Book Review: Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games
Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games. Edited by Patrick A. Lewis and James Hill Welborn III. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2024. Paperback, 356 pp. $40.00.
Reviewed by Jonathan W. Peters
The American Civil War has been recounted through various mediums. During and after the war, participants recorded their thoughts on paper through letters, diaries, books, and newspaper articles. Photographers and artists likewise produced visual depictions. Soldiers soon placed monuments on the historic landscapes and donated artifacts to archives and museums. Aging veterans marched in parades and traveled to reunions to retell their deeds. Inspired by these eyewitness accounts, succeeding generations portrayed the war through poetry, fiction, biographies, histories, lectures, exhibits, tours, reenactments, documentaries, movies, paintings, toys, t-shirts, and tabletop war games. Out of the latter grew Civil War video games, the subject of fifteen essays contained in Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games, and edited by Patrick A. Lewis and James Hill Welborn III.
As readers of this book discover, developers created primitive games in the late 1980s which tended to focus on tactical battles and grand strategies (Gettysburg: The Turning Point, Decisive Battles of the American Civil War, and North & South). Turned-based games became firmly established in the 1990s with John Tiller’s Battleground series (1995-1999), Sierra’s Robert E. Lee: Civil War General (1996), and Civil War Generals 2 (1997). Sid Meier enhanced battle simulations by developing real-time Civil War games such as Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! (1997) and Sid Meier’s Antietam! (1999). Tactical and strategic games continued into the twenty-first century with Forge of Freedom: The American Civil War (2006), Ironclads: American Civil War (2009), Civil War II (2013), Ironclads 2: American Civil War (2015), Ultimate General: Civil War (2016), and Grand Tactician: The Civil War 1861-1865 (2021). However, developers also took on the genre of first-person shooters in games like The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided (2006), Civil War: Secret Missions (2008), Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (2009), and War of Rights (2018).
These games (and others unlisted) sought to provide entertaining virtual worlds where players could engage in historical fiction or counterfactual history according to the rules set by the developers. To give the games greater authenticity, developers researched historical maps, photographs, building surveys, tactical manuals, and other primary and secondary resources. Some even walked modern battlefields and viewed satellite images. Fan-based programmers also created “mods” (modified digital files) to enhance historical accuracy.
The authors of the essays in Playing at War evaluate these games through the prism of critical memory studies, and as such (to use the words of Wilfred McClay), go beyond:
debunking . . . popular misrenderings of the past. . . . [They] tend . . . to carry the matter much further, treating collective memory as a construction of reality rather than a more or less accurate reflection of it. Scholars in [this] field examine memory with a highly political eye, viewing nearly all claims for tradition or a heroic past as flimsy artifices designed to serve the interests of dominant classes and individuals, and otherwise tending to reflect the class, gender, and power relations in which those individuals are embedded.[1]
Therefore, Civil War video games that do not center African-Americans, Indigenous people, women, slavery, and colonialism are said to be advancing white, male supremacist politics. Many readers would contest such a claim, while still appreciating the book’s critiques about the historical imperfections found in these games. Some may also wish that LSU Press had included screenshots from the games under review, and omitted The Oregon Trail (1971, 1975), Freedom! (1992), and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), as the settings for these games take place outside the 1861-1865 time-frame.
Nevertheless, Playing at War provides a fascinating study of Civil War video games. Many reading this book may come to the conclusion that some historical material is not appropriate for depiction in a “Nintendoized” kind of way (134, 140-145, 208-209), especially in a society today which has struggles with dehumanization. Other mediums might still be best for learning about the past in a more conducive and comprehensive manner.
[1] Wilfred M. McClay, “The Claims of Memory,” First Things (January 2022): https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/01/the-claims-of-memory.
Jonathan W. Peters serves as an administrative assistant at Reformation Bible Church and Harford Christian School in Darlington, Maryland. He was interviewed in PCN’s Battlefield Pennsylvania: The Battle of White Marsh (2019), and he transcribed and edited Our Comfort in Dying: Civil War Sermons by R. L. Dabney, Stonewall Jackson’s Chief-of Staff (Sola Fide Publications, 2021).
Wow…I remember playing the Gettysburg board game in the 60’s in fact I still have it. Did not know I was engaging in white supremacy as a 14 year old. This book is just part of the modern movement to classify all American history as racist and propaganda for white supremacy. I think it is bulls*!&.
Oh man, way too much of my life went to Civil War Generals 2. Excited to read this at some point.
I fondly remember playing the Civil War games from SSI on my Commodore 64 in the 80s. I had fun refighting Antietam, Gettysburg and Shiloh over and over. Didn’t realize I was practicing white supremacy though, I figured it was just some fun play.
I played a lot of these games. Battleground: Shiloh in particular got me into the battle. Civil War Generals 2 had a great scenario creator.
I will say the book talking about identity is odd since these are games about war but all ideas that purport to explain everything will intrude into everything. But it does get tiresome and makes many academic works seem contrived rather than illuminating.
The authors appear to be of that school of historians who think everyone’s study of the war should follow a diversity checklist and if you don’t you’re somehow either a bad person (racist, sexist) or a troglodyte. Anyway, I wouldn’t consider playing a video game as a serious way to study any subject.
So, who are the historians that contributed to this collection?
I am late in leaving my comment, but as a contributor to this book I believe the reviewer here gives Playing at War very short shrift to the intellectual arguments it makes about historical memory and the Civil War. I am also disappointed in some of the comments that emerged in response to the review, with one person ridiculously concluding that he didn’t realize playing Civil War video games meant that he was engaging in white supremacy, which Playing at War supposedly argues, rather than the book’s contents.
While space is always a limitation when writing book reviews, the aim of an effective review is to demonstrate how a book contributes to historiography and to highlight specific authors and arguments that are effective and not effective in shaping that historiography. The reviewer here does not gives any specifics about particular authors or essays that represent the essence of the book, nor does he provide a specific example of how the book advances his conclusion that Playing at War’s main argument is that “Civil War video games that do not center African-Americans, Indigenous people, women, slavery, and colonialism are said to be advancing white, male supremacist politics.” The term “white supremacy” only shows up a handful of times in the book and in most cases it is in the footnotes and not within specific chapters. The reviewer here spends nearly 200 words listing video game titles, which could have been better spent citing specific authors and arguments in the book to advance his arguments as a reviewer.
John Legg’s chapter on The Oregon Trail–which the reviewer asserts should have been omitted from Playing at War (even though the book is about the memory of the Civil War Era, not just the war years)–perfectly exemplifies a sharp, nuanced argument that is minimized by the reviewer. Legg demonstrates how the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, who created The Oregon Trail, was composed of team members who were historians and teachers; people who understood how to do historical research, use archival records, and create compelling narratives. MECC utilized top notch research methods to present the Oregon Trail in an entertaining way to students all over the country for generations, creating distinct memories and understandings of westward expansion within the context of the Civil War era. However, Legg highlights more recent scholarship on archives and power, demonstrating that archival institutions that historians have relied on to conduct research often leave out perspectives that are not necessarily reflective of the sorts of primary source documents these institutions collect. In the case of Indigenous history, Legg argues, the archival records tend to minimize or erase perspectives that might challenge the popular interpretation of the Oregon Trail that MECC perpetuated through its video game. As such, many people can nostalgically reflect on playing the video game and explain their understanding of westward expansion’s history through the lens of the game’s narrative, but they may not even consider Indigenous perspectives on the subject. Legg asks us to consider how and why this form of understanding westward expansion has come about and even cites a few more recent video games that attempt to highlight Indigenous history within the context of The Oregon Trail. He does not argue that playing Oregon Trail makes someone a white supremacist, but he argues that playing the game could distort one’s understanding of the history of westward expansion during the Civil War era. That is a far more nuanced position than what the reviewer portrays in this essay.
David Silkenat and Holly Pinheiro’s chapter on the erasure of USCT soldiers in video games is also an example of a sharp, nuanced argument that demonstrates a very fair point that 90s Civil War video games fully excluded Black soldiers from the Civil War. Does that mean players were white supremacists? Of course not, but Silkenat and Pinheiro raise fair questions about why the developers of these games chose to create narratives about the war that eliminate race, slavery, and emancipation from the Civil War.
There are other examples that could be mentioned, but I’ll leave it there. I recommend people buy the book and make their own conclusions.