Z-Access: Fun, and educational

Who says games are just for fun. Well, alright, they are. But Tim Dean thinks they might have a beneficial side effect too.

Who says games are just for fun. Well, alright, they are. But Tim Dean thinks they might have a beneficial side effect too.

So, I was invading Cisalpine Gaul the other day, and it got me wondering. Fighting a war on two fronts is never easy, and I was starting to second guess my decision to take on the Gallic tribes and the Dacians to the north of Greece at the same time. The Gauls were tough and stubborn fighters, but their disunity and lack of discipline would be their downfall – they could never stand against the coherent might of the Legions marching their way.
 
The Dacians were similar in nature, and would be a welcome break from the tight-packed phalanxes of spearmen found in Macedonia. Their only remarkable feature of the Dacians was the unusual recurve bladed two handed weapon wielded with particular ferocity by a few of their tribes – but nothing a Legionary shield wall couldn’t cope with.

But then came the dilemma that inevitably faces every aspiring empire – who’s next? You know the story: conquer one nation, and there are two more on their border eyeing you in that shady barbaric way. To the north of the Gauls were the Germanic tribes. Tough buggers, but their deep forests and heavy winters should at least slow them down if they should choose to defy the might of the Empire. To the north of the Dacians though, are the Scythians, living in the lands surrounding the Black Sea, what is modern day Ukraine – and they’re an entirely different story.

These nomadic tribes live for war. War, and horses. A Scythian rider will drink the blood of their first kill as a right of passage. They scalp their victims and wear their skin like handkerchiefs as a sign of status in their tribe. They’re even known to flay an entire enemy and use their hide as a cloak, or as a cover for their quivers. In fact, if a Scythian tribesman doesn’t make a kill during a given year, they’re left out of their main annual ceremony, where warriors drink wine from the gilded skulls of their enemies. The Scythians were also known as the only race to consume horse milk. And it’s not easy to milk a horse. You have to stick a straw up its arse and blow to make the teats appear, and that’s just the start of the procedure.

Now, my Legions are tough as nails, and unmatched in infantry combat, but when you’re faced with hundreds of screaming barbarians on horseback, peppering your ranks with black arrows, and never even coming in range of sword or pilum, it can be a touch unnerving. Maybe I should invade Asia Minor first…

Still, there is one thing above all others I have gained from playing Rome: Total War, and that’s an even deeper respect for history. After playing for a few nights, I was hunting my bookshelves for anything penned pre-1st Century AD. The insights into Scythian culture above, for example, come from Herodotus’ The Histories, which is a rambunctious collection of anecdotes, hearsay and myth rolled into one of this planet’s first history books. I can’t recommend it enough.

There are plenty of other things I’ve learned from gaming too, not just the disposition of Hannibal’s ranks as they crossed the Alps. In the west we have a somewhat distorted picture of the Second World War. Thanks to an English language history, and the limitless ‘creativity’ (*cough* U-571 *cough*) of Hollywood, we’re lead to believe that the Western Front, mid-1944 to 1945 was the crescendo of the conflict, and swung the balance of the war towards the forces of good. In fact, while the Western Front was hugely significant in winning the war, the tide had already turned, and the Third Reich’s fate was already sealed well before the invasion of Normandy.

The people who broke the back of the Nazi war machine were the poor conscripted Russian peasants, who gave their lives by the millions in the bitter Russian winter to prevent the fall of Stalingrad, or who beat the Wehrmacht at their own blitzkrieg game at Kursk. If it weren’t for games like Close Combat III: The Russian Front, or Combat Mission 2: Barbarossa to Berlin, I may have quietly passed by this area of history.

Sure, I wouldn’t recommend that you use games as the basis for all your historical learning – if that were the case it would be easy to wonder why we can’t find orc bones at archaeological dig sites – but to dismiss games as a medium that can engage, entertain and inform would be naïve.