What game Jackson Crawford should play? Red dead Redemption 2, hands down. A classic western with gun slinging rouges, gorgeous American vistas, outlaw gangs all wrapped up in one of the best narrative experiences gaming has on offer.
When I was playing Sid Meyer's Colonization (1994), I knew more about the American founding fathers than about my own history. Just cause it was presented in a fun and interactive way.
I remember when as a kid we were teaching about Peloponnesian and Punic wars, and Total War : Rome 1 just released, games are such great medium for teaching history in fun way.
The historical video games I play have guided me on my quest for knowledge by piqueing my interest in something I had never heard of before. If it weren't for Shogun 2 and Fall of the Samurai, I never would have learned about the Sengoku Jidai or the Boshin War or the Meiji Restoration. Or that the Imperial Family, as far as is known, is a single dynasty that stretches back into prehistory. It would be as if a descendant of Romulus was still the royal head of state for Italy! I'm glad you guys are bringing more history to people through games.
I'm a former schoolteacher married to a software developer and gamer of all platforms and genres. From the time our kid was a newborn, he would sit on his papá's lap and watch him play games like Half Life 2 and Unreal Tournament. In elementary school, bullying problems and dumbed-down curricula compeled me to pull him out and homeschool him for a few years. All the while, he played whatever games his dad played (sometimes Rated M). It was both funny and embarrassing when he told his violin teacher he knew all about riding motorcycles from playing GTA (4?). One day in 5th or 6th grade, when we started a unit on the Renaissance, he seemed bored in an I-already-know-all-this kind of way, and asked if we we'd ever cover the Medici family. I asked him how he knew about them, and he said from playing Assassin's Creed (he was a huge Enzo fan for a while there). We took a risk conducting this little experiment on our only child, but I'm happy to report that now, in his mid-twenties, he's a well-adjusted, functioning adult who solves problems diplomatically, despite a lifetime of violent/explicit videogame play. If anything, videogames piqued his interests in various topics, inspiring him to do further research.
One thing I really loved when I was playing assassin’s creed Black flag is that they would acknowledge when they were being anachronistic. You could look up the notes on different landmarks that they had in the Caribbean, and there would be a conversation supposedly between the the fictional developers of the game they were making, in which one of them would say, “actually this church wasn’t built for another hundred years” and the other one would say “who cares it looks cool.” and I actually loved that as a technique for drawing the player into the history.
Born in 79...experienced atari 2600 through modern day. Phantasy Star for Sega Master System was super cool. I respect you both and enjoyed the interview. Wish video game makers would hire Meg Dr. Crawford and make a badass Viking RPMG.
I have not listened to the whole interview yet but I am excited to get into it today. I just did my bachelor's degree on Europa Universalis IV and its representations of colonialism and one of my main points/ideas was the idea that historical accuracy is not the main point of historical video games.
Well, you won't be able to walk around in it, but the next Total War (strategy) game (Total War Pharaoh) will be set in late Bronze Age Egypt and Levant.
A game with no violence would be Eastshade. You’re a tourist on an island and your mission is to paint all the most iconic landscapes. It’s very pretty and very engaging and there is no fighting whatsoever.
Norse vs draugr is big part of the game Skyrim. Also, I'd recommend "Portal" an older game now, but with easy controls to master and you are not usually rushed. It has a very interesting puzzle-based gameplay. Basically, you are trapped in a research lab, trying to escape. There's no "combat" per se and your opponent is a well-acted computer system that it trying to prevent you from escaping/ You use a divide that allows you to create little "wormholes" (portals) that you can use to teleport short distances around the room you are in. It is a better game than you'd imagine from the premise.
My interest in history were started by two different games. Rome Total War and Age of Empires 2. As a kid I enjoyed looking at and reading any references to history within the games. I remember a thing in AoE 2 that had a historical blurb about each civilization. From there I always had a wonder lust towards Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe.
Concerning Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it is set in the Kingdom of Bohemia, which more or less corresponds to what's now the Czech Republic. I believe the time period was 13 or 1400s.
It would be an easy and chaotic intro to games to throw him into 'keep talking and nobody explodes'. Part party game so not learning alone. Low system requirements so most even low end laptops would run it without much issue such as the computer he probably has for editing. Decent intro to a lot of mouse controls that get used in a lot of games and the other party just needs to be able to open pdf or even just print it out.
Remember Road Rash by Electronic Arts? Having Viking age historical figures as bikers...use Scandinavian ba kdrops for racetracks and trash talk in old Norse
I'm an archaeology student and I wholly get holding that historical view on games whenever possible; it's so exciting when a developer takes the time to put in nods, easter eggs or inspiration in the setting. Playing lore detective is so much fun whether it's historical, inspired by history or just a constructed setting/world, as long as it's not trying to present made up history as fact. But like Meg said I feel like that's really rare in games. I actually decided to go into studying over this aspect. "I love to be a lore nerd, why don't I lore nerd real life lore?". I devour rpgs and I also have to say that I agree on AC Odyssey, what an incredible feat that game world is. I would say though, that my interest does sway more towards the far history. I'm not into the political history aspects as much and stuff like that. I think games as a medium has so much to offer to spark the imagination, whenever it's allowed to do so.
The last time I played a video game was in the 1980-ies on the original IBM PC! It was the game "King's Quest" with CGA graphics with the resolution of 320×200 in 4 colours. I also remember a monochrome pinball game on the IBM PC that you started by inserting a floppy disk and then turning on the PC. The PC then booted directly from the floppy disk and bypassed the MS-DOS and it was programmed to work directly on the Intel chip 8088. It was extremely quick and responsive for that period.
Ohh... Hellblade is probably one of the best games I've played. At least for the story and emotionally... It's kinda like playing a film, but it's riveting and so emotionally deep. And when she said she hadn't played through, I became a little disappointed, because the ending is so good... I had myself a good cry during the credits. Also, the mythology is fairly well represented!
I wonder how Jackson Crawford would go with paper and dice RPGs? Like maybe not something as rules heavy as D&D, but maybe something more story based like Sagas of the Icelanders.
Yeah a lot of games hit the same historical periods all the time. Rome, 1200 AD to 1500 AD, 1800s, WW1, WW2, Medieval Japan, Warring Kingdoms China. If a game breaks from this its usually a very specific localized area and time and often as part of a DLC. So every Rome game seems to focus on the expansion and then will have a later Hunnic invasion. Medieval stuff will find some way of having Mongolian or Viking invaders. One game I like is AoE2 which kind of spans from around 5th century AD to about the 16th century AD. Both with civilizations and technologies. And with the recent expansions that have been released they have grown to include even more civilizations from all over the world to include civilizations and time periods that are never or often seen in games. They got civilizations from Meso and South America, Africa, India, South East Asia, East Asia, the Eurasian Steppe, Europe (East and West), the Mediterranean cultures and such. And each time they add some new ones to the game there is another bit of cultural spice to learn about.
52:25 1982 here. I think we're all in the microgeneration called Xennials. Pronounced ex-ennials. We don't really fit in with neither Gen X nor Millennials. There's micro generations like these everywhere so between Millennials and Gen Z you have Zennials. I don't remember all the names of all the microgenerations but yes, they are indeed a thing. Very interesting interview as always.
I think the microgenerations are called “cusps”. As a person who is born in 1998, cusps have always been interesting to me, as I am a Zillennial by most Millennial/Gen Z standards save those that put the line at 2004.
@@iantaakalla8180True. But then you have other people who insist that microgenerations or cusps do not exist and a person born on 31/12/79 is a Gen X'er and a person born the day after 1/1/80 is a Millennial. I just don't see this as being completely true, as in it's not that clean of a cut.
Did I mention Minecraft being totally WHG (post-The-Tepis non-agrarian manufacturing!!!) on one of your videos yet? I think the last time I said it was over on S.Milo., so it needed to be done here too.
Yeah, games helped me a lot in history and geography stuff at school. Also story telling, philosophy, its great tool for teaching and in the end its great art.
You have the best guests. It's unfortunate that she was treated poorly because of her sex. My career was in public safety, which tends to be male dominated. But I noticed that most of the females in the field were just excellent. Some were not, but the excellent/worthless ratio in females tended to be a lot higher than in males.
you also don’t always know the age of the people you’re talking to. My six year old daughter recently discovered that there was a text feature on some of her tablet games and she said some really weird stuff to people who may very well have been adults, and we had to take that game away from her. So when you’re talking to someone who doesn’t know who Julius Caesar or Cesar Chavez are, that might not be nearly as weird as it seemed.
Hades is a fantastic game, but man does it have (what I would consider to be) a very steep learning curve and high level of difficulty, particularly for someone who is new to gaming or has been out of gaming for a while. I say this as a 47 year old man who has gamed continuously since the Atari 2600.
Haters are gonna hate yo. My new thing...I say yo put down the mirror 😂don't talk about yourself like that 😂omg they go nuts I love it. I have a bachelor in American Constitutional History and would love to professionally collaborate with research that would be a mega honor. Thanks for enduring my hyperelongated tangents I appreciate this.
Still waiting for a game with accurate representations of medieval armour... mordhau’s the best we got now I think but soon we’ll see cinis and blight looks promising too
*Clinks glass of Ensure with Dr. Crawford* - I was born in 1970 and playin' vidya games are kinda mah thing. I love me some RPGs as well as quiet building games like Factorio and Minecraft (well, they *can* be quiet), or even House Flipper. I don't claim to be any good at any of them, nor do I play on any mode other than easy or normal, but they are damn fun. I'm not trying to impress anyone and I'd rather get to play the whole game then rage quit because the combat became too overwhelming. Also, you do get used to controllers after a while, although until you do, you will cause your death or create other unintended consequences, like punching an NPC...or a bear....oops. That one was unintentional AND lead to my death. I do enjoy the chocolate Ensure though. Keeps the controller clean. It's like having a substandard milk shake.
Caesar Chaves east LA community organizer...si se puela....yes we can. LAPD gave the Altzan organizer an early retirement. Shot in the head with a tear gas canister point blank at a bar. Hunter S. Thompson's "The Great White Shark Hunt performs a outstanding journalistic requiem. Ever heard of hades....civilization 2 gold scenario editor.....WW3,1979 is like a modern day version of the boardgame Risk on roids. After that the game was bogged down with too many useless rules. Thank you both I learned a lot
People DO need to learn thicker skin. Don't expect anyone to be nice to you. You don't deserve to be nice to most of the time. It's a very narcissistic view of the world to think everyone is gonna cater to you. Be a duck. Let the water flow off your back. Sticks and stones.
Total War historical titles is something for Jackson Crawford.
What game Jackson Crawford should play? Red dead Redemption 2, hands down. A classic western with gun slinging rouges, gorgeous American vistas, outlaw gangs all wrapped up in one of the best narrative experiences gaming has on offer.
I was about to make this comment until I saw yours. You are 100% right on this one, lol.
We wouldn't see Crawford for months if he played it
I also came into the comments to suggest this.
Agreed it's a timeless classic
I want to see how he reacts when his horse keeps killing him in hilarious ways.
When I was playing Sid Meyer's Colonization (1994), I knew more about the American founding fathers than about my own history. Just cause it was presented in a fun and interactive way.
I remember when as a kid we were teaching about Peloponnesian and Punic wars, and Total War : Rome 1 just released, games are such great medium for teaching history in fun way.
Well, this is refreshing to be sure!
The historical video games I play have guided me on my quest for knowledge by piqueing my interest in something I had never heard of before. If it weren't for Shogun 2 and Fall of the Samurai, I never would have learned about the Sengoku Jidai or the Boshin War or the Meiji Restoration. Or that the Imperial Family, as far as is known, is a single dynasty that stretches back into prehistory. It would be as if a descendant of Romulus was still the royal head of state for Italy!
I'm glad you guys are bringing more history to people through games.
Rome 2 with DEI mod is still great and getting updates.
I'm a former schoolteacher married to a software developer and gamer of all platforms and genres. From the time our kid was a newborn, he would sit on his papá's lap and watch him play games like Half Life 2 and Unreal Tournament. In elementary school, bullying problems and dumbed-down curricula compeled me to pull him out and homeschool him for a few years. All the while, he played whatever games his dad played (sometimes Rated M). It was both funny and embarrassing when he told his violin teacher he knew all about riding motorcycles from playing GTA (4?). One day in 5th or 6th grade, when we started a unit on the Renaissance, he seemed bored in an I-already-know-all-this kind of way, and asked if we we'd ever cover the Medici family. I asked him how he knew about them, and he said from playing Assassin's Creed (he was a huge Enzo fan for a while there). We took a risk conducting this little experiment on our only child, but I'm happy to report that now, in his mid-twenties, he's a well-adjusted, functioning adult who solves problems diplomatically, despite a lifetime of violent/explicit videogame play. If anything, videogames piqued his interests in various topics, inspiring him to do further research.
@megsullivan good on u for not giving in to poisoned minds. they're expressing their inner sadness. FIGHT on..
Loads of fun... now I have a new channel to watch❤
One thing I really loved when I was playing assassin’s creed Black flag is that they would acknowledge when they were being anachronistic. You could look up the notes on different landmarks that they had in the Caribbean, and there would be a conversation supposedly between the the fictional developers of the game they were making, in which one of them would say, “actually this church wasn’t built for another hundred years” and the other one would say “who cares it looks cool.” and I actually loved that as a technique for drawing the player into the history.
Born in 79...experienced atari 2600 through modern day. Phantasy Star for Sega Master System was super cool. I respect you both and enjoyed the interview. Wish video game makers would hire Meg Dr. Crawford and make a badass Viking RPMG.
I have not listened to the whole interview yet but I am excited to get into it today. I just did my bachelor's degree on Europa Universalis IV and its representations of colonialism and one of my main points/ideas was the idea that historical accuracy is not the main point of historical video games.
I want to see a good, well researched game set in the Bronze Age! I don't really care where, I just want to walk around in a Bronze Age setting.
Early bronze age where there are still lots of stone and wood tools and weapons or more late bronze age?
@@AndrewTheFrank Yes.
@@AndrewTheFrank If I get to meet Ea-Nasir and either assassinate him or clear his name, that's a huge plus! 😂
Well, you won't be able to walk around in it, but the next Total War (strategy) game (Total War Pharaoh) will be set in late Bronze Age Egypt and Levant.
valheim, hehe..
A game with no violence would be Eastshade. You’re a tourist on an island and your mission is to paint all the most iconic landscapes. It’s very pretty and very engaging and there is no fighting whatsoever.
congrats on 250k subs
58:50 Girl you look fine. And you seem smart from the two videos you have done with Jackson. You do you.
Hearing Jackson describe Human Fall Flat was amazing
Nice one!
Hades kicks ass. Great take on greek mythology.
I'm an ubernerd when it comes to this stuff😅 thanks
Norse vs draugr is big part of the game Skyrim. Also, I'd recommend "Portal" an older game now, but with easy controls to master and you are not usually rushed. It has a very interesting puzzle-based gameplay. Basically, you are trapped in a research lab, trying to escape. There's no "combat" per se and your opponent is a well-acted computer system that it trying to prevent you from escaping/ You use a divide that allows you to create little "wormholes" (portals) that you can use to teleport short distances around the room you are in. It is a better game than you'd imagine from the premise.
Thumbs up for Portal! Love that series.
Dr. Jackson; dispelling the socially awkward academic language professor myth one interview at a time.
My interest in history were started by two different games. Rome Total War and Age of Empires 2. As a kid I enjoyed looking at and reading any references to history within the games. I remember a thing in AoE 2 that had a historical blurb about each civilization. From there I always had a wonder lust towards Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe.
Concerning Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it is set in the Kingdom of Bohemia, which more or less corresponds to what's now the Czech Republic. I believe the time period was 13 or 1400s.
Oh my god do I ever want to see the Jackson Crawford learns to game video!
It would be an easy and chaotic intro to games to throw him into 'keep talking and nobody explodes'. Part party game so not learning alone. Low system requirements so most even low end laptops would run it without much issue such as the computer he probably has for editing. Decent intro to a lot of mouse controls that get used in a lot of games and the other party just needs to be able to open pdf or even just print it out.
@@m2zz3 that would be brilliant!
Remember Road Rash by Electronic Arts? Having Viking age historical figures as bikers...use Scandinavian ba kdrops for racetracks and trash talk in old Norse
I'm an archaeology student and I wholly get holding that historical view on games whenever possible; it's so exciting when a developer takes the time to put in nods, easter eggs or inspiration in the setting. Playing lore detective is so much fun whether it's historical, inspired by history or just a constructed setting/world, as long as it's not trying to present made up history as fact. But like Meg said I feel like that's really rare in games.
I actually decided to go into studying over this aspect. "I love to be a lore nerd, why don't I lore nerd real life lore?". I devour rpgs and I also have to say that I agree on AC Odyssey, what an incredible feat that game world is. I would say though, that my interest does sway more towards the far history. I'm not into the political history aspects as much and stuff like that. I think games as a medium has so much to offer to spark the imagination, whenever it's allowed to do so.
The last time I played a video game was in the 1980-ies on the original IBM PC! It was the game "King's Quest" with CGA graphics with the resolution of 320×200 in 4 colours. I also remember a monochrome pinball game on the IBM PC that you started by inserting a floppy disk and then turning on the PC. The PC then booted directly from the floppy disk and bypassed the MS-DOS and it was programmed to work directly on the Intel chip 8088. It was extremely quick and responsive for that period.
Love your videos your a true inspiration I'm a pagan from england
Ohh... Hellblade is probably one of the best games I've played. At least for the story and emotionally... It's kinda like playing a film, but it's riveting and so emotionally deep. And when she said she hadn't played through, I became a little disappointed, because the ending is so good... I had myself a good cry during the credits. Also, the mythology is fairly well represented!
I wonder how Jackson Crawford would go with paper and dice RPGs? Like maybe not something as rules heavy as D&D, but maybe something more story based like Sagas of the Icelanders.
Yeah a lot of games hit the same historical periods all the time. Rome, 1200 AD to 1500 AD, 1800s, WW1, WW2, Medieval Japan, Warring Kingdoms China. If a game breaks from this its usually a very specific localized area and time and often as part of a DLC. So every Rome game seems to focus on the expansion and then will have a later Hunnic invasion. Medieval stuff will find some way of having Mongolian or Viking invaders.
One game I like is AoE2 which kind of spans from around 5th century AD to about the 16th century AD. Both with civilizations and technologies. And with the recent expansions that have been released they have grown to include even more civilizations from all over the world to include civilizations and time periods that are never or often seen in games. They got civilizations from Meso and South America, Africa, India, South East Asia, East Asia, the Eurasian Steppe, Europe (East and West), the Mediterranean cultures and such. And each time they add some new ones to the game there is another bit of cultural spice to learn about.
52:25 1982 here. I think we're all in the microgeneration called Xennials. Pronounced ex-ennials. We don't really fit in with neither Gen X nor Millennials. There's micro generations like these everywhere so between Millennials and Gen Z you have Zennials. I don't remember all the names of all the microgenerations but yes, they are indeed a thing.
Very interesting interview as always.
I think the microgenerations are called “cusps”.
As a person who is born in 1998, cusps have always been interesting to me, as I am a Zillennial by most Millennial/Gen Z standards save those that put the line at 2004.
@@iantaakalla8180True. But then you have other people who insist that microgenerations or cusps do not exist and a person born on 31/12/79 is a Gen X'er and a person born the day after 1/1/80 is a Millennial. I just don't see this as being completely true, as in it's not that clean of a cut.
I just want to see a stream of Jackson playing Red Dead Redemption 2.
Did I mention Minecraft being totally WHG (post-The-Tepis non-agrarian manufacturing!!!) on one of your videos yet? I think the last time I said it was over on S.Milo., so it needed to be done here too.
It's crazy when people still say video games are for kids since video games have been adult art forms since before I was born in 1995.
Yeah, games helped me a lot in history and geography stuff at school. Also story telling, philosophy, its great tool for teaching and in the end its great art.
You have the best guests. It's unfortunate that she was treated poorly because of her sex. My career was in public safety, which tends to be male dominated. But I noticed that most of the females in the field were just excellent. Some were not, but the excellent/worthless ratio in females tended to be a lot higher than in males.
1969 here. You two are younglings.
Contacting the makers of Ori might help....Viking band lost In ancient peru...merlin the magician and space aliens
Confused about the grandkids part.
Pretty sure Jackson would enjoy Hellblade alot! All the Futhark puzzles and stuff.
Gamepass plug, yes!
you also don’t always know the age of the people you’re talking to. My six year old daughter recently discovered that there was a text feature on some of her tablet games and she said some really weird stuff to people who may very well have been adults, and we had to take that game away from her. So when you’re talking to someone who doesn’t know who Julius Caesar or Cesar Chavez are, that might not be nearly as weird as it seemed.
Hades is a fantastic game, but man does it have (what I would consider to be) a very steep learning curve and high level of difficulty, particularly for someone who is new to gaming or has been out of gaming for a while. I say this as a 47 year old man who has gamed continuously since the Atari 2600.
46:30 "Vikings vs Zombies" comment.. Yeah, thats pretty much Skyrim right there, one of the most successful games evah!
Haters are gonna hate yo. My new thing...I say yo put down the mirror 😂don't talk about yourself like that 😂omg they go nuts I love it. I have a bachelor in American Constitutional History and would love to professionally collaborate with research that would be a mega honor. Thanks for enduring my hyperelongated tangents I appreciate this.
Still waiting for a game with accurate representations of medieval armour... mordhau’s the best we got now I think but soon we’ll see cinis and blight looks promising too
*Clinks glass of Ensure with Dr. Crawford* - I was born in 1970 and playin' vidya games are kinda mah thing. I love me some RPGs as well as quiet building games like Factorio and Minecraft (well, they *can* be quiet), or even House Flipper.
I don't claim to be any good at any of them, nor do I play on any mode other than easy or normal, but they are damn fun. I'm not trying to impress anyone and I'd rather get to play the whole game then rage quit because the combat became too overwhelming.
Also, you do get used to controllers after a while, although until you do, you will cause your death or create other unintended consequences, like punching an NPC...or a bear....oops. That one was unintentional AND lead to my death.
I do enjoy the chocolate Ensure though. Keeps the controller clean. It's like having a substandard milk shake.
15:40 what??????
My thoughts exactly.
Caesar Chaves east LA community organizer...si se puela....yes we can. LAPD gave the Altzan organizer an early retirement. Shot in the head with a tear gas canister point blank at a bar. Hunter S. Thompson's "The Great White Shark Hunt performs a outstanding journalistic requiem. Ever heard of hades....civilization 2 gold scenario editor.....WW3,1979 is like a modern day version of the boardgame Risk on roids. After that the game was bogged down with too many useless rules. Thank you both I learned a lot
People DO need to learn thicker skin. Don't expect anyone to be nice to you. You don't deserve to be nice to most of the time. It's a very narcissistic view of the world to think everyone is gonna cater to you. Be a duck. Let the water flow off your back. Sticks and stones.