There was a vogue for simulation gaming at this exact moment much bigger than the wargaming hobby we all think we know. Yeah, there were the wargamers. But there was also, at just this time, a surge of interest in using simulation games, role-plays, and similar exercises in education. A little digging in education libraries turns up literally hundreds of simulation games for use in elementary, high school, and university classrooms—and they all date from the same era.

I have a big heavy tome in front of me. Two tomes, actually: the Handbook of Social Education Simulation Gaming, published 1972. It contains hundreds of games and goes into considerable details about the rules. Some are just “educational” versions of board games: you know, like “Congressopoly” and things of that nature. Some are un-games: free-form roleplays of a sort I associate more with therapy than gaming. But a lot of them and these are clearly the ones the author of this particular handbook was most excited by [what] sound an awful lot like what we would call RPGs.

Educational roleplaying games? Educational simulations? Rob is onto something that I’ve been uncovering in my own research as well – an interest in roleplaying and simulations within education in the very early 70′s. What I find interesting is how he is studying board and “pen and paper” roleplaying games and simulations – while my own research focuses on computer simulations and roleplaying. I’m not sure the medium matters as much as the concept of using this within the classroom. Remember that in my brief outline of the origins of the Oregon Trail computer game, I explained the original version was released in 1971 – right at this same time. Coincidence? Probably not.

The question I’ve been building to the past several weeks combines this early history of roleplaying games, the Oregon Trail computer simulation’s goals of teaching history, and Wild West roleplaying in Second Life. How can history teachers use Second Life and roleplaying within virtual worlds to teach history? As I (and others, such as Rob) uncover a greater-detailed history of educational roleplaying and educational uses of simulations my gut reaction is that the use of Second Life in this manner seems completely logical. Just as the Oregon Trail computer game adapted educational simulations to the teletype machine, we can do the same with Second Life – in an environment that I would argue overcomes many traditional shortcomings of educational computer simulations.

Eric Hotz has assembled an incredible online resource of Wild West Game Rules. The page acts as both a directory of Wild West role-playing and wargames, and also links to rules if they’re available online. There are so many games available that I’ve only begun to read about each one individually – their instructions even offer maps of how towns should be oriented and characters act. Eric owns a store called Whitewash City that sells 3D Wild West Paper/Card-Stock PDF models to use within these games. The image above is a town created using his kits.

The incredible variation in representations of historical architecture parallels the inaccuracies I’ve witnessed within Second Life – an uncompromising tendency to blend ideas of the past with modern-day architecture to create something holding salient historical traits but often out of context.