Abstract

Games based on historical themes are incredibly common but also divisive among both game scholars and historians. This project was an attempt to bridge that divide by adapting historical argumentation directly into gameplay mechanics, using the procedural rhetoric of games as a uniquely powerful tool to conveying the academic rhetoric of historians. The resulting game, The Jagged Time, tells the story of a fictionalized civilization modeled on New Kingdom Egypt over the course of several hundred years of history, ending in an analogue to the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Using its mechanics, the game advances the argument made by the historian Eric Cline – namely that the Collapse was due to a perfect storm of factors and not any one cause. It also advances these arguments in a novel way from a design perspective, taking an approach to gameplay and history that is conventionally done through 4X-style strategy games and instead adapting it to the logic of a deck-building card game. The affordances and limitations of this approach are assessed, as well as the process of adapting historical argument into gameplay mechanics. A case study scenario in the game is then briefly analyzed using Brian Upton’s criteria of playfulness.