The Sidewise Historian

The Spectre of the Gun

[Simon Coll] — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I would hope that the premise, influence and enduring appeal of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek need little introduction. The franchise, chronicling the exploratory and diplomatic adventures of various starship crews, has enjoyed phenomenal success due largely to its optimistic, uplifting portrayal of the future – a welcome change from the dystopian spirit that marks most televisual science fiction. This optimism has sustained the show’s popularity through the majority of its incarnations – the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and at least eight of its thirteen films – but it has never been the only level on which it may be analysed and enjoyed. Contemporary politics have also featured consistently in its plot lines and moral messages, the most prominent, at least in the original series (broadcast 1966–1969), being the global Cold War.

Star Trek has (almost) always been an aspirational franchise,¹ shaped by an ethos of progressive humanism that it believes humanity as a whole will one day adopt. On the other hand, it is also inevitably a product of its time – a fact that is true of all its incarnations, but perhaps most evident in the original series. As Nicholas Sarantakes mentions, this is the Trek show that most clearly engages with the values, prejudices and anxieties that characterized the Cold War at its height.² The following will therefore focus almost exclusively on the original series, save a few highlighted exceptions.

Face of the Enemy

Perhaps the clearest Cold War parallels in the show are embodied by its various alien species. In particular, the principal antagonist powers, the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire, are established as analogues of the Soviet Union and communist China, respectively.

The connection between the Klingons and the Soviets was confirmed at the time of the show’s original run, with producer Gene Coon remarking in 1967 that ‘we have always played [the Klingons] very much like the Russians’.³ Indeed, the original conception of Klingon society, according to one of the actors who portrayed them, was of a culture oriented towards ‘“the collective good” rather than “individuality”’, in a thinly-veiled reference to the Soviet communist social model.⁴ More fundamentally, however, the Klingons are characterized as the most dangerous recurrent menace to the security of the Federation, a description also applied to the Soviets for much of the Cold War. The Romulan-Chinese parallel, meanwhile, is less pronounced on screen, but as Aaron Angel points out, both powers fulfil the role of ‘the other enemy’ – not the principal foe or existential threat represented by the Klingons/Soviets, but still ‘a force with which to be reckoned’.⁵

These comparisons are given emotional resonance, however, only by the association of the United Federation of Planets (and therefore the show’s protagonists) with the USA. While it shares many of its characteristics with the United Nations,⁶ the picture we have of the Federation is more American than international. Just as the UN headquarters are situated in New York, so does Earth (more specifically, San Francisco) play host to the Federation’s president, its council and its military arm (Starfleet), of which most main characters throughout the franchise are members. The Enterprise crew itself mirrors this US-centric arrangement, with the multicultural senior officers – an African communications officer, a Russian security chief, a Scottish engineer, an Asian American pilot and an alien science officer – all working under the ‘enlightened but no-nonsense American leadership’ of Captain James T. Kirk.⁷

By Any Other Name

Of course, Earth’s privileged status within the Federation is also motivated by more fundamental storytelling concerns; it is to be expected that American audiences will find it easier to relate to a threat to the Federation if it has its sights set on San Francisco in particular. Pragmatic cultural and budgetary considerations also doubtless played their part in the producers’ decision to present their diverse, multi-planetary civilization primarily as an extension of the United States. Still, it is equally clear that such an approach gave the show considerable scope for political commentary, and that this was intended by the creators from the beginning.⁸

One of the most frequent targets of such commentary was the Cold War, and the way in which the US was waging it. Rick Worland, for instance, argues that despite its science-fictional trappings, the show ‘neatly duplicated the configuration of international Cold War politics of the 1960s’.⁹ This interpretation has been echoed by a variety of scholars, including Mark P. Lagon and Daniel Bernardi.¹⁰ Far from taking the contemporary political situation for granted, however, the producers were keen to take advantage of their show’s futuristic setting to interrogate, even criticize, US foreign policy. Many episodes do indeed ‘duplicate’ certain Cold War relationships and situations, but this duplication takes the form of deliberate and critical allegory, whereby the basic assumptions of Cold War politics are, for the most part, discredited.

Naturally, such subtexts should be seen as part of Star Trek’s broader progressive, liberal form of social commentary: the show frequently denounced militarism, promoted racial equality (though it had less time for sexual equality) and presented a future in which humanity had outgrown the capitalist system. Its critique of US foreign policy and Cold War politics was one pillar of this far grander vision – albeit one to which the producers attached considerable importance.

The Paradise Syndrome

It is of course possible to take such comparisons too far, and this may be reading too much into what is, after all, a science fiction/space fantasy franchise. In a (thankfully mild) social media controversy involving Star Trek politics, for instance, William Shatner himself went on record asserting that ‘Star Trek wasn’t political…. To put a geocentric label on interstellar characters is silly’ (@WilliamShatner, 23 July 2015).

Mike O’Connor, among many others, evidently does not agree with this stance, stressing in his work that the contemporary political undertones of the show are impossible to ignore. Nonetheless, he also acknowledges that Roddenberry’s original intention was to make his show ‘thoughtful and philosophical, rather than explicitly political’. In particular, he and his fellow producers were keen to avoid any specific mention of how humanity had achieved this state of technological, social and moral utopia by the twenty-third century, and of ‘which socio-economic system ultimately worked out best’.¹¹ H. Bruce Franklin sums this up pithily when he notes that the show’s utopian future was ‘assumed’ but ‘never envisioned’.¹²

In short, the Federation’s standing in for the USA did not mean that it needed to mirror the US political system. Indeed, the few details of Federation society that are revealed on screen point to a culture in which such political differences have been transcended altogether, and in which the best features of both capitalism and communism have been combined in an almost dialectical way.

False Profits

One such detail is the lack of money or private enterprise in Federation society. This remains implicit for much of the show, but comes to the fore when the Enterprise crew encounter humans from their past (that is, the audience’s present). Various stories involving time travel to Earth’s past, such as the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, or the later Next Generation episode ‘Time’s Arrow’, present humanity’s reliance on money as an obstacle: the Enterprise crew’s lack of ready cash leaves them powerless in this barbaric capitalistic society.

The idea is discussed more prominently in the Next Generation episode ‘The Neutral Zone’, a subplot of which sees a trio of cryogenically frozen humans from the early twenty-first century being discovered and revived on the Enterprise. One of their number, an overbearing, loud-mouthed financier, finds it particularly hard to adjust to a civilization in which money no longer exists. His disorientation is eased, however, by his conversation with Captain Picard, who urges him to move beyond such a blinkered world view and ‘enrich [him]self’ with all the new challenges the future has to offer. This endorsement of one of communism’s signature features in an otherwise liberal, Americanized society is striking.

Emissary

Roddenberry’s Federation also bears some superficial resemblance to communism in its attitude towards religion. In most of its incarnations (aside from the later series Deep Space Nine, which deviated from the norm in almost every sense), the show is ‘aggressively secular’.¹³ When it features at all in the franchise, religion is usually revealed to be the result of either deception or naivety, and is certainly something that humankind has long since left behind. The parallels with the anti-religious Soviet form of communism in particular are apparent.

Despite these points of similarity, however, it is clear that the viewer is not meant to conclude that communism has triumphed on twenty-third-century Earth. As noted above, the future of Star Trek was always intended to be one in which such petty political divisions had been overcome. Neither capitalism nor communism has conquered the planet; both have been superseded by something far better.

Amok Time

A more obvious sign of this spirit of compromise, however, was the introduction in Star Trek’s second season of Ensign Pavel Chekov, a new main character of Russian nationality who, the show made clear, came from the very same society as his American (and Scottish) colleagues. There is some uncertainty surrounding the origins of the character. The most widely circulated explanation is that Chekov was devised in response to an editorial in Pravda (the organ of the Soviet Communist Party) complaining about the lack of Soviet characters on the show. The idea that Pravda wrote such an editorial is generally believed to be apocryphal, but there is evidence to suggest that whether it is true or not, Roddenberry believed it at the time.¹⁴ Regardless, Chekov’s presence in the main cast serves a similar purpose to that of the African Lieutenant Uhura and the Asian American Ensign Sulu – namely, to illustrate the inclusiveness of Roddenberry’s twenty-third-century world, and the extent to which he believed humanity would by then have conquered all the prejudices and inequalities that plague the present.

That Which Survives…

As O’Connor points out, Star Trek’s political message has grown less important to each new generation of fans, as the particular socio-political circumstances that gave rise to the show recede further into the distance.¹⁵ That is certainly true in my case: I began my foray into Trek fandom in the late 1990s with The Next Generation, and the real appeal of the franchise for me has always been in its imagination and its characters, rather than its political morals.

The fact that the show is a product of the politics of its time, however, is an integral part of its creative DNA. It is quite possible that only the 1960s, with their peculiar combination of steady liberalization and Cold War paranoia, could have given rise to a science fiction series as defiantly optimistic as the original Star Trek. While its television and cinematic sequels have echoed this optimism to varying degrees, the best of them have at least made sure to acknowledge and engage with this distinctive heritage. In essence, then, the show can be viewed as an indirect response to the social and moral questions posed by the Cold War. Though the questions have not been asked since 1991, Star Trek’s answer has lost none of its appeal.

This is a (slightly revised) version of a post I wrote for History to the Public in 2015. If this version leaves you unsatisfied, you can find the original here.

I say ‘almost’ here as Roddenberry grew progressively more attached to this ethos as time went on, and it really became the governing principle of the franchise only between the cancellation of the original series and the launch of The Next Generation. See Chaos on the Bridge, directed by William Shatner (Wacky Doodle Productions, 2014); and Mike O’Connor, ‘A Relativist Utopia? The Politics of Star Trek: The Next Generation’, Society for U.S. Intellectual History (blog), 11 September 2016, https://s-usih.org/2016/09/a-relativist-utopia-the-politics-of-star-trek-the-next-generation/. Deep Space Nine, meanwhile, went on to test the optimism of the Star Trek universe to its limit, while the latest live-action series, Discovery and Picard, seem to have abandoned it altogether. This may well explain why the latter two series, along with the more recent ‘reboot’ films, lack much of the distinctiveness of their predecessors. ^[return]
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, ‘Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Perspective of the Original Star Trek Series’, Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (2005): 74–103, 77. Mike O’Connor also takes up this point: O’Connor, ‘A Relativist Utopia?‘. ^[return]
Sarantakes, ‘Cold War Pop Culture’, 78. ^[return]
‘Depicting Klingons’, Memory Alpha, accessed 21 January 2021, https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Depicting_Klingons. ^[return]
Aaron Angel, ‘Cold War Images and the Enemies of Star Trek’, Star Trek: WWW, accessed 21 January 2021, http://www.stwww.com/papers/coldwar.html. ^[return]
Mike O’Connor, ‘Liberals in Space: The 1960s Politics of Star Trek’, The Sixties 5, no. 2 (2012): 185–203, https://doi.org/10.1080/17541328.2012.721584. ^[return]
Mike Marqusee, ‘End of the Trek’, Prospect Magazine, 20 August 2001, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/endofthetrek. ^[return]
Sarantakes, “Cold War Pop Culture’, 74–77. ^[return]
Rick Worland, ‘Captain Kirk: Cold Warrior’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 16, no. 3 (1988): 109–17, 112 https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.1988.9943393. ^[return]
O’Connor, ‘Liberals in Space’, 195. ^[return]
O’Connor, ‘Liberals in Space’, 189. ^[return]
H. Bruce Franklin, ‘Star Trek in the Vietnam Era’, Film & History 24, no. 1 (1994): 36–46, 36. ^[return]
O’Connor, ‘Liberals in Space’, 190. ^[return]
Bill Brioux, Truth and Rumors: The Reality Behind TV’s Most Famous Myths (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2008), 43–44; David Mikkelson, ‘Was Star Trek’s Chekov Inspired by Pravda?’, Snopes.com, 23 March 1999, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russian-crewlette/. ^[return]
O’Connor, ‘Liberals in Space’, 186. ^[return]

Book Review: Prime Minister Corbyn, edited by Duncan Brack and Iain Dale

[Simon Coll] — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Duncan Brack and Iain Dale (eds), Prime Minister Corbyn: And Other Things That Never Happened (London: Biteback, 2016) (Google Books)

Counterfactual history is a very useful, yet undervalued tool of historical analysis. When taken seriously, it offers a unique instrument for measuring the impact of particular events, decisions or personalities, by enabling historians to construct realities in which they did not exist or occur. Aside from the insights this offers, counterfactuals also have an emotional appeal unlike any other branch of history, inspiring a peculiar combination of fascination, temptation and poignant frustration. Perhaps because of this emotive quality, the field is becoming increasingly popular with the public, but is still struggling to gain academic respectability. In this context, Duncan Brack’s and Iain Dale’s Prime Minister Corbyn is an laudable step forward, offering rigorous, thoughtful argument alongside popular appeal.

The best leaders we never had?

As might be gleaned from the title, the collection is concerned primarily with British political history. Its essays explore such topics as the Liberal Unionist split in 1886 (and whether it could have been avoided); a possible union of the UK and France in 1940; an early Brexit following the referendum of 1975; a split in the Labour Party in the wake of the Iraq War; and a nationalist victory in the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. Naturally, and perhaps most tantalizingly, it also presents a host of alternative prime ministers, from the obvious candidates, such as Boris Johnson or David Miliband, to more novel possibilities such as Roy Jenkins, Hilary Benn, Tessa Jowell, Ed Balls, or the titular Jeremy Corbyn – though this last scenario is something of a cheat, as will be seen.

In addition, there are three essays that break up the UK-centric material, introducing the reader to versions of the USA and Russia governed by Hubert Humphrey and Evgeniy Primakov, respectively, and to a Germany that never experienced reunification in 1990. Even without these international entries, however, the book offers an admirably diverse selection of alternate realities, which combine to make it a very entertaining read, quite aside from the strengths of the individual scenarios.

Finger on the pulse

As the editors mention in their introduction, this book is in fact the fourth in a series of political counterfactual volumes that has been running since 2003. The fact that so many texts have been published in this field in such a short period is impressive – all the more so since this volume, at least, is of such high quality. Another upshot is that the collection is remarkably current: of its twenty-three essays, thirteen focus on events from 2000 or later, with eleven of those centred on the major upheavals of the last decade.

It is clear from the topics of these essays that this is a book compiled in a post-crash, post-Brexit, increasingly polarized political climate. Chapters by Andrew Stone, Paul Richards, Mark Pack, Alexander Larman and Julian Huppert and John King, for instance, all look at various means by which the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government of 2010–2015 could have been more successful, or avoided altogether. A further set, by Stuart Thompson, Tony McNulty and Adrian Moss, present realities in which the Labour Party could have become a more enticing prospect in time for the 2015 election, and where Britain has therefore been spared both Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn.

Even several essays whose points of divergence are further back, such as Tim Oliver’s scenario of a 1975-Brexit, or Peter Cuthbertson’s piece on Britain’s losing the Falklands War of 1982, also shed light on these contemporary events, by presenting worlds in which their causes never arose. The use of such up-to-the-minute subject matter makes it easier for the reader to appreciate the value of the counterfactual analysis, which feels more relevant, and emotionally resonant, in a contemporary setting.

The finer points of politics

The choice of material also allows for a subtlety of approach that is immensely refreshing in this field. With considerable overlap between many of the essays, the authors are obliged to draw precise and often creative distinctions between their counterfactuals, which in turn makes them much more intellectually compelling. Most of the scenarios are appropriately small-scale, spanning only a few years and exploring in some detail the impact of often minor deviations from our established history.

Most chapters also employ quite a finely-shaded morality. While a few show realities that are unambiguously better or worse than our own, the majority deal with worlds that are simply different, inviting the reader to consider the role that inertia, vested interest and other countervailing factors might play in history. In Oliver’s chapter, for example, Britain’s relationship with the European Union remains similarly complex, and equally fraught, after its departure in 1975, and by the present day Euroscepticism has become as influential a political force as in our world, though for different reasons.

This subtlety extends even to the style in which almost all the chapters are written, with most authors committing fully to the counterfactual scenario. Most essays present themselves as a historical work hailing from the alternate reality in question, with only a small editorial passage at the beginning or the end commenting on the analysis and comparing it with what really took place. This is largely a stylistic affectation, and certainly makes the book more entertaining, but this does not impair the quality of the essays. On the contrary, it marks this book as a more mature, developed work of counterfactual history, from people clearly comfortable in the field.

The importance of this nuanced approach cannot be overstated. As I have outlined before, scholars working to tighten up the methodology of counterfactual history, such as Martin Bunzl, have stressed the need for a usable counterfactual proposition to have a plausible turning-point and plausible consequences. Without both of these elements, the acceptability and the usefulness of the scenario are compromised. This is a trap into which a large number of counterfactual works have fallen, with authors often tempted to sacrifice plausibility for a more striking or elaborate alternate world. For the most part, Prime Minister Corbyn confidently avoids this pitfall.

No country for straw men

There are one or two exceptions, however – including, sadly, the final two essays dealing with the Jeremy Corbyn premiership of the title. The more eyebrow-raising of the two is easily Tom Harris’ chapter, in which Corbyn proves to be an unparalleled disaster as prime minister. After winning the 2020 general election, he attempts to force through an ill-conceived and thoroughly unpopular hard-left legislative agenda, alienating his citizens and much of the rest of the world and inflicting immense damage on Britain’s infrastructure and its international standing, before his government is ousted by a heroic alliance of the Queen, the Conservative Party and the upstanding British populace.

To say that this apocalyptic narrative is unconvincing is putting it mildly. The extremity of Corbyn’s left-wing programme, and the chaos of his premiership in general, seem unlikely. Given the extent to which his politics have softened, in presentation at the very least, since his appointment as Labour leader, there seems litle chance that he would attempt half this programme even if he were elected. This characterization of Corbyn and his government reads as a slightly crass caricature, one constructed by the author purely so that it can then be discredited. The version of the Labour leader presented here seems grounded in popular media depictions, especially those that appeared at the start of his leadership in 2015, and there is little attempt to convince the reader of any deeper plausibility to the scenario.

Indeed, the chapter has more in common with several fictional representations of corrupt or dysfunctional government than with real political life. To a large extent, it can be viewed as a lightly-sketched fusion of the original House of Cards serial and the 1988 television series A Very British Coup, which proposed a counterfactual based on a Labour victory in the 1983 election. In fact, this chapter, and the prime minister it describes, would have worked far better as an exploration of a 1983 Labour government; the party’s manifesto for that year advocated many of the policies pursued by Corbyn here. Instead, the essay attempts to shorehorn Corbyn into the fictional Harry Perkins’ shoes, as though the past two years had not happened, and fails to justify the exaggeration.

The other essays at the back of the book fare little better. Francis Beckett’s vision of a Corbyn premiership is more novel and interesting than Harris’, but scarcely more convincing as a counterfactual analysis. Andy Mayer’s depiction of Boris Johnson as prime minister, meanwhile, feels more cartoonish than the others combined, with its screenplay format, inclusion of fictional characters (notably Martin Tucker, a communications director with an infamous father) and extensive use of future, rather than counterfactual, history.

Back, not forward

This last may be the root of most of the weaknesses of these entries. A focus on the future sits uneasily in a collection of counterfactual history, leading to conclusions that tend to be both more speculative and more controversial. It also seems to encourage a preoccupation with the style of the proposition over its substance, to the point that the reader almost loses sight of the argument. As such, these essays largely fail to meet the standards expected from a decent counterfactual scenario, as set out by Bunzl and other more reflective practitioners in the field.

These slight missteps attract attention only because they are in such a minority, however. Almost all the essays in this volume prove to be stellar examples of counterfactual history done right, marrying plausible argument and presentational flair in a way that is still far too rare in this discipline. As a whole, therefore, Prime Minister Corbyn is an insightful, entertaining and acutely relevant book, and is enthusiastically recommended.

This is a (slightly revised) version of a review I wrote for History to the Public in 2017. The completionists among you can give the original a read here.

Down the Rabbit Hole

[Simon Coll] — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Your secondary school history teacher shows your class a poster that has unexpectedly arrived from a museum in Pennsylvania; the poster displays both a web address and a QR code. Following either link leads you to a website discussing a recently discovered ‘bizarre document’ dating back to the US Civil War, and which contains a string of writing that appears to be in some sort of code. Banding together with your classmates, you decrypt the document, and become embroiled in an investigation that encompasses puzzle-solving, historical fact-finding using the museum’s collection of digitized primary sources, and the hunt for a mysterious jewel.

Intrigued? That was certainly the idea when the US National Civil War Museum launched this alternate reality game (ARG), titled The Jewel of the Valleys, in 2011. The ostensible objective of the game was to find the titular jewel, but in order to do so, students were required to learn about a real historical period and the people who lived in it. Their curiosity and desire to solve both the game’s puzzles and its broader mystery propelled them towards a more active understanding of this topic than they might otherwise have gained. Jewel of the Valleys is one of the more prominent history-themed examples of a game genre that has grown increasingly sophisticated and popular over the last decade, and whose educational potential has barely begun to be tapped.

Alice reloaded

Alternate reality games vary greatly in appearance, content and level of interactivity, and the format resists precise definition. In essence, however, ARGs are ‘games that do not acknowledge that they are games: they pose as alternate realities hidden away in streams of dormant internet code’.¹ Rather than explicitly choosing to start playing them, players often begin by stumbling across one of the strands of their narratives, masquerading as a real-world website, email or forum message. This initial point of contact is designed to inspire and possibly unnerve players, but above all to entice them to follow its clues and delve deeper into the game’s universe. As a result, it is often referred to by ARG developers as the game’s ‘rabbit hole’. In addition to their online component, ARGs are generally distributed across as wide a variety of media as possible, using phone calls and text messages, posters, public spaces and even clothing to unfold their storylines. For that reason, they are occasionally also referred to as ‘pervasive’ or ‘ubiquitous’ games.² Their stories are related in a non- or semi-linear manner, relying on player initiative to move the plot forward. The intended effect of all this is that the player treat the game and its story as part of the real world, and approach its characters and challenges accordingly.

The genre grew out of closely related, though broader, ‘transmedia experiences’ such as Ong’s Hat (developed from the 1980s until 2001), though the ARG proper began with more recent games such as The Beast and Majestic, both of which launched in 2001. Other prominent examples include Perplex City, EDOC Laundry, a range of murder mystery and horror-themed titles (notably In Memoriam and the ongoing Ben Drowned saga) and various games linked to film, television and video game franchises (such as the Halo-based I Love Bees).

While the majority of ARGs are of course designed for entertainment (or marketing) purposes, the genre’s value as an educational tool is also being explored by teachers and researchers – including a number of pioneering historians.

Where sourcework meets cybersleuthing

ARGs offer a host of advantages to those attempting to teach people about and engage people in history, particularly school students and other non-academic audiences. Indeed, many of the history-themed ARGs run over the last decade have been developed as part of wider public outreach projects, frequently in conjunction with museums, universities and heritage organizations. This was the case, for example, with The Jewel of the Valleys, in addition to the MIT-based Reliving the Revolution (2005), focused on the Battle of Lexington, and Das Geheimnis der Krone (The Secret of the Crown, 2012), covering the history of the Austrian city of Linz. Several ARGs have also adopted wider perspectives, presenting national stories (such as the Italian game Aequilibrium in 2013 or The Ups and Downs of Polish History, run from 2006 to 2008) or even multi-national debates (such as the primarily Canadian game Tecumseh Lies Here, run from 2011 to 2013).

Aside from the specific historical lessons such games provide, they have also proved useful for teaching history-related skills to their players. In order to progress in an ARG, participants need to develop their ability to search for, use and critically evaluate sources, as well as to guide their own investigation independently. When making such judgements about the utility of a source or the direction of their research, they have to consider a variety of competing narratives, and assess each to decide which is the most plausible – to ‘peel back the layers to see beyond a single authoritative voice and learn how history is constructed from fragmentary and conflicting evidence’.³ Furthermore, they are almost always required to work collaboratively in these efforts. This is an especially valuable skill to cultivate, since ‘many historians can attest that sharing is not necessarily our strongest suit’.⁴

In short, ARGs have shown themselves ideally suited to encourage in their players what Rob MacDougall terms ‘playful historical thinking’: an imaginative and flexible way of relating to the past and its study that even professional historians employ, whether or not they acknowledge it.⁵

Just as importantly, however, ARGs are also likely to be effective at enthusing players about history. By drawing them into a captivating world and narrative, and giving them a sense of agency within that narrative, the games may render their historical content more memorable, and may even make the work of a historian look more appealing.

Historians as playtesters

The history ARG is scarcely a decade old, and the games developed so far have thrown up a number of questions, both theoretical and practical, that will need to be considered as the genre matures. Perhaps the most interesting concerns the balance of creative power between ARG players and developers, or the extent to which an ARG should be a player-guided or a developer-guided experience. It is not without reason that ARG developers are often referred to as ‘puppet masters’ in the industry: their control of the game’s information, and the rate at which it is doled out, give them a dominant role in the crafting of the narrative.⁶ Such an obvious imbalance is hardly desirable in a game, however, particularly in a genre that aspires to greater player agency than most.

In the case of history ARGs in particular, concerns about historical accuracy also become relevant. When attempting to inform about real historical events, in a medium that is expected to allow for player interpretation and the possibility of alternative outcomes, what should ARG developers prioritize? How, in other words, can they avoid compromising either the educational or the entertainment value of their games?

Some history ARGs have engaged with such questions rather ingeniously, extending the genre’s ‘alternate reality’ conceit to present their stories as part of a hidden or forgotten history, concealed between the lines of recorded history. This framing device allows developers to tell a story with specific historical content, while incorporating fictional elements that make the game’s plot more compelling and grant the players greater freedom to discover the story in their own way and draw their own conclusions. As various historians working on ARGs have pointed out, moreover, all forms of history leave this sort of interpretive space; historical games merely make it more visible.

There are a variety of other questions of less theoretical import: the relationship between ARGs and other physical history-themed games, such as reenactments or the increasingly popular ‘escape the room’ activities; the extent to which history ARGs can be replayed; whether their online components damage their verisimilitude (the inclusion of patently digital ‘Civil War’ documents in The Jewel of the Valleys, for instance, was less than convincing); and whether there are limits to the type of historical topics that can be presented in the ARG format.

The shape of things to come

These concerns in no way detract from the considerable, and as yet largely untested, advantages of teaching history through ARGs. The genre has great potential for informing and enthusing non-academic audiences about history, and is continually developing in ambition, complexity and self-reflexivity. Its theoretical foundation and creative limits need to be more clearly defined, but this will be possible only if historians engage with the medium in greater numbers. The ARG is a fascinating sign of the direction in which history learning may develop, and historians have the chance to be at the forefront.

This is a (slightly revised) version of a post I wrote for History to the Public in 2016. The completionists among you can give the original a read here.

‘This Is Not a Game: Rise of the ARG’, GamesTM, May 2013, 90. ^[return]
Jane McGonigal, ‘This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century’ (PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2006), https://janemcgonigal.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/mcgonigal_this_might_be_a_game_sm-1.pdf. ^[return]
Timothy J. Compeau, ‘Tecumseh Lies Here’, Timothy J. Compeau (blog), 29 June 2015, https://timcompeau.com/public-history/gaming/. ^[return]
Adriana Ayers, ‘Tecumseh Lies Here’, Active History (blog), 2 May 2012, http://activehistory.ca/2012/05/tecumseh-lies-here/. ^[return]
Rob MacDougall, ‘Playful Historical Thinking’, Rob MacDougall (blog), 8 March 2010, http://www.robmacdougall.org/blog/2010/03/playful-historical-thinking/. ^[return]
Jane McGonigal, ‘The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real-World, Mission Based Gaming’, in Second Person, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 251–65. ^[return]

Book Review: Playing with the Past, edited by M. W. Kapell and A. B. R. Elliott

[Simon Coll] — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, eds., Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013) (Website/Google Books)

For a lifelong fan of video games who has more recently developed a sideline as a historian, the chance to review this book was too good to pass up. As its title suggests, Playing with the Past brings together a collection of essays on the ways in which games present, discuss and promote understanding of historical topics, from the joint perspectives of ‘narratology’ (that is, a focus on story) and ‘ludology’ (the analysis of gameplay).

While not itself a work of popular history, therefore, the book explores a medium that has enormous potential to popularize historical events and processes – and, more importantly, to encourage a mode of historical thinking more sophisticated than anything games are usually given credit for. The editors elaborate on this in their introduction, citing in particular Sam Wineburg’s research on the use of games to enhance learning in schools. According to Wineburg, the main difference between the historical outlook of school students and that of historians lies not in their level of knowledge, but in their understanding of the nature of history:

For the students, history is what is written in the textbook, where ‘facts’ are presented free of bias. For the historians, historical inquiry is a system.… It is a way of knowing based on using specific evidence to support claims rather than trying to establish a set of facts that exist without bias. (p. 15)

The transition from the former mindset to the latter is one familiar to students of history at any level from undergraduate onwards. From relatively uncritical faith in the authority of history as presented in textbooks and historians’ narratives, they are required to progress to an appreciation of history as process, unfolding as a result of a series of decisions and turning points – which, crucially, could have had different outcomes.

This is what Kapell and Elliot mean when they refer to ‘historical contingency’, that sense of the dependency and fragility of historical events that is especially important to an understanding of why they occur. They argue that a major advantage of video games, and one that allows them to serve as an educational tool even inadvertently, is that they encourage players to understand, and indeed exploit, this idea of contingency in order to succeed. Most of the contributions to this volume focus on analysing the ways in which different games attempt this.

Within this overall goal, however, this study incorporates an impressive variety of perspectives and debates. The book is organized thematically, with each of its five sections exploring a different way in which history and video games intersect. These sections include an examination of causation, teleology and other concepts related to the process of history (Part One); a survey of games confronting questions of Western cultural bias and politics of representation (Parts Two and Four); as well as more unusual angles, such as a collection of essays on the issues raised by modding and user-generated content (Part Three); and a section on counterfactual historical scenarios and the ways in which they reflect the social and political concerns of the present (Part Five).

The games investigated in these sections also cover a surprisingly wide range, moving beyond explicitly historical games (such as Civilization, Age of Empires or the Total War series) to more intriguing choices (including the Fallout and Resident Evil games). Standout chapters include Josef Köstlbauer’s study of simulation games, Tom Apperley’s discussion of mods as an expression of ‘counterfactual imagination’, Hyuk-Chan Kwon’s contribution on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms RPG series in China, and Joseph A. November’s and Tom Cutterham’s essays on the Fallout games.

Equally importantly, the essays in this book also take into account the peculiarities of video games as a medium – that is, as products that are played, and whose interactivity is key to their significance. It is this ‘ludic’ quality of games above all that makes them particularly well suited to popularizing the idea of historical contingency, and rendering it comprehensible on an almost instinctive level.

Games are distinguished from other forms of narrative or historical exploration by the agency that they grant their players, which allows them to influence the outcome, or at least the details, of the plot. In choosing one action, or trying to bring about one outcome, over another, players automatically engage in a decision-making process that hinges on an appreciation of all the relevant chains of cause and consequence. By presenting this process within a historical scenario (either real or imagined), games encourage players to apply their knowledge of these causal relationships to their view of history. This applies, moreover, even to those games without an explicit educational remit – as the inclusion of titles such as Resident Evil and Call of Duty in this volume illustrates. This ludic strand of the book’s approach is especially apparent in Part Three, as well as those chapters (such as Rebecca Mir’s and Trevor Owens’ contribution on Sid Meier’s Colonization) that unpick the ways in which a particular game’s expectations or victory conditions reflect the cultural and historical assumptions of its designers.

Since it is undoubtedly true that more people play video games than will ever dedicate themselves to an in-depth and critical study of history (and this is certainly no bad thing), Playing with the Past is a profoundly important, as well as entertaining, investigation into the hidden depths of the medium. As such, it is enthusiastically recommended.

This is a (slightly revised) version of a review I wrote for History to the Public in 2015. If you’re sorry this post is over, feel free to read the original here.

Not (Just) a Parlour Game

[Simon Coll] — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The classic examples roll off the tongue easily, crystallized into cliché by decades of pop culture exposure. What if Nazi Germany had won the Second World War? What if the Spanish Armada had not failed in 1588? What if the Confederacy had triumphed in the US Civil War in the 1860s? What if President Kennedy had avoided those fateful shots in November 1963? What sort of worlds would have resulted from such dramatic changes to established history – and, more intriguingly, would they have been better or worse than our own? This form of speculation is widespread and virtually irresistible. Almost everyone indulges in imagining particular turning points in history or in their own lives, ‘one moment when all was held in a balance ready to fall to one side or the other’,¹ and in wondering what might have been if events had played out differently.

This mode of thought goes by a variety of names, some of which depend on the forum in which it is practised. In fiction, it is frequently referred to as alternate history, allohistory² or, occasionally, uchronia (a closely related genre, from the French uchronie, meaning ‘no-time’). In Alan Bennett’s acclaimed play (and later film) The History Boys, it is described as ‘subjunctive history’. In its academic form, however, it has come to be known as counterfactual history, and it is under this name that the concept is being developed into an increasingly refined and useful tool for historical analysis.

Coming in from the cold

As a branch of academic history, counterfactual history is believed to have been practised since Ancient Greece or earlier,³ while one of the first authors in the modern field was no less illustrious a figure than Winston Churchill. Despite this pedigree, however, counterfactual history has remained confined to the margins of scholarship, with most historians, including famously E. H. Carr, dismissing it as a ‘parlour game’ and unhistorical ‘red herring’.⁴ The two most significant texts in the discipline until recently – Alexander Demandt’s Ungeschehene Geschichte (literally, ‘Un-happened History’, first published in 1984)⁵ and Niall Ferguson’s edited volume Virtual History (first published in 1997)⁶ – were both insightful scholarly works, yet neither made any real impact in the academic world at the time of their original publication.⁷

It is only over the last decade or so that the field has begun to attract greater interest and respect. This is reflected in the growing number of publications, conferences and workshops devoted to it, one of the most interesting being the establishment of an ongoing counterfactual reasoning research project at the University of Konstanz in 2012. It is unclear whether this increased attention is due primarily to Westerners’ mounting anxiety in an uncertain post-9/11 world, as Roland Wenzlhuemer suggests.⁷ Regardless, it is certainly a positive development, as counterfactual reasoning has several unique qualities that lead it to deserve wider historical application.

Making contingency concrete

Most fundamentally, the use of counterfactuals allows historians to acquire a more sophisticated appreciation for the contingency of most historical developments. Contingency can be defined as the inherent fragility and unpredictability of events: a single event is the product of a host of different factors and influences, any one of which could, if changed or prevented, alter the event in unforeseeable ways. As Richard Ned Lebow makes clear, this is an understanding that all historians need to gain one way or another, as ‘the contingency of our world should be self-evident to any serious reader of history’.⁸

The fact that this concept is so commonplace has led some researchers, such as Martin Bunzl, to argue that counterfactual claims are ‘implicit in every causal assertion’, and therefore ‘not as easy to avoid in the practice of history as one might think’.⁹ This is echoed by Naomi R. Lamoreaux, who summarizes the point rather neatly: ‘all historical arguments by their very nature imply that history would have turned out differently if the events or factors singled out for emphasis did not occur’. Crucially, however, she goes on to suggest that such arguments would be strengthened by a more explicit and supported exploration of these implied alternatives.¹⁰ It is this more overt articulation of alternative possibilities that counterfactuals offer, and which in turn forces historians to confront the notion of contingency more directly.

Refining the theory

Second, the field is becoming steadily more intellectually rigorous as more researchers are drawn to it. Many of the more frequent criticisms levelled at the use of counterfactual history have in fact already been addressed by its practitioners, who have fashioned it into a far more versatile discipline than is supposed by the wider academic community. Scholars such as Bunzl have developed clear and practical criteria for distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ counterfactual reasoning, with the latter encompassing much of the rampant, unfounded imaginings and ‘analytical naiveté’ so damaging to the field’s reputation.¹¹

‘Good’ counterfactual arguments, on the other hand, are those whose turning points ‘can be grounded’ and supported with evidence, as in any other form of history. Naturally, given the nature of counterfactuals, this is usually ‘indirect’ evidence: the turning point might be tested against physical laws, knowledge of the time and place in question, or more abstract ‘considerations of rationality’. This process involves some measure of imagination, but an imagination anchored by a rational, evidence-based evaluation of how historical actors at the time perceived their options and priorities. The value of the counterfactual therefore hinges on the quality of this evaluation. Bunzl points out that various other fields of historical practice (such as oral or biographical history) rely on equally ‘informal methods’, and sees no reason why counterfactual history should be held to account any more strictly than these.¹²

Along similar lines, Bunzl presents a means of judging the plausibility of a counterfactual, stressing that the likelihood of both the turning point (the ‘antecedent’) and its consequences should be examined.¹³ As a caveat to this argument, however, he also points out that ‘not all historically interesting counterfactuals need to be plausible’ – that is, certain counterfactual scenarios have an appeal and a value that extends beyond the need for their turning points to be at all probable. If a historian’s main interest is in assessing the impact of a particular event, for instance, exploring the consequences of its alternatives is more important than whether those alternatives were likely to happen.¹⁴ What matter, as in any form of historical inquiry, are the relevance of the method to the research questions, and the quality of the analysis that follows.

Enhancing the wider discipline

Even on this latter point, counterfactuals have a lot to offer more mainstream historical study. Scholars such as Lamoreaux have advanced the idea that counterfactual reasoning helps to make historical judgements in general more robust, by encouraging a ‘a mode of thinking that is constantly seeking out alternative ways of making sense of the evidence, as well as methods for deciding which alternative is most likely to be correct.’¹⁵ Lebow makes a related point when arguing in favour of counterfactuals as a way of ‘providing distance from our world’, thereby allowing us to analyse it more scrupulously.¹⁶ All historians, whether or not they engage with counterfactuals, rely on such analytical skills; counterfactuals are, however, an especially efficient way of honing them.

This point is illustrated even by those more critical of counterfactual arguments. Randall Collins (rightly) objects to the bulk of counterfactuals as crude simplifications of causality, arguing that an appreciation of more complex and diffuse processes of historical change is vital to any accurate understanding of why certain events took place. He demonstrates this, however, by dissecting several counterfactual assertions (the idea that a Nazi invasion of Britain in 1940 would have led to a thousand-year Reich, the idea that a Confederate victory in the US Civil War would have preserved slavery in America to this day, and so on), and it is through this dissection that he arrives at a more complete picture of the network of causes and influences that led things to develop as they did.¹⁷ He determines that counterfactuals can indeed serve as a useful tool for ‘sharpen[ing] our understanding of the processes of historical change’ – provided they are not simply taken at face value.¹⁸ By incorporating counterfactuals into a broader range of research projects, therefore, and by considering a wider variety of alternatives against the evidence as a result, we may either come to a more considered understanding of why events unfolded as they did, or even discover that some of our assumptions about the past are wrong. In either case, the practice of history is much enriched by the additional effort.

In short, as Charlotte Nettleship concludes in her overview of the discipline: ‘counterfactual history is more than just a fun exercise – it can reveal how important certain people and events were in history, and, taken seriously, you can really begin to appreciate how history happens. Although it is kind of fun too!’ Such a gratifying blend of enjoyment and intellectual depth brings out the best in historical study, and historians of all hues – whether SF fans or no – are encouraged to give it a try.

This is a (slightly revised) version of a post I wrote for History to the Public in 2015. The completionists among you can give the original a read here.

Interested readers could also do much worse than visit The Counterfactual History Review, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s blog discussing instances of counterfactual reasoning in the academic, cultural and political spheres. Rosenfeld’s examples, particularly the political ones, show how surprisingly prevalent this sort of reasoning is, as well as how casually or superficially it is often employed.

Randall Collins, ‘Turning Points, Bottlenecks, and the Fallacies of Counterfactual History’, Sociological Forum 22, no. 3 (2007): 247–69, 248–50, 265–68, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1573-7861.2007.00030.x. ^[return]
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, ‘What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel’, American Studies 50, no. ¾ (2009): 63–83. ^[return]
Schneider-Mayerson, ‘What Almost Was’, 63. ^[return]
E H Carr, What Is History?, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 97–98. ^[return]
Alexander Demandt, Ungeschehene Geschichte. Ein Traktat über die Frage: Was wäre geschehen, wenn…?, 5th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). ^[return]
Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Penguin, 2011). ^[return]
Roland Wenzelhuemer, ‘Editorial: Unpredictability, Contingency and Counterfactuals’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 34, no. 2 (2009): 9–15, 10–12, https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.34.2009.2.9-15. ^[return]
Richard Ned Lebow, ‘Counterfactuals, History and Fiction’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 34, no. 2 (2009): 57–73, 66, https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.34.2009.2.57-73. ^[return]
Martin Bunzl, ‘Counterfactual History: A User’s Guide’, American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): 845–58, 845, 855, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.3.845. ^[return]
Naomi R. Lamoreaux, ‘Taking Counterfactual History Seriously’, California History 89, no. 1 (2011): 39–50, 70–71, 39–40, https://doi.org/10.2307/23215290. ^[return]
Bunzl, ‘Counterfactual History’, 847; Collins, ‘Turning Points’, 250–56. ^[return]
Bunzl, ‘Counterfactual History’, 845, 852–54. ^[return]
Bunzl, ‘Counterfactual History’, 848. ^[return]
Bunzl, ‘Counterfactual History’, 857. ^[return]
Lamoreaux, ‘Taking Counterfactual History Seriously’, 50. ^[return]
Lebow, ‘Counterfactuals, History and Fiction’, 67. ^[return]
Collins, ‘Turning Points’, 252. ^[return]
Collins, ‘Turning Points’, 265. ^[return]