I’ve been really getting back into photography on this trip, and took about 450 pictures while I was in Tibet for eight days. I primarily host them on my deviantART page, but I figured I’d cross-post a few of the better ones here for all of you fine people who are doubtlessly pissing your pants in anticipation of everything I write.

Ask most of the people in the know and they’ll agree that if you aren’t gaming on a PC, you’re getting some sort of watered down experience. Games developed for a personal computer are generally more complex as the range of input options is vastly increased over that of a two-handed controller tethered to what amounts to an underpowered computer wired to your television (i.e. a console). A mouse and keyboard are tools near universally understood by now, given that you’re reading this on a computer and your grandmother probably emailed you this morning. Furthermore, the gaming culture stereotype persists that PC gamers are generally more intelligent than console users, who tend to fall into the frat boy, dorm room demographic.

"Sorry, what was that? I can't hear you over the sound of my golden locks flowing in the wind."

In short, the PC is where it is at, particularly if you’re trying to learn something. I’ll provide two examples, bearing in mind that I’m an East Asian historian.

SHOGUN: TOTAL WAR

(Creative Assembly, 2000)

What a game! I struggle to write objectively about this one as it was probably, more than anything else, the one thing that got me interested in history. To think the game is ten years old now makes me feel pretty old as well. Sigh

Shogun is set during Sengoku Jidai, Japan’s medieval counterpart to the Chinese Warring States period. In the game’s main campaign mode, you select one of several clans vying for control of Japan. You are then left to manage this state, from the ground up. Manage the economy, send diplomatic envoys to rival daimyo, use spies and geishas to gather intelligence, deploy ninjas to conduct assassinations of generals, curb the influence of Portuguese traders spreading Christianity with their guns, conscript armies, and conquer lands through capture of key enemy fortifications. All of this is in your hands.

Two separate interfaces are used to interact with the game’s representation of medieval Japan. The one you’ll spend a lot of time staring at is a beautiful hand-painted map of Japan.

Soldiers are represented in a style vaguely reminiscent of Risk; each is given a token on the board, and armies are assembled by combining units of foot soldiers, archers and horse-mounted warriors into one unit. Spies and watchtowers enable you to see into neighboring territory, so you’ll be aware enough if your neighbor is amassing troops at your doorstep. And inevitably, you will be fighting in this game. Bismarck would have been a big fan of this one, as a lot of blood and iron were involved in my dozens of conquests of Japan.

In spite of notoriously bad strategic AI since the series’ inception, each entry has shined for its continuously improving battle interface. When armies square off, all comparisons with Risk are cast aside in favor of giving you real-time control of your army. Hundreds (thousands, if you had the system to handle it!) of individual soldiers facing off with arrows flying, cavalry seeking to outflank your lines, and a multitude of other tactical decisions to be made on the fly. INTENSE.

As if that weren’t enough, the introductory video contains footage taken from the 1985 Akira Kurosawa masterpiece “Ran,” ninja assassination attempts rewarded you with cinematics that were either kickass (if the attempt succeeded) or hilarious (if it failed), and you could get advice from an old samurai in your own personal frickin’ throneroom. This game had everything. It’s dated to the point of probably having problems with 64bit operating systems, looks like a joke compared to the most modest flash game these days, and is fairly difficult to find (outside of this excellent bundle deal!), but this one still looks great through the rose-tinted shades of memory.

“That’s all great, but what can we learn from this?” Well, how about the frustrations of managing an agricultural-based economy at a period where you constantly need to pool manpower to defend territory from your primary agricultural labor force? Perhaps something about allocating limited resources for development of a small state while ensuring that your army is well fed? The role of subterfuge in statecraft, perhaps in the creation of a dominant historical narrative? Maybe even something about Japanese xenophobia against western nations, via your interactions with Dutch and Portuguese traders? Hell, even in the screenshot above you can learn some geography for free.

“But surely you’re among the minority. I mean, this is just a piece of software, right?” Tell that to the good people at Total War Center, where hundreds of PC nerds work tirelessly researching period histories to craft mods for Shogun and its successors. I’ve been involved in one or two mods for Rome that never came to fruition, and half the reason I left was I couldn’t foot the bill of being a designer/historian. These guys often do both, and they do both exceptionally well, doing a lot to repair buggy AI and otherwise extend the life of these incredible games.

And speaking of incredible games with fanatical fan bases…

CIVILIZATION IV

(Firaxis Games, 2005)

This is an absolute Jesus of a game. I was a latecomer to the Civilization franchise (which has been around since 1990), jumping in at the point when Civilization III was available for about $20 and Civ IV hadn’t been released yet. Even compared to the relatively cerebral fare of the Total War series, there was a fairly steep barrier to entry to Civ III that took me a month or two to overcome. Then I moved to Texas and turned into a rock star blah blah blah and didn’t game that much for a little while.

Civilization IV, which became the game it is today after two large expansions and litany of game balancing patches, refines many of the experiences found in its predecessor and does so with unparalleled panache. Starting a new campaign of Civ IV is like starting a cocaine habit, only you’ve already paid for a lifetime supply of the junk and there’s no nasty nosebleeds (just insomnia-induced headaches). Long-time fans of the series will tell you best that this game is an absolute time sink; I personally had a hard time balancing the second semester of junior year with a particularly engaging game as the Vikings. Days pass by like mere seconds during this game’s high points, and if you don’t believe me, try playing it on a trans-Pacific flight.

“What do you actually do in this game?” You begin as the leader of one of several dozen civilizations (ranging from the Americans to the Koreans, from the Mali Empire to the Aztecs) and are challenged by His Holiness, Sid Meier to build an empire to withstand the tests of time. Your civilization builds cities, gathers scarce resources, researches new technologies (from The Wheel to The Internet and everything in between), conducts diplomacy and trade with neighbors, fields armies to capture resources and crush Montezuma (let’s face it, it’s kill or be killed with that bastard), spread culture, founds religions, and adopts the State Property civic as soon as possible (best civic IMHO). Factor in population control of individual cities, the occasional barbarian invasion, and the prospect of Gandhi with nukes, and you’ve got yourself a real winner here.

Where does learning come? In a word, everywhere. For all practical purposes, every single element of Civ IV is explained in great detail in the Civilopedia, an in-game Wiki that describes everything from the differences between sailing ships to the origins of religions. And that’s only the deliberately-crafted informative portion of the game. This game hammers home lessons about the role of inflation in bringing down governments (as often the most effective means of combating is a revolution and the subsequent turn or two of anarchy), the means by which Europeans came to dominate so much of the last two-hundred years of history (research gunpowder first and you will be in position to steamroll your feudal adversaries), and the extent to which history is built upon control of resources like land, food and (recently) fossil fuels.

I was playing a game using the “Rhys and Fall of Civilization” mod (excellent and distributed with the final build of the game) as Japan a few months ago. After clearing the islands of barbarians and more or less maximizing the use of available land, I began to explore the rest of Asia.

Japan, as you can see (and probably already knew) is not exactly huge, and you eventually will reach a limit of horizontal and vertical growth (i.e. no more food can be milked from the land, no more land to conquer). There are also few natural resources on the island that cannot be obtained elsewhere, and (upon researching the requisite technologies), it becomes apparent that Japan lacks any fossil fuels.

Next door, however, the Korean peninsula is only a stone’s throw away and provides land, resources and (eventually) desperately-needed coal. From there, China’s riches beacon.

I’ve studied World War II in Asia for a few years, done a dearth of reading on the topic, and yet it was Civilization IV, a video game, that helped me more than years of study to understand the motives of the Japanese in their expansion. In a word, economics. The only way to “win” this particular game (beyond peace-mongering means like culture or science) was to expand into China. Here I sat with Japan in the 17th century, building up an invasion force to seize cities on the Chinese coast before they could build up enough strength to counterattack, when suddenly it clicked. “OH,” I said aloud.

“Oh,” indeed. This is only the most profound example on hand; there have been dozens of instances like this one where I’ve come to understand history a little better through this incredible game. I would go so far as to posit the following: you could, with minimal difficulty, incorporate Civilization IV into the classroom as an instructor to demonstrate a few things. Hell, I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to say that this could easily be made into homework for a social studies course. Go ahead and challenge me on this.

“Alright, so there are a few examples of fairly dense, historically-based games that might have some didactic merit to them. So what? Most people are just going to play Call of Duty anyway, and how are they supposed to learn from that?“. Well, I’ll tell you how. Next time.

OPTION 1

Stranger: How did you get interested in history?

Jeff: Video games. I started playing Shogun: Total War when I was about twelve and loved it.

Stranger: (snidely) Video games, eh? That’s really dumb. I don’t play those, I’m a serious person.

OPTION 2

Stranger: What got you interested in history in the first place?

Jeff: Video games, actually. I found this game called Shogun: Total War when I was about twelve and I learned a lot from it about medieval Japan.

Stranger: (polite but confused) Oh! Interesting…yeah.

Seriously, people? Video games! Like they’re some sort of esoteric, unheard of entertainment medium at this point. It’s two thousand and goddamn ten, ladies and gents. Our species has been “gaming” for thousands of years and we’ve had the technology to take those games and throw them onto television screens now since the Carter years, if not earlier. And in that period, the medium has grown in complexity and sophistication. It has faced the same social hurdles that have been jumped by the written word, the song, the surreal painting, the photograph, the silent film, the talking film, television, comic books, and the pornographic industry. And, trust me, the medium isn’t going to recede into the twilight anytime soon. In all likelihood, it will continue to grow.

How can games be used? Clearly they can be used in an educational setting. My generation and the one before it were in love with a wonderful bit of “edutainment” called The Oregon Trail (available here as abandonware, though you’ll need to do a little software wrangling to get it working if I remember correctly). This game had fricking everything: math problems, basic economics, reading for clues as to which strategy would guarantee your family’s survival, ethical dilemmas (“Jimmy has dysentery! Should we slow down and all starve, or press on and lose him to save the family?”), logistics management, period-appropriate music, geography, hunting (!), and gravestones to mark your prior defeats along the trail. GameSpot, arguably the top online source of video game news until about two years ago, did a special feature on The Oregon Trail in their Greatest Games of All Time section several years ago, and it does better justice to this fairly incredible monument to the didactic value of gaming than I could.

“But Jeff, The Oregon Trail was designed specifically to be used be educators to instruct students about a specific period in American history! There are thousands of video games; how are all of them supposed to be of educational merit?”

My honest answer to this sort of question is, “If you’re a shallow dumbass who isn’t able to see the relative merits of all things, there might be nothing to take away from anything at all, much less video games. But if you’re willing to dig a bit, you can learn from anything. You can learn from Ikea furniture, a roll of toilet paper, or from the schizophrenic old man who digs through the garbage outside of your dorm, much less something which took a hundred people ten thousand man hours to complete.” All of this is a matter of perspective, and my perspective is that of a life-long learner. I don’t understand how you could go through life not starving for further knowledge about everything, seeking to improve yourself endlessly. It’s not like anybody (or anything) is going to do it for you.

Stay tuned for more.

I’ve also managed to network with Barry Sautman, author of a superb article “‘Vegetarian Between Meals’: The Dalai Lama, War and Violence” in Duke University’s positions journal of East Asian studies earlier this year. This article is just the sort of thing the clove smoking masses in the PNW should read, to get it out of their little heads that our balding friend is some sort of magical, mystical peacemaker who can do no wrong. He’s certainly got no authority over this Buddhist.

The People’s Republic of China is the world’s largest construction site. Upon arrival in Beijing, one is immediately met by cranes stretching across the horizon. I was the witness to more construction sites in the Chinese capital than I have most likely witnessed in twenty-one years in the United States. And long gone are the days of kitschy but beautiful Soviet-style architecture on the Greco-Roman model; one needs only to have seen a postcard of the ever-shifting skyline in Shanghai, or to have watched the games of 29^th Olympiad, to see that China is destined to become not only political and economic, but perhaps also the cultural powerhouse of the 21^st century. It has already certainly become the dream home of thousands of young architects, who are effectively given permission to pursue their wildest dreams here.

This wave of construction is no coastal facade, either. In truth, I would say that it is even more startling to see how much is being built in the interior provinces. The ancient capital of China, Xi’an, which was described to me by a local guide as a “modest” town of twelve million, is built around the old city center which has retained its ancient wall. Around much of this wall, high-rise apartment buildings and banks are being built to provide a second barrier to the heart of old China. Xi’an doesn’t seem to have lost any of its charm in the wake of this rapid vertical growth, however. The people of this town were among the most courteous hosts I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, the food is wonderful, and the museums and historical sites are rivaled only by the Forbidden City in Beijing.

But what about the far-removed interior of China? Surely in the southwest, isolated from the coast and lacking the pull that well-known cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tianjin, will have missed out on this seemingly endless procession of new buildings. This is not the case. The Chinese government has essentially co-opted a mantra used by our own government over a century ago: “Go West.” Chengdu, the largest city in western China, is a growing city of eleven million people; simply looking out my window, I see no fewer than six construction sites. Sichuan University, the state-operated post-secondary school of choice in west China, is home to over 70,000 students and has nearly completed construction on its fourth campus within the municipal limits of Chengdu. The city has also managed to attract a large number of foreign investors, the most widely touted being Intel. Indeed, the information technology sector in this town is striking, for here one may also find Nokia, IBM, Siemens, HP, Xerox, Motorola, and Microsoft. The banking sector has also exploded here in the heart of the Chinese southwest, where JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and CitiGroup vie for customers with domestic financial giants like the Agricultural Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and the imposing China Construction Bank. It seems oddly fitting, given the fact that Chengdu was the first place where printed paper was issued, almost one thousand years ago.

It goes without saying that none of these commercial ventures are more than thirty years old, and their arrival has made the average urban center in China a much taller place. China continues to grow, economically and spatially. How long will this continue? Martin Jacques, whose recently published tome When China Rules the World will become the textbook on contemporary China for the next decade, projects that another ten years of steady growth are to be expected. By that time, the size of the Chinese economy will be ready to surpass that of the United States between five and seven years. Not half a year ago (though the exact date varies depending upon one’s source), China officially displaced Japan as the world’s second economic power. This is not abstraction; it is happening right now, outside my window. China is building to ensure that this will be the Chinese century.

Postscript: Just sent an abbreviated version of this to the Tacoma News-Tribune. We’ll see how that goes, given my luck with getting published since I arrived here.

I am going to China.

Not in a small, measured experience; I will be visiting at least four major cities (possibly five, if we are able to fly into Lhasa, Tibet) over a four month period.

Excitement mingles with anticipation, both of which meet up with and have several drinks with a part of me that is becoming increasingly aware that, in order for me to get where I would truly like to be in the future, I am going to be forsaking a lot of this “fun” and “freedom” stuff that I could otherwise enjoy. Whether it be the cloistered halls of the University of Chicago or the isolation of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, graduate school is in my future and it is there that I will surrender some fundamental part of me, something I guess you could call “youth.” The gig will be up. It will be time to cultivate a truly resplendent beard, purchase a handsome pipe, and subscribe to weighty academic journals to monitor the progress of my peers. All of these things sound awesome, but there is an opportunity cost associated with that life.

But for four months, I will be able to approach something new with a naivete and an excitement that will be forced underground in the fall of 2011. I will cultivate language skills, see sights that my ancestors (hell, my relatives within living memory) only dreamed of seeing, and I will do all of this in a place with food spicy enough to keep me entertained. This is all good.

May I meet the rising of phenomena with equanimity and balance. May I meet the passing of phenomena with equanimity and balance.

I was published in a journal called Korean Quarterly in February, presented a paper at the Thompson Rivers University Undergraduate Conference in Philosophy, History and Political Science in Jaunary, and gave a speech at the Third Annual Powell and Heller Holocaust Conference at Pacific Lutheran. I’ve been invited to my second private function at President Loren Anderson’s house. I feel like I am becoming a part of the “establishment” or whatever. Maybe it’s time to invest in a blue suit.

My holiday was fun, in a what-the-hell-is-going-on sort of way. I landed in Abilene, slept, jumped in a truck and drove a 700-mile loop that took me through San Antonio and College Station to the effect that I saw several of my expatriated Hawaiian friends. Got back to Abilene, slept, then drove to western Wisconsin for about a week. Got back to Texas, dropped some money on records and video games (eat your heart out) and saw Avatar. Now I need to see that junk again in 3D, as it apparently will rip out my kidneys and beat me over the head with them with its powers of kickass and beatass (which are two different things, probably worth writing about at length at some point). Now I’m back to a place that has actual changes in elevation, water, and a distinct lack of old flames, people who want to kill me, and combination feed store/steak house/private club/donkey pen/donut shops.

I couldn’t make this shit up, people.

(Warning: Foul language, rapping, blasphemy, etc. ahead)