Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games - The Diigo Meta page

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  alexandra m. pickett

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• 11 Feb 09
  

  Jason Heppler

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  hyacint

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• 15 Oct 07
  

  Harry Haller

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• 30 Aug 07
  

  Mark Walker

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• 18 Jun 07
  

  Games are a superb vehicle for thinking deeply about complex systems. A new game, due out in 2008, will model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran. (Niall Ferguson, Virtual Histories 1999)

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• 28 May 07
  

  theplayethic

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• 25 May 07
  

  David Bovill

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• 22 May 07
  

  Stephen Turner

  Interesting article by Clive Thompson on games that are being used to predict alternate historys, and how this is often working better than previous thinking.

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• 21 May 07
  

  Paul Deutsch

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  Mike Wesch

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  A great article that highlights author Niall Ferguson's love of counterfactual history, and how his recent incorporation of games as tools to help such thought has pushed him to work on a game in the same vein (Wired [Clive Thompson], May 21 2007).

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  OITC-Rich

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  Todd Bryant

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  Adam Crowe

  "when today's teenagers become tomorrow's historians, politicians and war fighters [will they] have reclaimed the ability to think counterfactually? Will all those years of gaming have trained them to imagine the many different ways a crisis can evolve?"

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  TransTracker
  • you develop a Mandlebrotian appreciation of chaos dynamics -- how a single change can take a stable situation and sent it spiraling all to hell, or vice versa.
  • The power of counterfactual thinking is that forces us to step outside of our comfort zones. When we think about historical events, we have 20/20 hindsight -- so we forget how confusing and uncertain they were at the time.
  • When we play with sims, they knock us off our pedestals -- because crazy things usually happen we don't predict.
  • The United States used to be champions at this sort of strategic thinking, Ferguson notes, until Iraq came along. Much of America's failures in Iraq have been due to the overly rosy predictions of administration heads. They didn't have the healthy respect for chaos that was the original animating genius of conservatism -- the thinkers like Edmund Burke, who distrusted aggressive tinkering with economies, states or cultures, because they shuddered to think of what genies might be unleashed.

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