Interview with Adam Clulow about his article “From Shōgun to Ghost of Tsushima”
Read Adam Clulow’s article “From Shōgun to Ghost of Tsushima.” The Journal of Japanese Studies | Volume 49, Number 2, Summer 2023 pp. 395-416 10.1353/jjs.2023.a903469 Clulow provides insight into how educators can engage with video games and discusses what they can offer to the classroom when historians design them.
INTERVIEW with Adam Clulow
In this interview with Erin Trumble, Clulow provides insight into how educators can engage with video games and discusses what they can offer to the classroom when historians design them. He was interviewed for JJS by
Trumble: 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?
Clulow: 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.
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