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Honors Class at WIU Introduces Video Game Technology to the History Classroom

January 27, 2023

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MACOMB, IL – A new history course, offered through Western Illinois University's Centennial Honors College, is getting students involved in the University's new Digital Recreation Center, and incorporating building and playing historically-based video games into classroom lessons.

WIU Department of History Chair Tim Roberts designed and teaches the class, "Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach and Make History." He hopes the class will reflect how digital technology is shaping the humanities at WIU. Thirteen Honors students are enrolled in the class; however, none of them are history majors.

"I knew I had to up my game because I can't assume these students like history," said Roberts. "I have to prove studying the past should matter to digital natives."

Assignments for the class can be done on students' personal devices, or in the University's Digital Recreation Center, which opened in Fall 2021. The space, considered the largest eSports facility in the Midwest, offers a variety of technological options for students from computing to video gaming to virtual reality systems.

Throughout the class, students will be analyzing a variety of historical video games that will require them to research traditional historical sources and events. One game asks students to role play a character in a reenactment of a historical trial and to use historically-accurate arguments to participate.

"I'm hoping to explode the notion that history is inevitable," said Roberts. "Interactive, history-based games offer novel ways to explore fundamental historical concepts: cause-and-effect, bias, contingency and human agency."

Students were taken to the Digital Recreation Center for an orientation session on the available technology.

Roberts became interested in incorporating video gaming into course work when studying for a graduate certificate in the digital humanities and public history through a program offered by George Mason University and the Smithsonian Institution. It was through that work that he was introduced to Twine digital story-telling software.

Roberts assigns a Twine game he created, in which students, as President Abraham Lincoln, are presented with various Civil War-era evidence concerning emancipating people held as slaves. Students may follow Lincoln's footsteps, or adopt a different strategy. The program development was helped by the summer stipend program through the WIU Foundation and the Office of Sponsored Projects.

Roberts is also working with teachers of Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History, showing them how to use the Twine program in the classroom.

For more information about the WIU Department of History, visit wiu.edu/history. For more information about the Centennial Honors College, visit wiu.edu/honors.

Posted By: Jodi Pospeschil (JK-Pospeschil@wiu.edu)
Office of University Communications & Marketing