Adam Clulow’s essay “From Shōgun to Ghost of Tsushima” appears in the summer 2023 issue of JJS. It explores how popular media has created interest in Japanese history and how educators can use video games as pedagogical tools. In this interview, Clulow provides insight into how educators can engage with video games and discusses what video games can offer to the classroom when they are designed by historians. He was interviewed for JJS by Erin Trumble, a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
You open the article with James Clavell’s Shogun: A Novel of Japan before comparing it to the Ghost of Tsushima, a video game released in 2020. What do video games, as works of historical fiction, bring to the table that other mediums don’t or can’t?
Great question. I would say immediately:
- video games are incredibly popular and have become a key driver for students coming into our classrooms;
- video games are interactive and generate high levels of engagement for players;
- video games come with expansive worlds created by large teams of designers that often have striking hidden depths.
To expand on this, there are a few characteristics that make video games special. First and most obviously, people play them in huge numbers. The global industry has recently surpassed $200 billion in total sales and is moving rapidly to $300 billion. For university students in particular, video games are utterly pervasive. According to surveys, more than 70 per cent of college students play video games, even more watch gaming content streamed on a range of services, and the overwhelming majority report some exposure to video games across multiple platforms. In most of my classes, it’s rare to find a student who doesn’t play video games. At the same time, video games have become an increasingly important gateway for majors. Many students who enter our classrooms come to history via historically based games which proliferate across multiple platforms. So we have to meet students where they are, and video games are a big part of this.
Second, video games are highly interactive which makes them a particularly exciting medium. I love historical fiction and the way it can be wonderfully immersive. But the best video games allow players to develop alternative pathways through the story with very different consequences. This means that one game can be played in a range of different ways which makes games especially interactive.
Third, video games often include expansive worlds. Ghost of Tsushima, for example, takes more than 50 hours to play through. It is a massive open world game built by a large team of writers, designers, and consultants that has one required storyline but dozens of alternate quests, characters, and experiences that serve to offset the problematic binaries at the center of the game. A typical play-through including side quests takes players into a sprawling world populated with a wide range of characters. Even if the main quest is problematic, you can usually find interesting teaching points hidden in the outer corners of video games.
This is not to say that video games are always productive, and I’m very selective about the ones I incorporate in my classes, but I do think certain games can be valuable teaching tools.
Ghost of Tsushima is not historically accurate, nor is it trying to be, but it does create a vast world. Are there any parts of that world that you find useful in helping expand students’ minds and getting them to approach the history of Japan in new ways?
Ghost of Tsushima is indeed historically inaccurate at a number of key junctures but it’s not entirely fair to say that its designers have no interest in trying to create a historically accurate world. Rather, the designers made it clear that they were not bound by history. So whenever they felt that the history had to be altered to advance the game’s plot and gameplay, the designers did so.
This willingness to bend historical facts is clearest in the main quest where the designers really had to reinvent the Mongol invasions in the service of what they believed was a more compelling storyline. But in the side quests, where the pressing weight of games needs was less heavy, there is in fact a great deal of history. While it’s not footnoted history backed up by primary sources, there is a huge amount that we as history teachers can work with and numerous entry points for students.
One example I talk about in the article is female samurai. Many students arriving in a Japanese history class assume that samurai were men, that women played a limited role in medieval society, or that the subordinate roles evident in warrior households in the early modern period stretched back to the thirteenth century and earlier. That’s not the picture the game presents and I think interesting pathways open up by exploring the changing status of women in this period. You can use the game as a hook and then connect it to scholarship.
Japanese history is fascinating, but Japan is no longer the economic superpower it used to be. For this reason, we have to find new ways to draw students into our classes. I believe video games are one way to do this. But, equally important, video games can be really fun and productive to teach with.
Beyond the utility of video games for teaching history, your article addresses the fundamental problem of truth. Historians get easily upset about how popular culture—no matter whether novels, television, films, or video games—inaccurately represents historical events. But isn’t the job of the historian to constantly rewrite historiography and, thus, in many ways “correct” past historiographies that we no longer find “accurate”?
Interesting question. I would agree. I teach a whole class on the samurai. In this class, I talk about the very different ways the samurai/bushi have been interpreted from the nineteenth century all the way through to today. When I analyze video games, I ask students to engage in a historiographical exercise to figure out what books the game designers likely consulted. They quickly find that developers indeed did research (often lots of it) but they mainly used more dated studies that had been hugely influential in their time and retain a prominent status but have since been eclipsed by newer research. In this way, we use games to engage in what is essentially a historiographical exercise, figuring out what works were used and then understanding how scholarship has evolved. I have a tremendous amount of respect for video game designers who produce elaborate worlds on a very compressed timeline and so I try to figure out what sources they used and how this shaped their presentations. This kind of forensic exercise is both interesting and valuable as it shows students how scholarship is constantly evolving.
What do you find are the best ways to engage with your students who have enjoyed these video games, while also confronting the ways in which the games are inaccurate or reductive?
I’ve tried a lot of strategies. At first, I just critiqued games and pointed out where they diverged from history. This was not successful as students push back when you insist games they love are highly reductive. For example, when I first started teaching with Ghost of Tsushima soon after its release in 2020, it was mainly as a target. I devoted extensive time in class to exploring the worst aspects of the Mongol-versus-bushi binary that lies at the center of the main quest. While this was productive, it proved frustrating for many students who experience video games in far more nuanced ways that caused them to push back against this reductive framing. They pointed me to the scale of the world, to the different ways to play through medieval Japanese society, and to the game’s diverse characters.
I have two strategies now. First, I look for places where games surprise. This is occasionally in the main quest but more often in the huge open worlds that are part of games like Ghost of Tsushima. These are often filled with fascinating historical content. For example, in Ghost of Tsushima the player interacts with a number of blind lute priests (biwa hōshi). These itinerant minstrels provide a great opening to explore how the warrior tales they recited permeated bushi society, shaping expectations and behavior. In other words, I try engage with these games by looking for different entry points into history. Here I’m aided by my students who often know these games intimately. Second, I challenge my students to do better by designing not whole games but rather chapters of games as a class assignment. Students respond well to these kind of assignments and often come up with strikingly creative ideas.
In the article, you have a call to action for historians to get involved with video game making and mention that you have some of your students design their own games. If we consider video games as pedagogical tools, what benefits are achieved by having students design these games that can’t be achieved by writing an essay?
I’ve worked with groups of students to design two complete video games through a UT project called JapanLab. I can say without question that this produced the best learning experience I’ve ever seen at university. For Ghosts over the Water, for example, which is a game that examines the diplomatic aftermath of the Matthew Perry expedition, the script totals more than 130,000 words. To write this script, the student designers read dozens of books and articles. They delved deep into the intricacies of Japanese politics and they crafted compelling, believable storylines that reflected current scholarship.
Students take ownership of such learning experiences because these games, if developed to completion, can be published on gaming sites such as Steam and released to the public. They also get incredibly excited to work with professionals in the gaming industry. So at the University of Texas we invited the narrative director from Xbox Publishing to work with our students in a series of workshops.
While the essay form is a valuable tool, I believe that students graduating university today need to develop a suite of digital skills, often labeled as digital dexterities, to compete in a modern labor market in which they will be called upon to move between different platforms while engaging in frequent upskilling. This is where the experience of designing video games, which requires a range of skills, is so useful.
What benefits does playing video games, if they were to be designed by historians, have that traditional media, like books and articles, don’t?
I wouldn’t say that video games have more benefits than books or articles. The monograph and the peer-reviewed journal article remain of course the gold standard for our field. For any successful class, getting students to engage with books and articles is key.
Video games represent something different. They are ubiquitous for college students today. The most successful games are stunningly successful. In just three days after its release, Ghost of Tsushima, which retails for more than $60, sold more than 2.4 million copies. Two years later, this figure had risen to almost ten million copies with a film adaptation in the works.
But games often follow fairly predictable storylines. Games designed by students and professors can do something different: they can depart from the predictable to incorporate the best of current scholarship. Such games are not going to have a massive reach, but they can be deployed in high school and university classrooms across the world, where there is an acute appetite for high-quality, free, digital resources. Once there, they can effectively challenge some of the recurring stereotypes connected with Japanese history that permeate so many video games.
One might (mis)read your article as a call for historians to become video game developers. Should it be read instead as a call to become more collaborative and to acknowledge more fully that the author is indeed dead? What other implications might the end of the lone author have for the writing and teaching of history?
I wouldn’t say that the author is dead. Single-author monographs remain hugely important in our field. Rather, I would say that we can also work collaboratively with our students to produce exciting new projects. Technology has opened up new possibilities for historians that I think we can productively embrace. This doesn’t displace traditional publishing. It’s a way to reach students and then to create educational resources that can be distributed for free.
Do you have a top ten list of Dos and Don’ts if one were interested in following your example?
I’m experimenting and improvising every day so I definitely don’t have ten dos and don’ts. I’m only really guided by one rule: trust your students. When I started the video game project, I wasn’t sure if four history majors with no specialized background would be able to design a fully functional video game. Because of this, I aimed low in our first meetings. I suggested the design team work on just one chapter or perhaps an even smaller unit. In fact, they immediately decided to develop a fully functional game with multiple chapters and proceeded to do exactly that. Whenever they encountered an obstacle, they invariably overcame it. So now in this project I try to create a framework and a support structure for students and then allow them to carry the project forward. That’s never let me down and I’m constantly in awe of what students are able to accomplish through their talent, drive, energy, and excitement.
Adam Clulow is a professor of East Asian History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan and Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire and is involved with several digital history projects, including an interactive project focused on the famous seventeenth-century case in what is now Indonesia. In 2019, he founded Epoch: History Games Initiative which aims to make historically based video games for educational use, including in high schools, community colleges, and universities. Along with Kirsten Cather and Mark Ravina, he directs JapanLab, which creates digital content in the subject areas of Japanese history, literature, and language that can be used by teachers around the world.
Erin Trumble, a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studies gender in early modern Japan, paying particular attention to the construction of femininities. Her past work focused on fighting women, how they were portrayed in woodblock prints and literature, and how they participated in the Boshin War of 1868-69. Her current project involves looking at how intersections between age and gender affected identity making for retired women in the Edo period.
This interview was made possible by financial support from the Japan Foundation, New York.