The idea of using video games to teach history is nothing new. One of the oldest history video games, The Oregon Trail, was designed with this exact purpose in mind in 1971.[1] In the following decades, the popularity and technological sophistication of history video games–those with a historical theme or setting–have grown exponentially. The award-winning medieval action role-playing game Kingdom Come Deliverance II sold over five million copies in the first year after its release.[2] It is therefore natural that historians have started asking academic questions about history video games and how they influence younger generations’ understandings of history. However, the quantity of this research is still limited and there is a lot more to be explored and contributed. In my research project “Playing History: How Video Games Can Change The Way We Understand The Past” I sought to add to this growing field by pursuing two questions. How exactly do video games change how we think about history? What is unique about video games in how they communicate information? I surveyed and interviewed players of history video games and used Paradox Interactive’s acclaimed Europa Universalis IV as a case study to answer these questions. By analyzing the unique qualities of video games and Europa Universalis IV’s presentation of historical causation, this project demonstrated the potential of video games to communicate complex historical ideas to an audience already familiar with the medium. I will explore these conclusions here using the concepts of agency and replayability to show how Europa Universalis IV conveys knowledge of historical causation.
Video games are defined by their interactive nature. The player of a game actively influences and changes their experience through their actions, which is markedly different from how a viewer passively watches a film for example. This interactivity is best understood through the concept of agency, as defined by C. Thi Nguyen in his book Games: Agency as Art. Nguyen defines agency in the context of games as a set of temporary goals and actions available to pursue those goals, which the player takes up in order to play the game.[3] For example, when playing the video game Pong, I adopt the goal of scoring eleven points before my opponent, and to do so can move my paddle vertically to intercept the ball and bounce it at my opponent’s edge of the screen. This is not a goal I possess as I go about my daily life, nor do I use the limited action of vertically moving a paddle to achieve my normal goals, like making dinner. I take on the goals and available actions of the game to play it, and then dispose of them when I am finished. But while playing a game, these goals and allowed actions take precedence over any others we might have, allowing players to “submerge ourselves in the temporary agency of the game.”[4] This immersion means that video game players are not simply making mindless choices; they are firmly rooted in a game’s agency, which provides them a deep understanding of cause and effect.
Video games also possess the virtue of replayability. While some games are more replayable than others, unlike a traditional novel or film which plays out exactly the same way every time, a video game can be played repeatedly with differing results. These differences could be whether the player wins or loses, a different narrative outcome to the game’s story, or simply a different pathway the player takes to get to the end of the game. This allows a game to communicate more than just an argument about why an event happened or if it would happen or not; a game can communicate how likely that event is to occur and what causes were most impactful by “modeling difficulty.”[5] How challenging it is to achieve the goals in a game’s agency and what sorts of tools and obstacles a player experiences create a complex picture of causation for the player to learn from.
These ideas of interactivity and replayability are key to understanding Europa Universalis IV, abbreviated as EUIV. It is a historical grand strategy game in which the player controls a country in a historical simulation from the 15thcentury to the 19th century. The game begins in a state that reflects historical reality at a chosen date and then develops into an alternate history simulation driven by the player’s decisions, the decisions of computer-controlled countries, and various historical events that are rigged to occur across a playthrough. The player controls all of their chosen country’s political, economic, military, diplomatic, and social policies, making them the country itself rather than any person. They take on what I call the “agency of the state,” which encompasses the goals the player adopts and the actions they take while controlling any country in the game.
Logo of the Europa Universalis IV videogame. Source: Wikimedia Commons
While EUIV is a resultingly very complicated game, it also has a high level of replayability. No two playthroughs of EUIVare alike, even if playing as the same country, because there are so many variables which can change the course of its simulated history. As a result, it is a video game that is especially well suited to teaching and exploring historical causation.
Historical change and cause and effect are intricate subjects. How historians grapple with questions of causation can be just as complex. Some prefer to attribute the course of history to the actions of influential individuals and key events, often in the form of “great man history,” while others look to large structural factors such as the environment or economic systems as the cause behind historical change. In practice, how historians approach cause and effect is a sliding scale that incorporates both approaches, and most current historians fall somewhere in the middle. In her book Thinking About History, Sarah Maza defines this mixed approach to causation as “productive chaos,” an approach that looks to analyze all sorts of factors, individual and structural, to determine how they contributed to historical change.[6]
Europa Universalis IV reflects this nuanced approach to cause and effect. The player, as an individual actor, has a great amount of influence on the course of the game. Their actions can affect not only their own country but the entire world of the simulation. The player’s decision to declare war against their neighbor could lead to the ruin of their entire country. Or their decision to invest massive amounts of funds into trade infrastructure could result in their country becoming the commercial center of the world. In a different playthrough, these actions might have different outcomes, but in each case, it is the player’s actions and decisions that are crucial to the simulation’s development. The player and their actions are a surrogate for individual-driven change.
Yet at the same time, the player’s agency of the state and their ability to influence the results of the game through it are limited. They are constrained by the structures put in place by the game, systems and large-scale factors which mirror structural forces behind historical change. For example, religion is a constant factor within EUIV. The population of each province, and therefore country, has a dominant religious faith, and this structure is an ever-present factor in the game. The player can convert their population to different religions, promote tolerance or intolerance towards minority faiths, and even engage in religious wars with other countries. But their actions are limited. They cannot, for example, force the population to become atheists. Even if the player chooses not to interact with religion, its influence will still affect their gameplay. Countries of different state religions have diplomatic penalties, a disgruntled minority population might revolt, and the Protestant Reformation will occur whether the players like it or not. While the player is a surrogate for individual factors behind change, the game itself can be seen as a surrogate for structural causes of change.
Another structural factor within the game that constrains the player’s individual agency is colonization. Whether the player takes part in colonization or not, it will still occur in the game world. They are able to influence how it occurs, by leading France to colonize Mexico before another country does, for example, but if they do not engage with that part of gameplay, the computer-controlled countries will still do so, and colonization will happen. This is because the structures of colonialism and incentives for that behavior are built into the game for the player and the computer. The game world is unable to escape the momentum of that systematic trend. The significant variability in how each playthrough develops is limited and guided by structural factors. To illustrate this, I ran two EUIV games with only computer-controlled countries until the year 1628. In the first game, the Americas were primarily dominated by England in Canada and what is now the eastern United States, Portugal in most of South America, and Spain with the Caribbean and the rest of the mainland Americas. The second game was almost entirely different. Spain controlled eastern North America while Portugal controlled the Caribbean, Central America, and the rest of North America besides northern Canada. France was the dominant force in South America, with other colonial empires possessing small pieces, and England held few territories at all. The shape colonization takes can differ, but it always occurs. This demonstrates how unique alternate historical realities are created in each playthrough.
Man playing Europa Universalis IV. Created on Canva, Wikimedia Commons
This is exciting in an academic context because EUIV communicates that complex understanding to its players. By taking on the agency of the state and engaging interactively with decision-making in the game, players gain a nuanced understanding of cause and effect in history. Europa Universalis IV and history video game players in the University of Maine student body were surveyed for “Playing History,” and nine of those surveyed volunteered to participate in a semi-formal interview process to discuss their gaming experience. Interviewed and surveyed players demonstrated a complex understanding of historical causation. Many placed a great deal of importance on their own actions in determining the course of the simulation in a playthrough. These players also acknowledged that the mechanics of the game and the actions of computer-controlled countries played a significant role in their experience. Others explained that they felt the player had a roughly equivalent impact on the game as structural factors. One player even went as far as arguing that they are less important than structural factors and computer-controlled countries.[7] But all of these responses demonstrated an understanding that the causes behind simulated historical changes in the game were a mix of structural and individual ones.
Players demonstrated this same sophisticated understanding of causation when asked questions about their understanding of history. Again, some players favored structural factors, some favored the impact of individuals, and some argued they were equal, but all acknowledged their inseparability. A common interpretation was that individuals are products of historical structures that they can steer or shape but not necessarily overturn. One interviewee expressed that individuals “surfed social forces.”[8] Another used history video games themselves to explain how they understood historical causation, arguing that the player’s actions are constantly impacted by a game’s systems, and they are also altering the state of those systems with their actions.[9] Across the board, interviewed players expressed a nuanced view of causes of historical change, both in Europa Universalis IV and real life. Through the immersive interactivity players engage with when adopting the game’s agency, EUIV communicates the complex historical idea of causation to its players. It is able to shape how we understand history.
This ability to communicate complex historical ideas to the player is an exciting power of video games. As historians continue to increasingly recognize video games as a media form to be taken seriously, this serves as one more reason to do so. There is a great deal more research to be done on the subject and recent works such as Tore Olsson’s Red Dead’s History, Jeremiah McCall’s Gaming the Past, and Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s Slave Revolt on Screen are pointing the way. While “Playing History” revealed intriguing insights about history video games, it only scratched the surface. For one, the project’s sample size of surveyed and interviewed players was modest. More research on a larger scale would help us further understand how video games impact their player’s understanding of history. History video games also come in all shapes and sizes, from strategy games like EUIV to narrative games like the previously mentioned Kingdom Come Deliverance II. Further research into what historical ideas different types of games can explore and communicate is needed. History video games are a subject full of possibilities for public and academic history alike, and with the recent release of EUIV’s sequel Europa Universalis V, there is no better time than the present to study how we play the past.
Chapman “Chappy” Hall is a History PhD student at George Mason University and a Graduate Affiliate at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. His research interests are centered on French colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, history video games, and digital history.
[1] R. Philip Bouchard, “How I Managed to Design the Most Successful Educational Computer
Game of All Time,” The Philipendium, June 29, 2017, https://medium.com/the-philipendium/how-i-managed-to-design-the-most-successful-educational-computer-game-of-all-time-4626ea09e184.
[2] “Five million Henrys are now adventuring in Bohemia!” Steam, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II,
February 12, 2026, https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1771300/view/530995512961141966?l=english.
[3] C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4-5.
[4] Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, 10.
[5] Gonzalo Frasca, Mark J. P. Wolf, and Bernard Perron, “Simulation Versus Narrative Introduction to Ludology,” essay, in The Video Game Theory Reader, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 228.
[6] Sarah C. Maza, Thinking about History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 178.
[7] Chapman Hall, “Playing History: How Video Games Can Change The Way We Understand The Past,” Honors College, 2024, 83, https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/874.
[8] Hall, “Playing History,” 90.
[9] Hall, “Playing History,” 90-91.
