I admit this is a bit of a niche question, but a podcast interview with Bret Devereoux got me thinking about it. The episode is about using video games to teach history. Bret seems to appreciate historical video games but gets frustrated when they claim to be historically accurate when they are far from it.
That got me thinking about having historical games coming with a disclaimer, along the lines of "for the purpose of gameplay mechanics, historical facts have been altered in such-and-such a way." But then I remembered that some games actually already have something like that: I remember hours spent reading the in-game encyclopedia of Age of Empires II, and poring over the companion manuals to Lords of the Realm that explained medieval warfare in depth.
Are these suplementary materials actually well-researched, informative ways of teaching history, or are they just one more way that video game devs give a veneer of historicity to their otherwise inaccurate games?
The paratext and encyclopedic texts featured in historical video games is an area of research that has only recently begun to be increasingly focused on, alongside other important themes of historical video game studies. You will therefore find a variety of different judgements depending on the video game. Most research that exists focuses on a specific example rather than to make a general judgement of all games -- which seems fair, as different approaches are taken by different studios.
To answer your question, I will use the example of the First World War FPS Battlefield 1 (2016). BF1 features a series of codex entries meant to contextualize what the player encounters in the game's single and multiplayer features. These entries are unlocked as the player progresses in the game, play different modes in the multiplayer feature, or complete specific challenges.
As Chris Kempshall has written in his article about the use of historical consultants in First World War video games, the BF1 developers did not write these encyclopedic entries themselves, but instead had YouTuber Indy Neidell of the popular The Great War YouTube channel and his research assistant write them. Due to the nature of the game as a first-person shooter, the majority of codex entries revolve specific weapons and vehicles, in some cases providing quite in-depth technical explanation surrounding the weaponry, while other times offering only a few sentences for a vehicle. Although the game gives constraints as to how long these entries can be, most are approximately one to two paragraphs.
Turning to my own research, I found that these codex entries did not offer more than a bite size chunk of historical information for a player with limited knowledge of the First World War. Indeed, there is a clear preference for information about weapons than there were about other aspects of the war. The treatment and contextualizing of colonial soldiers, something that I have written about in a separate text for Historical Games Network, is very poor (and of course, reflective of those who wrote them). There is considerably more information in the game about the C96 pistol than there is about the participation of Indian soldier during the war. While the entries bring up important topics such as racism, it is very shallow -- they will for example mention that segregation existed, but not the racist ideas that would explain why segregation existed in a military context, an important aspect if you were genuinely committed to making players learn.
The codex entries in the game are therefore of varied quality, often shallow and short unless the entry is about a specific firearm. This is not entirely surprising, and there is no doubt that the entries might (hopefully) encourage a player to pick up a book to read more about a subject they found interesting. Yet for the most part, they provide little real informative context and in some cases, especially in regards to colonial and minority soldiers, outright incorrect or otherwise passive information that are unable to do the subject justice. Simultaneously, these codex entries must be seen in the light of the BF1 developers desire to make the game both informative and fun to play. It is a noble effort and completely aligned with their desire to get people to explore the unknown parts of the First World War. One can only hope that they would turn to actual scholars in the future.
Sources:
"War collaborators: documentary and historical sources in First World War computer games" by Chris Kempshall in First World War Studies, 10:2-3, 225-244.
White Mythic Space: Racism, the First World War, and Battlefield 1 by Stefan Aguirre Quiroga (DeGruyter, 2022).