The Rest Is History - 40. History as Entertainment

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

From re-enactment to reinforcing capitalism through the board game Monopoly. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland examine the history of games and the portrayal of history in games. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. His face floods with light and relief. You have won second prize in a beauty contest. Collect £10. Monopoly, first invented as the Landlords' Game in 1903, endlessly reimagined and reinterpreted ever since. Welcome to The Rest Is History with the old Kent Road of history, Tom Holland,

and with me, Mr Mayfair, Dominic Sandbrook. Hello, Tom. You're a big Monopoly fan? What a wonderful introduction. You've won the game of the rest is history already. I have. We should stop right now. It'll be downhill from there. So today's subject is a huge one, actually, isn't it? It's history as entertainment, history as board games, video games. And I thought we'd go in first with reenactments,

because that's obviously something that you know a lot about, because you've written about it in the past. And we had a question to me from Roland Miners, who says, I seem to remember the Romans did battle reenactments as part of their games. So we're always told that the stadiums could be flooded for sea battles. And he says, was this a bit of theming for gladiators to kill each other, or was this actual reenactment of history? And I guess for as long as there's been history, Tom, people have reenacted it, right?

Yeah, well, people probably remember in Gladiator that Russell Crowe plays the part of the Carthaginians in the Battle of Zama, where the Carthaginians lost to the Romans, but in Gladiator they win, which, of course, is part of the fun of reenacting history isn't it i mean it's part of the fun of staging these is that occasionally uh you get different results so we obviously the romans would have exercised some control over that so we know for instance that after claudius conquers britain he restages his um his capture of colchester there was no question that the britains were going to win that. Obviously, the Romans had to win it. But yes, I think you do get the sense.

We know that Claudius also sponsored a great naval battle in which I think the Rhodians and the Syracusans fought each other. And I think that's a bit more like those kind of computer games where you can get the Aztecs fighting the Babylonians or something. You bring different people to fight each other. And, of course, in this style of armour that the gladiators wore, so that you had a type called the Samnite, which was a central Italian people defeated by the Romans

kind of in the 3rd century BC. And then you have Thracians, who were another kind in Northern Greece. And I think there was the sense with gladiatorial combat that it was about reminding the Romans of their own history, of their martial qualities. You know, Rome is this city

at the heart of a great peaceful empire. So people did slightly worry that they were forgetting their martial values. So there was, I think, a sense in which gladiatorial combat existed to remind the Romans of their ancient martial history. So was, I think, a sense in which gladiatorial combat existed to remind the Romans of their ancient martial history. So, yeah, I think you could count that as historical reenactment to a degree. And sort of telling history in itself is a reenactment, isn't it?

I mean, the weird thing about history is that, you know, you're sort of performing it when you retell it on the page. And there's always this issue with history. You know, we get a lot of comments on Twitter about, you know, it when you retell it on the page. And there's always this issue with history. We get a lot of comments on Twitter about to what extent is history social science or to what extent is it a kind of literary entertainment? And entertainment is kind of baked into history

from the beginning, isn't it, with Herodotus and so on. And people read that stuff because it's fun and because they want to have fun. Don't you think also, though, that baked into it is a kind of, when you read something about the past you you can feel this yearning to see it for yourself oh absolutely yeah absolutely and so you know so we talked about arthur we talked about king arthur and the round table at winchester which almost certainly was built to mark an attempt by knights under edward i to recreate um camelot and that was

something you know so that's that was a theme in tournaments throughout the middle ages was that people would come dressed as you know galahad or lancelot or whatever and it was a kind of desire to make real this world of of of romance that people believed you know had actually happened they had a sense as we do of a kind of lost world that they can never recapture. Yeah. And gamma. They think that the past is glamorous, do they? Yes. And then, of course, famously, there was an attempt to recreate the tournament in the 19th century after Queen Victoria's coronation, which lots of people felt had been rather drab. And they got rid of this kind of tradition where the champion of the queen comes in and challenges someone to single combat if they're not going to accept her as queen.

And so the Duke of Eglinton set up this tournament in Ayesha, which, of course, it rained. Of course. So it was all in the absolute kind of washout. But that's kind of brilliant, that whole kind victorian strain of cod medievalism yeah which was hugely influential on architecture and all kinds of things but it was you know they they did actually try and stage a tournament and i guess that that is absolutely something that goes into the 20th century because of course the more that you have a consumer society the more you have money that you can spend on recreating this kind of stuff the more people do it yes and i suppose there's a i remember

having a conversation once with a guy called ian mortimer who writes these books called the time travelers um guide to a particular period and he'll write about history as though it's a guidebook you know this is where you stay this is where you eat and it was about the question about history as entertainment and sometimes it's easy to forget i think when you're a sort of academic historian um engaged in historiographical arguments with your peers that actually the reason people get into history and the reason actually people are listening to this podcast is because they is because it's fun it's because there's something you're saying this podcast is fun well i think I think I'm having fun anyway, even if nobody else is.

But, you know, there's that sense that you're interested in history, not just because it's instructive. I mean, we've done a whole podcast about the lessons of history, but because, as you said, there is this sort of insatiable, I mean, literally insatiable yearning to see people who've been before us and to see their world that we can never that is completely out of reach and that's why people will always do these kind of reenactments and things but when it comes to reenactment there is actually a kind of border zone isn't it where it becomes a living history and people will say that um if you want to understand something you

actually have to experience it so i yeah about years ago, talking on the subject of medieval tournaments and recreating them, I find generally when you go to, they recreate them at National Trust. I find incredibly dull because they're just staged. But about five years ago, I went to,

I think it's officially called Medieval Warfare or something. It's kind of like a sport. And they staged it at this castle, Belmonte, in La Mancha, in the middle of Spain, which is where they filmed El Cid, the Charlton Heston film. Yeah. And they have this huge international tournament.

It's kind of like the World Cup. They had teams from America and Britain and Germany, all around the world. And I thought it was going to, again, be really dull. It was brilliant. It was absolutely fantastic. So the rules are that they have a kind of like a football pitch, I guess, and you're not allowed to go outside the football pitch.

And you map up, you know, one-on-one, five-on-five. The climax was 100-on-100. 100 people. That's like, that's a proper battle. Oh, it was really really great it's one of the all great sporting events that i've ever been to and the rule is essentially that you can smack anyone around the head you like you know you don't have a sword you don't have anything sharp but you have kind of blunt axes or maces or whatever and you can just smack people

and as long as they are on two feet, the battle continues. The moment they touch anything else, say with their hand or their elbow or their head or whatever, then they're out. And it was amazing. And the argument for this being educational

was that the better your armour, the better you are able to stand up. So I spoke to the captain of the German team who, I think he was a travel agent, but in his spare time, he'd go around chapels and churches all round Germany looking at effigies of knights in armour. Looking for tips. It was such fun. But also the other brilliant thing about that was that it was also very, very political. Because I think that this sport had been begun by the Russians. And the Russians were apparently rather aggressive.

And so they'd been frozen out by all the other countries. In fact, I think some of the people who were involved in that then went on to take part in the invasion of Crimea. That's interesting yeah which is itself a kind of reenactment of czarist glory you know i mean to what extent politicians is boris johnson a kind of churchill reenactment act i mean uh that's i suppose you can argue reenactment is baked into politics itself but But on the politics, that's a really interesting thing because have you ever been to this place in France called Puy-du-Fou,

which is one of Europe's most popular theme parks, which is all about history? No, I've been to the Asterix Park. I've never been to the Asterix Park, but the Puy-du-Fou one is fascinating because it has a series of zones. There's one about the vikings there's one about there's a couple about the middle ages they have which you would love

they have a roman amphitheater i mean they have an amphitheater where they have shows with chariot racing gladiatorial battles and and wild animals um it says in the brochure they have executions but i don't believe that can be true um but it's massively popular in this space. It gets hundreds of thousands, millions of people. It's the second most visited theme park in France after Disneyland. And what's interesting about it is it's set up by a politician who was originally Mitterrand's culture minister, Philippe de Villiers, who's now very right-wing, very anti-Islam, anti-immigration,

kind of an unashamed French nationalist, conservative. And the version of history that you get is kind of pure kings and battles. It's a kind of the French equivalent of Our Island Story. So there's stuff about Richelieu's musketeers. They have a thing about the Battle of Verdun from World War I. And it is colossally popular. I mean, it's hard to imagine. Have you been to that?

I haven't actually. I'm talking about it with – I was going to go before COVID. My son is desperate to go, and every now and again to amuse ourselves during lockdown, we would watch videos. You know, in that sort of terrible sort of – Of executions. Third-hand tourist way. We'd watch YouTube videos of other people who've been

and sort of weeped that we can't go ourselves. I mean, it looks amazing, but I was thinking, could you do it in a less right-wing way? I mean, could you do a left-wing history theme park? And I'm not sure if they did a sort of Peterloo reenactment and a thing about the Chartists. I mean, Tony Benn would like, but they have Level a Day in Burford,

which is a kind of big reenactment. I mean, it's a reenactment as in people turn up with posters and shout about john lilburn or something well i mean there's a sealed knot isn't there which is yeah i think i can see you as a 50 years old man have you done the sealed knot i bet you've done the sealed knot well i i remember i've never no i've never actually taken part in it i always have a secret yearning. Yeah. You'd be a cavalier, though, wouldn't you? No, I'd be an Ironside. Would you?

I'd be an Ironside. I'd love to do that. I'd like to be like, can you be Cromwell's spymaster or something? That's what I'd want to do. Milton, perhaps. Just sit there being blind, writing rude stuff in Latin. There was a book, a novel, by a crime writer called anthony price who almost i don't think anyone reads them anymore but i really love them they're always crime stories thrillers espionage stories revolving around history um and he had

one called war game which was set in the context of a battle a kind of sealed knot type battle and the gist in that was that everyone on the parliamentarian side was very much on the left and everyone on the uh royalist side was very much on the right and um a kind of a very left-wing guy who's being shadowed by mi5 ends up dead in a ditch with a halberd through his stomach um sounds great and it was great i remember it being great and uh and then it kind of you know turns out to be a big conspiracy theory um but i was kind of wondering whether i guess that um you know if you're on the left you would be probably drawn to the the round heads and if you're on the right because i because i looked up the the seal not because i thought we'd probably end up talking

about it and it says um the name of the society derives from a group which during the protectorate plotted for the restoration of the monarchy so it's it's a cavalier society but it's very here the similarity ends as the present society and this is in capitals on the website, is non-political and has no political affiliation or ambitions. So it seems very important for the SEAL not to make that clear. I can believe that of them, but at the same time, I think there probably is something temperamentally small because he's conservative about being a re-enactor, don't you think?

I mean, if you're super left-wing, you probably think what you want to do is build a better tomorrow rather than go back to yesterday and sort of put on a nice hat and stuff um which i think is i'm not saying there's something inherently conservative about hats but that kind of is there isn't it definitely yes particularly got feathers in yeah but you see i'd want to reinvent i'd want to dress up as stanley baldwin or something so it would probably be quite of course the standard well i think that's a massive money spinner i think you should go ahead with that yeah well there's i mean of course because at the at the furthest extremes um you really are pushing into some quite dodgy areas so prince harry well yes so prince harry dressing up as nazis so dressing up as nazis is

the big it's verboten as it were so there was a congressman rich ayat about 10 years ago i think he was um he was running for for congress and um his candidature got torpedoed because it turned out that he was a reenactor. And among the reenactments he'd done, he dressed up in SS uniform. Yeah, I think that's hard to come back from that. So dressing up in an SS uniform, I think, I mean, you're pushing the boat out there. The claim that people always make, isn't it, is they just like the uniform.

But yeah, there's a slight are we the baddies aspect to it that I think is hard to overcome, don't you? And so also I was wondering in that context what, and I don't know the answer to this, what the state of play is at the moment with the re-enactment of battles in the American Civil War, because I know that that's a huge scene in America. I mean, they make the sealed lot look like amateurs.

I mean, they are amateurs, but you know what I mean. It's huge. But I wonder whether that kind of buys into a subject that we should do in a definitely in a separate podcast, which is the lost cause of the Confederacy. So lots of people love to, I mean, fascination with the Civil War, I think often does have a sort of political dimension to it in America, rather like that whole ecosystem of plantations and all that sort of stuff. And yeah, I mean, it would be hard as an outsider. I mean,

maybe American listeners will disagree and will put us right. But as an outsider, I think there's an element when you're pulling on a Confederate uniform in defense of slavery. I mean, I know some people will say, oh, no, state's rights or whatever, but obviously, slavery is a big part of it. That does feel very highly charged at the moment, doesn't it? Well, I mean, there's a big controversy here in Britain about the National Trust and to what extent visitors should be told about whether people who owned it or built it or whatever, whether they were making their money from slavery. And I was wondering what the state of play is with the grand plantations in Beaufort or... Well, I've been to a plantation.

I went to a plantation called Boone Hall. We were shown around by this, absolutely, this sort of vision, this Scarlet O'Hara-like vision, who, you know, took us through the kitchens and the lovely drawing room and the veranda and all this sort of stuff. But she didn't mention slavery once. And there was sort of a load of huts in the distance.

And I said, what was going on in the huts? And she said, oh, this is like the staff quarters or something. You know, I mean, this was some years ago. I mean, maybe they've changed their rubric since then. But there was definitely a downplaying of the key element that you would think as a visitor would be would be would loom largest and obviously a lot of listeners i'm sure will think there's something kind of really a bit tasteless about luxuriating in this world without drawing attention to its single most salient um feature i wonder even um you know even even something like the London Dungeon,

where the emphasis is very much on torture and death and murder. You know, is Jack the Ripper? Well, Jack the Ripper, we had Hallie Rubenhold on, and she's very vigorous in campaigning against what she sees as the Jack the Ripper industry. Which is interesting,

because when I told my son, who's nine, that we were doing a podcast with her, and he said, is she going to tell us who killed Jack the Ripper? And I said, no, she's more into the women, the victims. And he said, who cares about the victims? Would Sherlock Holmes have caught Jack the Ripper? And was Jack the Ripper a prince? Those are the two questions that everybody wants answered.

The questions everyone wants, yes, yes. Well, I mean i suppose that that the um you know if we the things that tend to get reenacted are violent they are they're all violent whether it whether it whether it's um jack the ripper in uh in in london dungeons or um you know reenactment battles you don't reenact people i suppose i mean to a degree you do don't you occasionally there are the kind of um attempts to there's that village in um hampshire where they've rebuilt um various huts from various periods of history and you do get people who kind of sit around and weave and things but it's it's less inherently dramatic it is less dramatic. And if you judge history as an industry more broadly,

so you think about films, but also books, I mean, classically what sells is the Second World War and the Tudors. And the fascination of the Tudors is that people have their heads cut off. I mean, that's what people like about the story. It's not just about kind of gowns and Bibles. Yes, it is about the execution. The the executioners acts as key to the success and and you know we look now at gladiatorial

games i mean we will have to do a podcast on gladiatorial games but we look now gladiatorial games with horror i'm sure you would say because of our christian heritage and we recoil from the spectacle of the blood and all the rest of it but we consume the blood don'ticariously. I mean, we're going to do video games in a second, but we consume it in the books. I mean, how many authors right now, how many historians are crafting a chapter in which a thousand people die horribly? Yeah.

And we're going to read it for, people are going to read it for entertainment, effectively. Right. And you mentioned computer games and indeed board games. And an awful lot of those that have a kind of historical setting absolutely do involve lots and lots of people being killed but it you know it'll be it could be a counter moving across a board and you know entire continents are conquered or in a computer game you know you storm a city or something but let's let's let's get on to that

um after the break uh board games and computer games. Add free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets. Head to therestlesentertainment.com. That's therestlesentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Restless History. We're talking about history as entertainment, particularly games. And Dominic, you opened this episode by talking about Monopoly. I did, shamelessly. So Monopoly, is that strictly a game about history? Isn't it a game about capitalism? It's actually, it is.

Well, it's a game about a particular version of capitalism. And it is a historically rooted game. So there are all sorts of arguments about the origins of Monopoly. But as far as we can tell, it began in about 1903. And it was an anti-capitalist game. It was what's called a Georgist game. So there was a guy called Henry George in America who had all these theories about landlordism, about fighting landlordism. So this is the progressive era in America where people are sort of taming the excesses of capitalism, of the sort of Carnegie, you know, sort of rampant railroad

kind of American school of capitalism. And the point of monopoly was to illustrate how bad landlordism is. So in other words, if you've got all this property, you can squeeze your tenants and you'll become rich and they will never win. That was the point of it, that you would never win if you didn't get all this, you know,

you didn't get all this property. And then basically monopoly evolved and was, there was a big battle over the, the, the patents for it. And it ended up being taken up by the sort of toy companies and turned into a capitalist game in the depression. So it's no longer about showing you how evil it is.

Now it's about glorying in it, glorying in your winnings. And obviously it's been longer about showing you how evil it is now it's about glorying in it glorying in your winnings and obviously it's been very successful since then but what's interesting is it is the game that's permanently been reinterpreted politically so there were cold war kind of communist versions and some of our listeners sent in there was a version done by east german dissidents called bureaucratopoly which was mocking the East German system. And then the Hungarian communists, I mean, they had a version of their own called Budget Smartly. Now, the actual title in Hungarian is Gazdal Kodj Okasan,

as my magia. We need Jonathan Wilson here. We do, yeah. He would put me right. There's no doubt about that. So, yes, a monopoly in itself is a great – I mean, presumably our historians of Monopoly who see it as a sort of map of the 20th century.

Okay, so the implication of that is that it begins as an anti-capitalist board game, but very rapidly it becomes all about conquering your enemies and becoming as rich and powerful as possible. Yeah, like most games. And on that theme we have a question from the splendidly named dick of axe and he says um from civilization to risk to europa universalist there is some irresistible urge in humans it seems to paint

a map one color doesn't matter if you're playing a ball game or if you're roman emperor do you agree i mean definitely when it comes when it comes to both the board games and computer games, historically themed games by and large do seem to involve an awful lot of conquest. They are about conquest. It only just occurred to me hearing that question that I'm sure the movement to decolonize board games can only be a mess away.

Yeah, well, you've got to say. Because, I mean, risk, diplomacy, all these kindize board games can only be, because I mean, risk, um, diplomacy, all these kinds of board games, they're all about creating empires, aren't they?

And defeat and smiting your opponents. I mean, it's hard to imagine a game that didn't involve that because that's the, that's the pleasure of games. Well, even chess. I mean, chess is kind of replicating a battle, isn't it?

It's originally it's chariots. And even in, in, in, in the one we have now, it's kind of nightsicating a battle, isn't it? Originally, it's chariots, and even in the one we have now, it's kind of knights and things on battlefields. So Risk is the classic example of that. So it's a global game. Yeah. So the setting is supposedly Napoleonic. But it's kind of a Cold War game, don't you think?

It's a sort of post-World War II game. It's a game. You're right, the setting is kind of a Cold War game, don't you think? You know, it's a sort of, or post-World War II game. It's a game, you're right, the setting is kind of older, but don't you think the mindset is, you know, there are great blocs fighting each other for control of the world? Yes, the cards show, you know, Curious Ears and the Polarionic Infantrymen and things, but you're having to conquer the entire globe and the map is the globe and i'm um that episode we did on the lessons of history and we dwelt very strongly

on don't invade asia and i remember we always played i played risk with my brother who's since gone on of course to um host our sister pod about the second world war and a very distinguished historian in the second world war um and he would always invade asia and so i'd always win i'd always win i'd always i'd always kind of encourage him say aren't you going to invade asia oh yes i think i will um and i think the trauma of that is what has led him to study the second world war that's a terrible insight into your brother's psychology but these games you've've seen. Now, a few years ago, Neil Ferguson, who had a link-up with the games company, he published a few articles saying that he was going to use this game

in his teaching at Harvard. And that this game, I can't remember what game it was. I don't think it was a terribly successful game, actually, that he had collaborated with it and that it was very useful for instructing you about how statecraft worked. And a lot of the time, for most historians, there were kind of guffaws of disbelief and sort of scorn. But I actually think games are incredibly good way of, I mean, that's why the CIA and that's why the Pentagon do war games, because they think they're a good way of illustrating the different variables that condition success or failure in war and in diplomacy. So you said diplomacy. I think diplomacy is the best. So that's the build up to the First World War.

It's the great powers of Europe. And the reason that's great is that you don't take it in turns to have turns. You all do it at the same time. And the opportunity to stab your allies in the back is tremendous. And I played it and stabbed my supposed ally in the back so successfully that I won triumphantly. And I've never played it since because I know I can never top that. That's great. But you see, you reveal your true self in a game tom i think so um yes you do that's very worrying yes but there's some amazing games so uh who was it

andrew menkes suggested a game called the campaign for north africa now this is an amazing game because it's a 70s game it's colossally detailed to play this game through so it's the world war two north african campaign to play it through it takes an estimated 1500 hours and the game itself recommends 62 days the game recommends that on each side you need five people one of whom is the commander-in-chief and the other is subordinate and it's so complicated if you're playing as the italians you need to bring water for your pasta to the battlefield yes you know i i love that i love that and and um apparently so i looked up an article on this um and apparently that rule isn't even factually accurate because the guy who who invented this game he says the reality is that the italians cook their pasta with the tomato

sauce that came with the cans wow he. He's done his research. Yeah. And the other amazing thing, he says, every game turn, 3% of your fuel evaporates unless you're the British before a certain date because they used 50-gallon drums instead of jerry cans. Oh, my God. See, there's a level of detail, isn't there? A friend of mine has a game called Twilight Struggle, which is a Cold War game.

And whenever we go to visit, he always says, you know, is this the moment where we're going to play this game? We've got kids, we've got wives. It's kind of hard to find the moment to say, for the next 10 hours, we'll be in Communicado. But it's more than 10 hours, isn't it? I mean, those games with kind of instruction manuals that are about 200 pages long.

Yeah. I mean, it's not as bad as um the the north african campaign but i mean they they are pretty long having said that there are i so there's another question from ben jones and he says i think my entire knowledge of english geography aristocratic families and certainly the plantagenet family tree is from the board game kingmaker always ended with stalemate until the constable of the tower of london got sent to Rye. Did you ever play Kingmaker? No, I've seen it.

I wanted it as a child, but I never got it. So that's set against the War of the Roses. Right, yeah, which is itself a colossal game, isn't it? I mean... It is a colossal, yes. Yeah, inspiration of Game of Thrones. So you have to fight, but also you have plagues and you have peasants' revolts

and you have to issue writs to summon parliament. So it's actually quite good. You can go around collecting, you know, Warden of the Sink Ports and Warden of the Northern Marches and things like that. That's a card I've always wanted to have. It's a fabulous game. Yeah.

That wiles away a very pleasant three hours. But, you know, the terrible thing, though, Tom, is when you get older. So I finished writing my most recent book about a month ago, and as my reward to myself, because obviously we're stuck at home in lockdown, as my reward to myself, I bought a video game for my computer,

a strategy game that I could play while my wife was working. And it's called Kaiser Reich. And it's a sort of offshoot of the Hearts of Iron games. So it's set in a world where Germany won the first world war. And it's set in the 1930s. Oh, Dominic, that's your kind of dream. It is, it is. And you can choose any of these.

I think there is some sort of slightly politically dodgy elements to it. But anyway, you can choose any country to control. So Britain has become a socialist republic. Austria-Hungary has become a kind of United States, a greater Austria. And I looked at this, I saw the map, and I saw the sort of list. I thought, brilliant, I cannot wait. And I loaded it up and I deleted it about 10 minutes later.

Why? Because you have to produce a lot of steel. It's so complicated. I knew I'd never come to. And I started to read manuals online and people's advice about how to play it. And I just thought, I don't understand what they're saying. And I don't have enough hours.

Life is too short. So what about the grand idea of those kind of ones, which is civilization? Yeah, I have played that. So you begin with a tribe of hunter-gatherers in whatever it is, 4000 BC. You do. You create your civilization from scratch. You create a civilization and then you have to send a space rocket to Alpha Centauri. And you can be any one of a number of civilizations.

And what it does, which is what all these games do, is they sort of mirror all those books that you see, which will say, you know, these are the 10 building blocks of a successful nation state, or this is how democracies live and how they die. So I always think they're slightly a bit like business books. They try to sort of turn history into a set of distinct variables. And that's

obviously how the game works the game works on variables and they say these are the building blocks of civilization now create your own and it is very they are very addictive um but they're sort of they're turning history into a kind of massive spreadsheet aren't they to some extent but they have to don't they because otherwise it doesn't work but it's very very deterministic i mean it's kind of marism, absolute power of 10. And it's also very, I mean, you know, you talked about decolonizing games. I mean, it establishes the emergence of European civilization as absolutely the norm that you have to industrialize.

And then you have to colonize everybody else. And then you have to colonize everybody else. And that is the pattern of... So there's an even better example of a game like that, Tom, which is, I think, the aficionados prefer to civilization, which is called Europa Universalis, which I highly recommend. So Europa Universalis starts in about 1450 and you can play till the Battle of Waterloo.

And what that does is you choose your country that exists in 1450 or so and then the game follows history. So the Reformation happens and the 30 Years' War breaks out and set events follow each other. But also there are set technological and cultural developments, which are quite Eurocentric. Oh, no, I really want to play this. Which you have to, but you have to.

You get penalised if you don't embrace the printing press or if you don't embrace colonization, then your stability cost is increased or whatever. So in other words, you have to follow the sort of... Down the funnel. does reproduce in a way that maybe, you know, an academic seminar can't, the strategic dilemmas, shall we say, of leading a state. You know, if you are Prussia or you are Poland, in a weird way, kind of role-playing it, I think does bring home the difficulties more so than reading it in the most, you know, the most beautifully researched monograph. There is a sense in which role-playing in that way does kind of carry a charge. So those computer games, part of the fun is obviously

absolutely being funneled down the spout of history. So to an extent, not being able to divert from it generates the fun. But then in other ways, that is precisely the fun, is being able to havege from it is you know generates the fun but then in other ways that is precisely the fun is being able to have aztecs fight yeah absolutely or whatever um yeah that's the incongruity there's um there's a i i've never been able to work out whether it's true or not um but this story that gandhi in, who is incredibly pacifist and never declares war on anyone, when they reach the nuclear age, there's some glitch, set civilizations, and making them behave in holy, unexpected ways. Exactly. Martin Luther King becoming dictator of the United States or something would be very interesting.

Which I suppose is a kind of counterfactual, the kind of counterfactuals that you do when you create alternative timelines in history. Sort of silly. But the other kind of game that you have is a game that plunges you into history in a sort of individual level. So that's, say, the Assassin's Creed games or Call of Duty. Call of Duty is all about – it's basically Second World War reenactment fantasy, isn't it? Yeah, it's about killing people. But Assassin's Creed is more interesting.

And I'm surprised that you've never played it, Tom, because a lot of it is set in kind of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and all that sort of thing. The reason I haven't tried it is the same reason that i haven't taken up crack i'm sure it's brilliant everybody says it's brilliant but i know that i would never get anything done yeah it's true you know i could sit in the back or i could or i could kind of be your children are too old now you see my son is nine so he's perfectly you know he's the right age to be really into all those even though they're 10 18 certificate yeah we've just we've just been fighting um in the peloponnesian war

very entertaining oh god i had to do an article about i had to do an article in january about um vikings and why they were culturally cool and that was on the back of the release of the new assassin's creed which is set in the viking world and i i thought should i um should i get it and i almost did and then i went and watched i watched the opening loop on youtube instead and it was kind of like methadone i got a vague sense of it but i wasn't wasn't surrendering to it but you see all these games are quite political in a way because they're all about i mean they're all about fighting they're all about sort of individual agency um and the sort of you know there is this sort of uh conspiracy theory that underplays them all so you know the world is being controlled by the templars and stuff so actually it looks back to

our podcast about conspiracy theories because the games present as all games do, because they have to, there's a rule book and there's an intelligence that kind of underpins them and binds them all together. So actually what they miss from history is the sort of, is it worth the unexpected, the, you know,

the messiness, I suppose they simplify history, don't they? They make it consumable, but you still enjoy it. Oh yeah. I mean mean of course but then but i mean games are uh games are part of human nature aren't they i mean as you know we

love games but also the what assassin's creed does for example is it you know they would have in their game about um setting kind of cleopatra's egypt they've got this incredibly faithful or painstaking reenactment of what Alexandria would look like. And you do get a set. I mean, I've never seen anything that's given me. And sometimes you can find online videos of people, you know, they've got ancient historians to comment. I suppose they haven't asked you, Tom.

They get ancient historians to comment on the design of Athens or the design of Rome and to say, how accurate accurate is this so i looked at london viking london right um i thought it'd be inaccurate did you that's disappointing it was it was like a very fresh rome room with lots of roman statues standing everywhere i think that's and you don't think that's right you don't that's right i don't i don't but having said that i thought it't think that's right? No, I don't. I don't. But having said that, I thought it was amazing. I mean, you kind of feel that in a fantasy, that is what abandoned Rome in London should look like. Yeah.

And that must be part of the fun, because I don't want to play a computer game where everything is absolutely... No, I suppose not. You know, you want a degree of creativity and experiment. But the other extent to which they're political is that I look slightly askance at the Vikings one because I believe the English are the baddies. So Alfred the Great is...

King Alfred is the baddie, apparently. Yeah, he's the main baddie. That's what decided me not to get it. I'm not lending my support to that. It's a French company, isn't it? So, you know, you suspect the worst. French-Canadian, I think. So they'd released a couple of very, very successful games set in the crusades and in the renaissance then they released the third one which was set in the american war of independence and

you played an american fighting the british and their sales in britain were much worse that moment made me proud to be british to see that statistic that people didn't want to i hope that people in wessex will not be buying this anti-alfredian nonsense but it will be interesting to find out whether people in germany for example are ambivalent about playing war games in which the germans are always painted as the i mean they're always the villains aren't they you're killing nazis i mean that must be a weird thing to do if you're a teenage gamer in frankfurt and you're basically engaged in shooting you know people who are mocked up versions of your great-grandfather and his buddies yeah do you not think yeah i do yeah

i do i mean that also raises the question that um alan allport who's a historian himself and a listener to the podcast raised raised on Twitter about taste. He said, at what point do you cross the line? And do you think, I mean, the Vikings were incredibly brutal. They enslaved people, bashed their heads in with their axes or whatever. Do you think there's ever a taste issue, Tom? Well, I think that's interesting. I mean, that is an interesting question, which touches on a much broader issue, which is when do atrocities and enslavement and imperial expansion, when does it cease to be a legitimate subject for entertainment?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that is a huge question. And I think that that could be the theme of another episode where we, we discuss that issue. Um, and I think that that is actually the perfect point on which to, um, pack up the board game, put away the dice. Yeah. Leave it hanging.

So thanks ever so much. So, uh, see you next episode. Uh, we'll see you next time. Tom has been, uh,

crushed. I have conquered the board. Um, I just wanted to get that in actually. And, uh, yeah, we'll see you next time.

We've got, um, I can't remember what we've got lined up for next week Persia we've got Persia Persia great well I'm really looking forward to that

what have the Persians ever done for us yeah why why Persia basically has invented everything it's a great episode look forward to it bye alright

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