Living the Past through Your Controller

Here's a couple of GREAT articles that I've found on history and video games.

http://www.notevenpast.org/discover/“you-have-died-dysentery”-history-according-video-games

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2010/nov/19/assassin-s-creeed-brotherhood-history

Jeremiah McCall has recently put a book out on the uses of and kinds of games that can be used to present history, called Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History. He has lots of other great ideas, early research, and teach methodology on his website.

http://gamingthepast.net

The articles under "Theory and Practice" are great. In one article "Student-designed text-based simulation games for learning history: A practical approach to using Inform 7 in the history classroom," he discusses the use of a program Inform 7 to create AND have students create text based simulation games. In many of the article he focuses and stress that the interactive ability of video games, helps students to work critically with facts to "do" history. He writes,

History students, consequently, are taught most authentically and meaningfully when they learn to study history as a discipline rather than a subject. This entails moving far beyond the rote learning of teacher’s and textbook’s assertions about the past and developing several critical skills:
    * The ability to evaluate and analyze evidence about the past
   * The ability to combine pieces of evidence into a plausible interpretation of the past
   * The ability to discriminate between the critical and trivial parts of a historical event or process
   * The ability to use these skills to develop defensible, coherent, and meaningful interpretations of the past.
 Taught this way, students come to appreciate the discipline of history as a lens through which they can view the world. They learn to “do” history by forming their own justifiable conclusions about the past. In the process, students learn fundamental skills of analysis, interpretation, critique, and synthesis that will serve them well.

In Gaming the Past, McCall includes an appendix, listing different video games, their status, uses, time periods of historic simulation that can be used in a classroom setting. He also has some lesson plans for doing so outlined.  Many of this same information can be found on his website. (As a side note, I actually "checked out" the book for a month through Amazon Kindle App on the iPad. Here's me learning new things!)

In both articles "'You Have Died of Dysentery'-History According to Video Games" by Robert Whitaker and "Assassin's Creed and the Appropriation of History" by Keith Stuart, one of their major focuses is the incredible graphics and the players submersion into a stunning and rich historical environment.

The question is about the validity and value of that kind of history. Do "counterfactual" histories have a validity? 

I feel like I need to do some more research on how historians, view history through film and historical fiction. I have some general ideas about that, but not as much as I would like. I think that the lens through which to begin investigating history in video games, but I also think that there is something more at stake with the history through the video game.