What do you think about the use of historical video games as a tool for education?

You can see my long-winded comments in the two threads that /r/LukeIntheSkyWith linked to. My basic take is that most games that wear history as a plot are typically pretty bad versions of history and are of very minor value from an educational standpoint. Education is rarely the goal of any of these endeavors, anyway.

A broader question to ask is, how could games get developed that were better at this sort of thing? I've been reading Casey O'Donnell's Developer's Dilemma (MIT Press, 2014), which is by far the most stimulating thing I've read on thinking about how to go about making games and the issues that come up (I have found other writing on the subject, e.g., Bogost, not very useful). O'Donnell's book is an ethnography of video game companies — he's an anthropologist who was allowed to sit in on the development of several games in both the US and India. The major "dilemma" he identifies is that the creation of a game, similar to the creation of a feature film, combines several very different types of expertise. You have the programmers, which is what most people identify with game development, but even these come in several different "flavors" (consider the difference between the people who are trying to program NPC AI versus the people who are programming the graphics engine). There are the artists, who also come in several different flavors (including technical artists who are sort of half-artists, half-engineers). There are the writers and story people, there are the "designers" who serve a role analogous to the director or producer, there are the marketing people, the money people, the company big-wigs, etc. And the final game is some unholy amalgamation of the interests, needs, and worlds of each of these groups. Quite a lot of game dysfunction comes when these things are out of whack in one way or another, and O'Donnell discusses several ways in which these different "cultures" can be coordinated in ways that stress their strengths and don't lead to total breakdown/miscommunication/loathing.

Anyway. It has gotten me thinking a lot about where a historian would fit into such a mix — because that's a whole other level of expertise, one typically not found in game arrangements. Even with films or television shows set in a historical period, historians tend to be outside consultants brought in to aid the writers, as opposed to people taking a more active role in the overall creation. This typically works poorly even in films, where the script presumably matters more than it does in a game (given how much of "the game" is about game dynamics, and how much the "plot" is sort of just a dressing for that in many cases). It is interesting to contemplate other models for development (which might be entirely incompatible, I would gladly acknowledge, with the maximally-for-profit approaches of AAA games; I am imagining this to be more of a niche market, though not exclusively an "educational" market). As an aside, I am hoping that next spring (2018) I will co-teach a game development course with a colleague who is an actual game developer, not quite with a strictly "historical" goal in mind (the subject will be nuclear risk), but as an experiment in multi-disciplinary game collaboration (and pedagogy).