"What if You Are a Medieval Monarch?": A Crusader Kings III Experience to Learn Medieval History

Abstract

This chapter is about the authors' experiences and observations on a blended world history course that combines classical lecture and discussion components of teaching with video game sessions. The students play strategy video games with a heavy historical focus. The course, named Playing with The Past, is designed to experiment on how to integrate video games on teaching history, especially in order to achieve a higher understanding of the contemporary social, political, economic, and technological context of a given era for different cultures and civilizations. This chapter presents the utilization of Crusader Kings, a renowned grand strategy game series, to teach medieval history, which constitutes an integral part of our course. It also examines how the game provides advantages for an immersive learning environment and how it fails to model medieval history at specific points. Our experiments and observations may be beneficial for designing a general world history course and any history course on specific periods, cultures, and nations that aims to utilize alternative tools to deliver a course.