Why Historical?
I love history. Been learning it all my life, since 6 month old me was read “A Study of History” by my graduate-school attending father. You should ask Mo about our trips together, and how I have to stop and read every historical plaque and see every historical landmark and go to every historical recreation and read every book on the history of wherever we’re visiting. She puts up with it well, but even she gets short on patience sometimes because my love of history is consuming.
It’ll be no shock, considering the context, that I also love RPGs. So you’d think it would be chocolate and peanut butter when the two go together, right? That I’d be constantly up to my eyeballs in historical RPG play and all of it would rock and all of it would roll. And yet I’d say less than 20% of my RPGing history has been playing historical games, and of that very little of it stands among my best moments in gaming. Don’t get me wrong, many of them were fun — but when asked about my top five game experiences I find myself thinking of things like Exalted and Dogs and Changeling, and not my Dark Ages or Persian Empire games. (Only my last full campaign of Pendragon, which was as much Romance as History, meets the high water mark.)
Despite this I still have a deep and abiding love for historical gaming, or at least the idea of historical gaming. I’ve also worked on a few quasi-historical games. Suryamaya, which should be out this year, is not a historical game – but is very much based on Indian history and mythology. I’m also currently being asked to look at doing a Sassanid Persian Empire game using RuneQuest OGL. Furthermore, whenever I think about my game The Wounded Lion I always think of it in terms of historical settings. Because of that, and my mixed history with it, I wanted to take a look at some of the agendas, goals, and ideas that go into playing various types of historical games and why we would, or would not, want to play them.
Reasons Why We Like (or Dislike) Historical Games
– Paul Elliott from the Historical RPGs mailing list
- In order to feel like you are there, as part of the history
- Playing the “what if” game. As in “what if the Romans had gunpowder” or “what if Ceasar had invaded Persia”
- Having a reason to do research, especially a reason to do joint research with friends
- Because history can give a game a “realistic” grounding that helps in the suspension of disbelief and acts as a catalyst to creativity and imagination.
- Fetishization of history, the more scholarly form of using, say, Superhero RPGs as a reason to argue about if Spiderman could whup the Flash.
- History makes a powerful tool to comment about the present through allegory or metaphor, even if you aren’t really talking about the history as fact (see any movie about Rome made in America)
- History taken factually and faced on its own makes a powerful tool for confronting, supporting, and generally playing with our notions of ourselves, our past, and our place in the world
- The massive research and books form pretty tourist books to deep scholarly works gives a deep, rich, and easily accessed wealth of material for setting. It’s also a setting that your players may already know something about and have emotional investment in. (Alternately, it could be one that they have even less interest in than something featuring elven-vulcan halfbreeds, depending on their relationship to history.)
It’s also worth noting that almost all of the above can be taken in different modes: form the intellectual strategy of the war-game “what if” to the emotional escapism of immersing in Victorian melodrama – or the reverse cognitive appreciation for the forms of French Romanticism to the deep emotional resonance of Roman what ifs.
This list is hardly definitive, its just what I came up with in reflecting on my own history and after reading essays and posts on the subjects by such field luminaries as Paul Elliott, Mark Galeotti, and John Carnahan. If you’ve items to add, or disputes with the listed items, then by all means post them to the comments!
So I’m going to stop there for now, because I want feedback on what I’ve said – especially on anything I’ve missed – before I continue on with my theorizing.
Hmm…
I hadn’t really thought about this before, but… It seems to me that there are actually some really interesting similarities. I don’t know that this is going to be coherent, but I’ll toss it out there as food for thought.
Whenever we use historical material we reinterpret it as we use it. Sometimes we reinterpret it up front, and sometimes as we encounter it. Stuff like “Dude, the feedubg christians to lions thing is barbaric!” is an interpretation in the sense I’m talking about. We ascribe meaning to historical stuff.
The same thing is true of fantasy stuff, really, right? I mean, we ascribe meaning in the same way “Tolkien’s elves are arrogant twits” is an interpretation.
It seems that the advantage of fantasy worlds is that they let you shape things intentionally. You can say “I really want an element that lets me deal with X, I’ll make one up.” The advantage of history is that it makes you interpret things you might not have otherwise, “Man, I was doing some research for the game, and did you know … That’s an atrocity!”
Like I said, not sure wheer I’m going with that, but maybe you’ll find it interesting.
(Also note that I still can’t comment without being logged in, and your comment feed isn’t updating properly…)
Thomas
And meaning being ascribed to things that really happened, rather than things that are fully symbolic, changes the meaning and interpretation of meaning how, philosophy boy?
Seriously, what is the difference to you as a player if you are saying something about Tolkien\’s elves in an era of unwise leadership, or saying something about the Roman and Persian empires in an age when the West is invading Iran again? What types of statements, interpretations, and personal issues are you going to find more avaliable in one over the other?
As for the logging in thing, I don\’t have people set to have to be cleared anymore — but I only changed that today. We\’ll see how that shakes out. The Comment Feed, however, is working fine for me from multiple different computers on multiple different connections. Have you updated it since I installed threaded comments? What programs are you using?
Brand,
Still having to log in to comment, I think I’ve resolved the feed problem on my end, I’ll let you know.
On to your question, I’m not sure that there is a categorical difference between fantasy and historical play. I think Josh touched on it below: it’s about depth. History is vastly more complex than even the most comprehensive fantasy world. I think that’s the draw for me.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read some of the hardcore discussions in popular fandom regarding continuity and fantasy “history”, but in many ways they look a lot like discussions of actual history (but with more conjecture, since there are fewer and less varied sources from which to obtain new information).
I think history has two things going for it: 1) it is inherently human, and we recognize some of the oddities in it, and 2) it is generally a ahared reference. Consider how complex Middle Earth is, but then consider that the vast majority of society doesn’t really think much about it or even have opinions about it. Compare that with (say) Rome. At least in the West, everyone has an opinion about Rome. It may be based on misconception, but it provides a starting point from which shared context can be generated.
Which raises the question: is there a difference between fantasy settings and historical settings that are relatively unknown (say colonial Polynesia)? And other than variety of sources on the subject (there will almost always be way more people presenting way more viewpoints on any historical thing as on a fantasy thing), I’m not sure there is. Do you think differently? I’d be interested to find out!
Thomas
I think the answer to your final question must be contextual Thomas. Are any of your players Hawaiian? Have they studied the period? Is it your baby, or theirs? (This last point is an important one, and one that I have seen doom many a historical game to doom.)
I answer this way because I’ve played games in settings like medieval Tamil Nadu — which to many people may as well be a low-FX fantasy setting. But considering I had a player in the group who was from Sri Lanka the question of the Tamil kingdoms was anything but distant.
Also, I agree about the way folks discuss deeper settings like history — in almost every way. For some both will get disucssed based on a central authority: I’ve seen many historical games that take the tact of positivist and definite history, just as I’ve seen the canon arguments from Exalted fans, and I’ve seen historical games that do the interpretive and subjective thing, just as I’ve usually done when playing in a canon setting.
However, even then I’m going to say that for some people there isn’t a difference — if it doesn’t matter to you if you’re playing in the kingdom of the Cholas or the land of the New Sun, then there isn’t a difference. But as some people do care, for them there is. Figuring out what that difference may be is what I’m after.
Its much like the question of why you would write an historical novel when you could write a fantasy novel, I suppose.
(Oh, and Mo brought up one reason that she puts up with my historical games despite the fact she’s not a big history buff — she learns from them. After a game of Exalted she knows about some imaginary world, after my India game she knows about the Guptan dynasty and how they formed the fabric of culture that continues to inform modern India.)
Mo’s spot on. I was going to say something similar actually. I mean, sure knowing a lot about Exalted’s setting will matter if you’re in a group of people playing Exalted. But knowing about the impact of the Chola empire on southeast Asia is going to matter for a lot more people.
Other than that, I think that there’s a strong similarity between the “history/fantasy” dichotemy and the “fiction/nonfiction” dichotemy. That is, there’s a strong sense that one matters more than the other because it “really happened to real people just like you” instead of “well, it’s possible that it might have happened, and these characters are very people-like”.
So, yes it matters, but I think it may matter for artificial reasons… maybe… possibly…
Thomas
Fiction/Non-Fiction in literature: the easy way to describe this is that they have different strengths for speaking to different things. Fiction often, for various reasons, has an easier time speaking to emotional truths and revelations while non fiction dominates in more pragmatic areas.
I do think there is a similar thing going on in historical/non-historical games and their import. It’s especially important to the divide between points six and seven, especially in the context of Paul’s quote — Hollywood uses history as fiction, where Paul wants to use history as fact.
I like Historical Gaming for its context — whereas in other games I enjoy the free creation of context, historical gaming gives me leave to enjoy free play with context. I get to juxtapose Ben Franklin, the Sons of Liberty, and the lead-up to the Revolutionary War in whichever way I like, and all the bits and pieces that I manipulate come with all sorts of associations and entailments that make it entertaining and give the experience depth.
Ditto on the logging in to comment thing.
Josh,
Cool. So you like the pre-established depth angle? Or the birth of idealogy angle?
Cause you can do a lot of that with fantasy settings with lots of built in detail. Like, say, Ptolus. Why go historical over Ptolus?