What do video games teach us?

Medieval history and stochastic terror on the Xbox 360

A reminder that The Chimera will be celebrating its first paid post in about two weeks’ time. I’m planning a freewheeling retrospective of the 160 films I watched last year; rest assured that stage blood will be spilled, and celluloid smoke blown up arses. If you want to get ahead of the game, you can pledge a paid subscription now:

When I was 16, a new teacher joined our school called Mr Walton. This was a pretty fancy school in central London, the sort that has its own archaic names for things like the dining room and all the different year groups, so we had the option to study History of Art¹; this new guy Walton, straight out of Cambridge and barely six years older than us, was going to teach the class a paper on 15^th- and 16^th-century Florence and Venice.

As you might have guessed, the Italian Renaissance is as close to an apotheosis as the subject gets to one. Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Titian, San Marco – these are the bread and butter of all budding art historians, basically the academic art-world answer to the Shakespearean canon or the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven. Popular but still very important stuff, in other words.

Mr Walton was, I think, a little nervous at the beginning of his first lesson. In fact, I think we all were. Our school was only mixed gender from the sixth form onwards, and was all-male up to that point (Yanks: the British school system is very weird, don’t ask). History of Art was a sixth form subject, and a very female one at that – there were only two boys including me in the class, and eight or nine girls – and this was our first class, on the first day of the year, in the first year of mixed school. Meaning 80 per cent of the class was totally new, and almost nobody knew anyone else, and nobody had ever studied the subject before.

Anyway – our new teacher began by artfully sketching out the civic context for the Renaissance in Florence. The city, he told us, had been a republic, or more accurately an oligarchy like the modern-day USA.² It was run by a council of important men – the Signoria – from particular families including, of course, the famous Medici, but also the Rucellai, the Pazzi and the fabulously wealthy Strozzi. This arrangement, Mr Walton explained, led to huge competition between these prominent families to outdo one another in public displays of patronage and civic goodwill towards the people of Florence, as well as a competing interest in fashions inspired by classical Rome.

I think someone had taught Mr Walton (not incorrectly) that to be a good teacher you had to engage your pupils rather than talk at them. That modern pedagogy had a certain call-and-response rhythm to it. And so, throughout this lesson, which was actually very well put together, he peppered his Powerpoint presentation with illustrations and examples of buildings, sculptures and portraits. Every time he reached a new slide, he would pause and ask if anyone knew what it showed. And every time, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I would put my hand up and answer:

“Does anyone have any idea what this is? Yes, Tom?”

“A cathedral?”

“Right, and do you know what it’s called?”

“The Duomo?”

“Exactly. The Duomo was the centre of religious ceremony in Florence from its founding in [insert two minutes of chat about Pope Sixtus IV and the Catholic Church here, until… new slide!] And what about this one? Tom, again?”

“The Ospedale degli Innocenti?”

“Yep. The Ospedale was where unwanted children could be left to be cared for courtesy of the Florentine state, and [insert another two minutes about the stark Vitruvian principles of Brunelleschi’s architecture for the Ospedale, and then…] How about this?”

“That’s Santa Maria Novella.”

If Mr Walton hadn’t known my name at the beginning of the class, he definitely did by the end. In fact, he eventually had to appeal to any of the class members who weren’t me to engage; to answer any question at all. For my part, I was a bit frustrated that nobody else was willing to go out on a limb and offer their own ideas – it was obvious that Walton wouldn’t move on until his questions about the slides were answered, so somebody had to. And yet I did eventually fuck up. He showed us this picture and asked what it was:

Any guesses?

I confidently told him it was a prison. It’s not. It’s the Palazzo Vecchio, where the Florentine Signoria would live and from which they would govern during their elective terms. It’s basically the town hall.

I tell this story – which frankly paints me as a shamefully keen nerd who probably nixed his chance with any of the new girls within about five minutes of setting foot in the classroom – because I knew all these answers because I played video games. Assassin’s Creed II had come out ten months earlier, a game set in 1480s Florence, and I had sunk literally hundreds of hours into it. I hadn’t just seen these buildings in-game; the parkour element of the AC franchise meant that in many cases, I had climbed up and around them. I thought that the Palazzo Vecchio was a prison because in Assassin’s Creed II’s prologue level, the player-protagonist Ezio Auditore da Firenze sees his family betrayed by the evil Pazzi clan, and his father and brother are imprisoned and sentenced to death. They are taken away to… you guessed it: the in-game Palazzo Vecchio.

Only 37 per cent of Britons believe that video games “can be considered art”³, a lower rate of endorsement than for stand-up comedy (44 per cent) or cooking (49 per cent). This is ridiculous, of course. The games industry is worth several hundred billion dollars a year globally; for comparison, Billboard estimates the entire music industry to be worth about £28bn. Video gaming probably makes ten times as much money as music, and is still consistently belittled by media and the general public.

But, even if you think that games somehow don’t meet the bar to be classed as “art” (and if you don’t, you’re a moron), it’s impossible to ignore their scope. Their sheer goddamn cultural impact. They’re amazing, engrossing vehicles for teaching, particularly for boys, and particularly for history. I promise you: more British and American teenagers will have learned about the Italian Renaissance from playing Assassin’s Creed than from visiting the National Gallery or the Tate Britain.