Recreating Past Worlds: An Approach to Student-Designed, Text-Based History Simulations

Jeremiah McCall

Students can exercise and develop historical skills in the course of designing their own historical simulation games. Designing a simulation that faithfully reflects a system or process in the past requires the historian’s critical skills: the ability to analyze and contextualize evidence, distinguish between the trivial and the essential, advance a defensible account of causation, and, in doing so, construct a plausible interpretation of the past. Using the freely available development tool Inform 7, students can quickly design reasonably sophisticated historical simulations in the form of games where the user interacts and perceives the world wholly through text. Inform 7, with its natural language program system makes only modest demands on the time and level of computer knowledge of students and teachers, raising the possibility that historical simulation design can become a regular part of the high school history class.