A Canadian company announced that they will donate 100,000 copies of the computer game Civilization 3 along with a special game module designed to simulate Canadian history. According to GameSpot.com:

Developed by Toronto, Ontario-based media firm Bitcasters, HistoriCanada simulates scenarios from Canada’s past, allowing gamers to take control of one of its European or aboriginal cultures to relive history, or change it in the process. In addition to the core gameplay (which builds off of Civilization’s social, economic, and military simulations), HistoriCanada also includes artwork, text, and short video clips on a wealth of topics as a result of cooperation with The Canadian Encyclopedia and Historica Minutes.

A Bitcasters representative told GameSpot that sponsor and distribution details are still being finalized, but 20,000 copies will be sent directly to high schools by Canada’s National History Society, where teachers will be able to use it in extra-credit assignments and otherwise experiment with the game in the classroom. The remaining 80,000 copies of the game will distributed directly to 12- to 18-year-old students through mail or retail outlets, likely by an as yet undetermined sponsor.

I loved the Civilization series of games when I was a teenager, mostly but not exclusively because of my interest in history. Although the strategy aspect of the game made playing on a computer-generated “random” world exiting, playing the real historical scenarios always appealed to me more. I really envy the students who will get to play the game as part of their history curriculum.

My only reservation, of course, is the issue of how accurately the game scenarios have been constructed. For instance, in the regular game’s “technology tree” a player can advance in knowledge of technologies that end up completely anachronistic to their civilization’s history (Incan stealth bombers and Russian AEGIS cruisers, to give a couple examples, always amused me). Not to mention the “wonders of the world” that a player could build given the requisite technological advances. I would always laugh when I read something across the screen like “Shakespeare’s Theater has been built in Paris,” “The Hanging Gardens have been built in Boston,” etc.

I hope that the developers of the Canadian history mod have been sensitive to spacial and cultural considerations in addition to temporal ones. If the “civilizations” are limited to Canadian cultural groups, then hopefully they’ve been sensible enough to only make certain technologies or wonders available to certain players. Counterfactual history is useful to an extent, but there are some counterfacutals that are so completely “wrong” that they would serve only to teach the students a really screwed up version of history.

For instance, if the game gave players the impression that native societies were on more or less equal footing with settler and immigrant civilizations, the result would be that a clever student game-player might end up “winning” as a native civilization. Of course, history in Canada, the United States, Australia, and other settler colonies is full of examples of smart, clever indigenous people going against the dominant trend of their peoples’ mistreatment, disenfranchisement, etc. at the hands of European immigrants. But it would be a disservice to students to teach them that history could have gone radically differently if only the natives had made a few different choices. All of this is speculation on my part, because I haven’t played the game mod for Canada.

The complete story from GameSpot: “2K donates Canada-specific Civ III mod to students”