
Before discussing historical roleplaying sims in Second Life any further, it’s important to introduce a side of Second Life that I’ve failed to acknowledge up to this point – sexual roleplaying. As one of the first subcultures to embrace Second Life, sexual roleplayers have influenced the entire Second Life culture – with BDSM references throughout the virtual world. The Wild West simulation of Sigil was started by a group of Gorean (also known as Gor) roleplayers who wanted to take a break from sexual roleplaying. As I’ve noted before, women in this Wild West roleplaying sim were sexualized – reflecting general trends within Second Life. Several other historical roleplaying sims have similar origins, including several Native American virtual tribes that I’ll introduce in the near future.
Nick Nobel, an undergraduate student at Trinity University recently wrote a paper on Sex in Online Games that begins to introduce this subculture better than most articles I’ve found. He described Gor as the following:
Gor is based on the futuristic science fiction novels of John Norman, and focuses primarily on the psychological relation between the “master” and sexual “slave.” [...] Gor was not sadomasochism, for it does not center on violence, but psychological domination and submission.
When beginning to articulate the relationship between individuals in current historical roleplaying sims, the master/slave relationship is important to keep in mind. I’m still researching the degree to which Gor influences and informs historical roleplaying in Second Life, and learning how many people in these sims identify themselves as Gorean. It offers an interesting twist to already complex power structures within history – for example Native Americans roleplayers and their relationship to Wild West roleplaying cowboys. In this world, does the D&S relationship directly correlate, or is it merely coincidental? Are cowboys dominant and natives submissive?
The most recent addition to the Sigil Archive introduces Native American roleplaying in Second Life, specifically the Sigil Tribe. There are several Native American roleplaying tribes in Second Life, including one that speaks entirely in French. I’ve uploaded a set of guidelines, as well as tribe rules that were used by the Sigil Tribe. Here’s an interesting snippet from one of the documents:
The Whites. We don’t like them. But we arn’t savages and out of control either. Whites are good for trade and weapons so we have to keep a balance to get guns and supplies. One thing though is we believe in a life for a life and this could be an issue is someone from the tribe gets themselves killed in town. Any Armed Whites coming into our lands is fair game and most likely won’t survive an encounter unless they choose to leave naked and humble. White woman often were playthings for single braves and found their womanhood a bit battered from the encounter but rarely were they killed. Children often were adopted if their parents were dead and made full members of the tribe so no mistreatment of our adopted children. All soldiors entering our lands are killed outright unless there is a treaty made. They travel in groups so once again for safty sakes don’t ever travil alone. Alone and armed is a fast way to die. Don’t expect the white men to talk first if you’re armed. Don’t go into town armed, an armed Indian is fair game in town. Going unarmed means you’re there to trade in peace.
Note: Any grammatical or spelling errors haven’t been changed from the original documents.
An enthusiast recently created The Oregon Trail Shrine, archiving images and downloadable copies of both the Oregon Trail and Oregon Trail Deluxe computer games. Similar to the oral histories I collected with my Oregon Trail Survey, the site shares game reviews and stories submitted by fans. This review struck me:
After playing this game it made [me] want to learn even more about the Oregon Trail and all about the pioneers who walked and did their best to survive. To know that they survived sickness and weather and Indians was amazing to me
The reviewer was amazed that pioneers survived amid the threat of Native Americans, however that threat wasn’t present in the game. Yes, in the game thieves sometimes attacked your wagon train – but they weren’t Native Americans. Moreover, Native Americans offered food in the game – a far cry from any threat the reviewer perceived. The reviewer’s subtle reference parallels many of the inaccurate and more explicit responses I received from my survey. When asked to describe Native Americans in the game, survey respondents occasionally wrote, “they attack you”, “bad”, or “savages.” These descriptions indicated a disconnect between the history represented within the game, and the knowledge retained by the game’s users. Individuals unintentionally saw the past through racist stereotypes, engendered by other forms of media and culture.
The reoccurrence of these inaccuracies and stereotypes is intriguing. Are they due to the inherent limitations of computer simulations? Are stereotypes foundational to how we see the past? Are there other examples of history and the past becoming abstracted in the minds of individuals – being replaced by stereotypes? Is this a phenomenon that could be studied further? Am I unduly extrapolating upon a perceived pattern and is this all just a waste of time? I already have preliminary answers to several of these questions – but I would appreciate feedback from my readers regarding ways to approach this.
