![]() The inaccuracies are real, but I don’t think they detracted from the game, and possibly not from the relatively minimal educational content. ![]() I agree that the game was great for teaching basic trading economics and some maritime history. It would be really cool to update it to fit with the improved PC abilities in the last 20 years. It’s impressive how much the original developers got into a very small program (by today’s gaming standards). This was (and is) a really excellent game. Here’s the intro to the game, compliments of YouTube. You definitely would have had contact with the navy, and not always a positive contact.) The ships you fight are always other merchant vessels or pirates.īut what you do learn is where commodities were cheapest (and most expensive), the historical names of a large number of ports, and how political alliances and territories changed throughout the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. (Especially if you’re British, this is a fiction. One major inaccuracy is that as a merchant vessel captain, you never have any contact with the navy of any nation, yours or another. There are certainly historical inaccuracies, and you definitely don’t learn anything about how to actually handle a ship. You get to pick a nationality from several seafaring European nations: England, France, Holland, Spain, or Portugal. It starts in 1650 you’ll die before the American colonies get their independence. It’s a game in which you, the captain of a trading vessel, trade commodities across the known world, fight enemy nations and pirate ships, collect gold, and work toward promotion within the guild. High Seas Trader came out in the mid-1990s, I think. So I’ve always been a little skeptical of the history people learn through computer games. But this past week as I sat in America and the Sea, I realized that much of the subject we were discussing–early exploration on the oceans–I had learned through a game. But they don’t really teach an accurate view of how world politics and wars work. Don’t get me wrong–a game that involved long drawn-out diplomatic negotiations wouldn’t be that fun. Historical video games on a larger scale, such as Age of Empires or Rise of Nations, though excellent fun, also teach a skewed view of history, most especially that war is always the way alliances and enmities are created. But in real life, pioneers usually had other resources besides what was in their own wagons. There’s no mention of the fact that you may be traveling in a wagon train with, say, a doctor, even if you’re not one yourself. Thus, old games like Oregon Trail, though highly enjoyable for indoor recess, teach that when you’re faced with dysentery, for instance, your only two options are to (a) rest or (b) keep going. History is also more complicated than one person’s ability to control it. Perhaps it’s the old fogey in me that wants to say, “If it’s not hard work, it’s not learning!” Using video or computer games as pedagogical tools has always been a concept that I’ve harbored deep skepticism about.
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