The games we play and the history we love

Started by W8taminute, February 16, 2022, 09:27:14 AM

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W8taminute

So a thought occurred to me last night whilst playing "The Cold War" mod for Civ3.  I wanted to share that with you all here to see if I'm an outlier or part of a trend, albeit a niche trend.

When I play certain games, be they shooters, RPGs, or grand strategy games, I often find myself wanting to recreate some aspect of history I may have read about or seen in a documentary.  For example, say I read about the G4M Betty being a flying coffin for its crew.  I'm going to then pick a game about the pacific theater of WW2 and try to see just how bad the Betty, or Japanese air forces in general, really was.  I know I'm playing a game that can't possibly let me experience what it really was like but that's where my imagination runs wild. 

Another example would be reading about logistics operations during war time.  Well I'm going to want to find a game that will let me try to manage supplies for my troops on the front line. 

I hope you get what I'm trying to say as I'm not really that good at writing.  Do you all find any inspiration from odd places that make you want to play a certain type of game?
"You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend."

Romulan Commander to Kirk

Gusington

I have been stitching together gaming, reading and viewing forever like you describe above - it goes along with my OCD - and I am slowly trying to break away from that kind of thinking because I think it limits my free time. Because I have tended to do that to an extreme point over 30+ years.


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MengJiao

Quote from: W8taminute on February 16, 2022, 09:27:14 AM
I know I'm playing a game that can't possibly let me experience what it really was like but that's where my imagination runs wild. 


   The what was it like thing...is kind of always intriguing, but also of course, kind of impossible...though its nice to have some idea of what sorts of things make it harder or less hard to imagine.
For example, a lot of things about how Japan and its people saw the world and/or the likelihood of dying horribly on various battlefields or under bombs are very hard for me to imagine, but I can work toward
at least seeing their motivation if not their emotional loads.  To extend that example...Japan defeated China and its American mercenary naval officers in 1894-5.  They took the usual concessions from China eg...Port Arthur and other harbors and then the whole western world made them give all that to Russia.  This sort of clarifies the Japanese drive to crush Russia and China no matter what anyone else might have to say about it.

ArizonaTank

When I read a military history about pretty much any period, I quickly want to find a game on the subject. The game helps me understand the historical situation better.
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MengJiao

#4
Quote from: ArizonaTank on February 16, 2022, 11:58:10 AM
When I read a military history about pretty much any period, I quickly want to find a game on the subject. The game helps me understand the historical situation better.

  I was wondering how an interest in crusading orders kind of snuck up on me.  I just remembered that one of the 400-meter Napoleonic maps had a "Commandery" on it and I looked up the Teutonic Knights (though of course a commandery could be that of the Hospitalers/Knights of St. John/Knights of Malta in theory even if it was in Alsace) and found they were officially disbanded as far as possession of such things as "Commanderies" went in 1810.  Their last HQ was somewhere in the area where Bluecher's Army of Silesia campaigned in 1813, though of course, they had not been a regional power since 1562 at the latest.  I have to admit that the pure exotic weirdness of the Crusading orders was what interested me more than any gamey aspect -- though I think I had trouble with them in the medieval mods of Rome II and Attila and of course there's always that stray Templar in Ivanhoe who seemed so marvelously malignant to me in my youth.

  Oh and even Masonic Lodges in Tacoma in 1904 were taken with them:

1904 Tacoma, Washington Viewbook, Compliments of the Knights, Templar of Tacoma, Washington].

Not very historical or gamey, but definitely weird: