Abstract

Tore Olsson does not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) and teaches with commercial games instead, building his courses Red Dead History and Grand Theft America around Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series. The games supply a short daily opener and the structure of a syllabus on U.S. history since 1980, framed by the neoliberal order and split into a city by day and a city by night. Kwok Leong Tang traces the shift from chatbots to coding agents that loop through tool calls, and argues that a historian can describe a game in plain English while keeping the research and the final check. He shows an Ace Attorney style game set in Qing China that took 45 minutes to build from one novel, a version built on primary documents, and a one-prompt website that yields a single HTML (HyperText Markup Language) file.

Chapters

Transcript

AI-generated transcript. It was produced from the recording by speech recognition and cleaned up with AI. It has not been edited by the speaker and may contain errors. The captions on YouTube are AI-generated in the same way. Each timestamp links to that moment in the video.

[0:04] So, I think we should begin. Welcome officially to our panel on Playable Pasts, Making Classroom Games with AI. My name is Tore Olsson, and as this conference does not have formal moderators or chairs of panels, despite the fact that I am presenting, I am going to moderate as much as I can this session. So in this session, you're going to hear two perspectives on how digital games made both with and without generative AI can serve as a bridge between students and perhaps the wider public and our profession as historians. And I know not everyone here is a trained historian, but I am, so it's hard for me to get out of thinking about our profession. We're going to have two presentations that are about 15 minutes in length and then plenty of time for discussion and questions to follow. Let me begin by introducing my co-panelist, Kwok Leong Tang of Harvard University. Kwok Leong is the managing director of the Digital China Initiative and a lecturer

[1:09] in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard. Trained as a historian, he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a PhD in history and Asian studies from Pennsylvania State University. In recent years, Kwok Leong's work has centered on integrating emerging Gen AI technologies into humanities research. He has organized and led workshops on adopting Gen AI in Chinese studies and broader humanistic scholarship at Harvard and other institutions. I will also say a few brief introductory words about myself. My name is Tore Olsson. I serve as the Lindsay Young Professor of History at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I'm the author of two books. The first is an academic monograph on 20th century U .S. and Mexican history called Agrarian Crossings, which came out with Princeton University Press in 2017. And more recently, a second book, which is a public

[2:09] -facing trade book called Red Dead's History, which came out with St. Martin's 24, and which I'll touch on briefly during my presentation, I'm now working on a third book that synthesizes U.S. history since 1980 for non-academic readers. So Kwok Leong asks that I present first, and I'm happy to lead us off today. And in my talk, I want to discuss how I've used two popular commercial video game franchises, Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto, as an inviting new audiences into serious historical study, both in the classroom and beyond academia. Kwok Leong will then address how he's used AI to make historical games in the classroom with students, providing a useful counterpoint. Now, before I begin, I do want to make three important disclaimers about what I'm not doing with my work. First off, despite the title of this panel and despite the title of this

[3:11] conference, I don't actually integrate Gen AI or writing, so don't be disappointed when you don't hear me talk about that topic. Secondly, I'm not trained in, nor do I consider myself a practitioner of, the discipline of game studies. That field has done very important interdisciplinary work in reading and making sense of digital games, but that's not really my focus. I'm a historian, first and foremost, and I see games as a tool for doing public humanities outreach, whether in the classroom or beyond. Thirdly, last disclaimer, do not interpret my use of these commercial video game franchises as my endorsement or celebration of these games. They are both complicated pieces of fictional pop culture. They are sometimes thoughtful and insightful. They are sometimes crude and juvenile, and they're pretty much always violent, let's be honest. But ultimately, whether or not an academic like myself engages

[4:14] these games, they're going to remain enormously popular. My only mission is to pair them with deeper historical understanding and awareness. With that being said, let me share the story of how I came to teach and write about video games, which is a story that I could not at all have predicted 10 years ago. Now, I did grow up as a I spent much of my adolescence in this hobby, not to the benefit of my high school GPA by any means whatsoever. And when I started college in 2000, I made the fateful decision to quit for what I would assume would be forever, to take a hiatus, an indefinite hiatus, so I could succeed in school. I kept this promise for 20 years, which was long enough for me to earn a Ph.D. and get a faculty position, publish a first monograph, and earn tenure at my university. But then in 2020, COVID lockdowns convinced me to dip my toes back in, not for professional purposes, but just as a hobby to pass the time.

[5:15] And I did not at all, in reconnecting with this adolescent pastime of mine, imagine that it would have any impact on my career as a historian. Well, one of the very first games that I played in my second incarnation as a gamer was a game called Red Dead Redemption 2. This game is now the fourth best-selling video game of all time. It has sold nearly 90 million copies. For those not familiar with it, Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in a fictionalized America of 1899. And it follows your protagonist named Arthur Morgan, a member of this fictional gang of outlaws, the Van der Linde gang, as they flee authority across a fictionalized West, deep South and Southern Appalachia, in addition to a Caribbean island. Now, picking up this game, again, just for fun, in 2020, I had pretty low expectations, to be honest, and I quickly realized in playing that this is far more violent than anything that actually transpired in the United States in

[6:19] the 1890s, and that it sometimes favored the sensational over the series. But, with that said, Red Dead Redemption 2 is not a stupid game. It foregrounds major dilemmas that historians also foreground when examining this period that we often call the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. This game foregrounds topics like the ascent of corporate capitalism, warfare between Native people and the U.S. military, the memory of the Civil War in the 1890s South. And it often, not always, but often treats those dilemmas with gravity and respect. characters that's foregrounded in the game somewhat reflects the diversity of the U .S. West and South in the 1890s, featuring Americans from many walks of life. Of course, there are also gaping holes in this game's rendering of 1899 America, and on its own, it doesn't teach you all that much history.

[7:20] But I came to realize when I was playing this in 2020 that its widespread popularity, especially among college-age students, could provide a useful bridge between pop culture and the profession of history. So I decided to make plans to teach an experimental undergraduate class at the University of Tennessee, which I rolled out in the fall of 2021 called Red Dead History, exploring America's violent past through the hit video games. And it really took this question of violence and placed it at center stage, but made clear in the course of the semester that violence in this period had much more to do with capitalism and race than it did with holdups at the bank robberies and saloon fights and the kinds of things that the games more frequently foreground. Now, I was by no means the first person to teach history through video games. In many ways, I was a distinct latecomer to that field, but I do believe that I was the first to semester's course around this singular game

[8:24] franchise. Now, I could have approached this class in an infinite number of ways, and I had to make some hard decisions about its shape. And as you'll see, these decisions informed my teaching about video games in the long run. I did not require students to buy or play these games during the semester, and I certainly never quiz them or examine them on the fictional game content within them. Instead, the games inform the class in two crucial ways. First, as an organizing schematic for the syllabus, in that I foregrounded subjects in the syllabus and in our lectures and discussions that are also present and central to the games. And then secondly, the games served as a daily hook, as a way to begin big, serious topics in American history, five to ten minutes as a sort of opener when I would sometimes play the game, show cut scenes or screenshots or

[9:25] anything like that from the digital games. But ultimately, by the end of the semester, only about a tenth of our time together was spent discussing video games. The 90 percent remaining were a rather traditional history class in that they had lectures and discussions and readings and papers, primary and secondary source of the stuff you'd find in a traditional college history class. Now, if you're curious about the nuts and bolts of how I approach this particular class, I have actually written an extended-length essay in the American Historical Review about this class called Teaching History with Video Games that came out a couple years ago. It is thankfully an open-access article. There's no paywalls whatsoever, so you do not have to be a subscriber to find the details. It includes the syllabus. It includes a sample lesson. It was really cool, and I'm very honored that the AHA invited me to participate in this. Anyhow, by my measure, this class was a success, mainly because it had a large enrollment. That's a good starting point.

[10:26] But more importantly, because students demonstrated exceptional engagement in an interest all semester long, and not just in the video games, but in the actual social and political and cultural history that lay at the heart of the course. And the success of this classroom experiment convinced me in the years following to write a public-facing book aimed at video gamers and the wider public, which adapted the course, often with lectures serving as standalone chapters in the book. And what was particularly helpful in convincing gamers out in the wider non -academic world to pick this thing up was the audiobook edition of Red Dead's History, which is actually narrated by Roger Clark, the same actor who plays Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2. So this has been a really nice connection that my publisher was able to arrange. So this book has allowed me opportunities for public engagement that I could not have imagined at the outset of this project, including going to San Diego Comic-Con

[11:30] and speaking with fans and all this stuff I could not have imagined as a professional historian. And the success of convinced me to try this experiment again for a different video game franchise and a different historical moment, one closer to our own time. And over the past two years, I have been working on a class called Grand Theft America, U.S. History Since 1980 Through the GTA Video Games. I've taught it twice. I'm in the middle of my second semester right now. So the game franchise is of course Grand Theft Auto, which is also created by Rockstar Games, the same developer who made Red Dead Redemption. GTA is now one of the most influential pieces of pop culture that humanity has ever created, with total sales approaching half a billion copies. If you're not familiar with these games, and it's exceedingly difficult nowadays to find people who are not even familiar with it, Red Dead Redemption is still a video

[12:33] game that gamers know, but almost everyone has heard of Grand Theft Auto by this point. But what they are, essentially, there's more than a dozen entries at this point. The franchise is nearly 30 years old. They're essentially a digital crime simulator, indulging players' fantasies of stealing cars, robbing banks, and creating mayhem. But they're also a whole lot more than that. They are a richly textured satire of American society set in fictionalized versions of New York, Los Angeles, and Miami over several decades. As such, they provide a parody of American life. Now, this parody is unfailingly cynical, often vulgar and juvenile, but sometimes the caricature rings true and reflects modern America in its funhouse mirror. And though very few people, I would think, think of Grand Theft Auto as historical video games, they now are.

[13:35] Even though most titles were set in the moment in which they were released, because the franchise is now almost 30 years old, and because some of the early titles were set in advance of their release date in the 1980s and 1990s, they actually capture a moment in time. So if you're curious, these are the games that are central to my class, games that range from 1984 in terms of the setting, right? So this is arranged in chronological order, not by release date, but by their setting. And they capture, they try to capture this fictional version of the U.S. between 1984 and the present day, given that a brand new GTA is just about to release next month. And as such, I think these games capture a cohesive historical moment. The years between 1980 and 2016, or what political historian Gary Gerstle calls the neoliberal order. And therefore, in my class, I use the fictional world of these games to understand neoliberal order, and how Americans grew apart during these years, how the United

[14:36] States became a lot less united in those same decades, and also how the inequalities and frustrations of the neoliberal order laid the groundwork for the upheaval and uncertainty that we've witnessed in the decades since 2016. And in playing the GTA games over the past two years to prepare for this class, I've been quite surprised at how often these games showcase many of the core topics that any historian would include in teaching a traditional non-video game version of U.S. history since 1980. They foreground topics like the war on drugs, mass incarceration, immigration, financialization, global trade, gun capitalism, political polarization, the militarization of the police, and the list goes on. So there's lots of opportunities. Of course, alongside these opportunities are undeniable challenges in teaching through an irreverent and sometimes crude piece of pop culture like GTA. How do I deal with this?

[15:38] Well, when I invoke the games in class, I steer clear of their most distasteful satire. And I also take great pains to maintain among my students a respectful and serious learning environment in our classroom. In fact, on the very first day of the semester, students are asked to force, essentially, to raise their hand and pledge that they will abide by what I call the golden rule of History 150, which is basically that the tone and content of the GTA games gives them zero license to recycle or reproduce offensive or inflammatory materials within the bounds of our classroom. So they walk out on that first day knowing that our classroom is not their buddy's basement. They are in a serious and professional learning environment and that I set the tone for how that's going to go. And I'm really proud to say that over the course of two semesters, I've never had a violation of this golden rule, which I was very anxious about at the outset, but has not come to manifest itself so far. You might be curious, how does this course work on a practical level?

[16:41] Well, as with my Red Dead class, I don't require any prior knowledge of or engagement or purchasing of the games, though I expect that a fair share will have some prior experience with the franchise. Students don't have to play them. They don't have to buy them. And once again, the fictional world of the games enters the classroom in two ways. As this daily five to ten minute hook where I use fictional content material to introduce any given subject and then instructuring the syllabus. Structuring the syllabus is really important, and I want to go into how the series of games set over these many decades, how I use them to organize class material. We talked a little bit about the framing of the class. So the fundamental subject of the class is the neoliberal order of 1980 to 2016, and its cultural, political, social, economic iterations. However, I've realized that we can't consider that moment within a vacuum, so frequently I will loop back to the political order that preceded it, the liberal

[17:42] order of 1933 to 1980. And at the end of the semester, I consider the historical meanings of the past decade and the shattering, or at least a fragmenting, of the neoliberal order. But this course is ultimately not organized chronologically or geographically. Instead, it's organized around places and institutions that frequently turn up across the GTA universe. And I use those places and institutions to tell bigger stories about economic, social, and political change. I split my semester into two halves, an admittedly artificial binary, but I carved the semester into two units, the city by day and the city by night. And I should note that this is a very urban history class. It really foregrounds cities rather than the countryside in this moment in time. And basically, the city by day is the part of the unit where I look at the licit,

[18:43] the sunlit, the sanctioned institutions of urban life. And then in the city by night, I look at the illicit, sometimes illegal, stigmatized institutions that are still nevertheless fundamental to understanding modern America. Well, like the city by day, for example, we start in the container port by looking at global shipping and trade. I use Marc Levinson's book, The Box, very, very intensively to look at how container shipping comes to not just mean globalization, but deindustrialization within the United States. I look at army bases to consider defense spending and the rise of a sunbelt in America's political geography. I look at fast food drive-thrus at the Cluckin' Bell restaurant of GTA fame to think about the neoliberal diet and particularly how it's transformed chicken, America's favorite meat. City by night, we look at things like organized crime and the relationship between the mafia, if you will, and organized labor and how one's decline is related to the

[19:46] other. We look at the police station to understand the militarization of policing, whether it's through SWAT teams or helicopter usage or battering rams. Spent a lot of time with LAPD in this. We look at prisons to understand mass incarceration and the broader war on drugs. Now, let me wrap up by reflecting on how this has all gone in its execution. First off, there's no doubt that the experimental novelty of this class has garnered it an unusual amount of media publicity. Now, about a year ago, last September, I unveiled plans for this class online through an extended interview with the website IGN, which is the world's largest video game news website. And once this went out there, news of this class reverberated across social media. Countless streamers and influencers commented in various ways about this class. Here's one example, this massive digital influencer, TikTok

[20:49] personality, who had extreme disbelief that such a thing as a GTA history class was happening. And his video here has, as you see, more than 230,000 likes on TikTok. on. Now, most importantly, all of this publicity has also saturated my home university, which has spurred an enduring student interest in this class. I'm now taught it twice, and each semester I have enrolled more than 200 students in the class. I'm teaching 240 this semester. Not many history majors, mainly STEM and business students, and this enrollment really exceeds the robust, but not nearly as robust enrollment in my Red Dead Redemption classes, in part because this video game franchise is much more popular and much more widely known. But beyond sheer numbers, this experiment has proved to be a tremendously rewarding teaching and learning experience. This is no silly video game fan club. It is a unique, at least for me, it's been a unique opportunity to discuss the historical origins of our contemporary dilemmas and to better understand the

[21:52] strange world that we live in. I've enjoyed teaching this class more than any other in my career. And now that I have one set of student evaluations under my belt, I can say that students have never enjoyed one of my classes as much as this one either. They might even talk about how hard it is and how surprised they were at the learning curve that this is not some joke class whatsoever. I'll just share two quotes from my recent student evaluations from spring semester, because I think they're quite illustrative. One said, I never expected something like GTA to be viewed with a historical lens, but here we are. And then my favorite is that this course has re-sparked my love for American history. Now, teaching through video games is admittedly not for every historian. I cannot imagine this being fun unless you have a pre-existing passion for the medium of video games. Maybe I'm wrong. It does require a great deal of extra time preparation and technical expertise and hardware to pull off, and using fictional pop culture of

[22:54] any sort to teach history comes with many unique challenges, especially with something like GTA. But I think that if it's done with thought and care, this might be one way that we can respond to the larger crisis of the humanities, whether it's on campus or in the wider world beyond, and perhaps can help foster greater civic understanding and historical awareness among different types of audiences. Thank you guys so much for listening. How are you, Gil? So, there's a QR code here, so feel free to take pictures. And I got my training in East Asia, and I do a lot of work in East Asia. One thing that I yesterday, my observation was like when there is a QR

[23:55] code show up, the room is not having the cameras up because in East Asia, when there is a QR code show up, everyone just raise their camera and then start to have the QR code. I also post the link of this slide in the Discord. I'm not accessing the Zoom. So if anyone can paste it in Zoom, that will be perfect. Thank you very much. And so I'm Kwok Leong Tang. Tore already gave a very good introduction of myself. So I'm not going to repeat it. And so first, AI disclaimer. So this is different from Tore, his three disclaimers about all his doing. I also have my disclaimer. It's like what AI did for me for all this work. help me to do the page design, do the coding, and then the timeline, and then the agent diagram, enjoy it, create all the QR codes.

[24:58] I paint my talk. I pick the choices of example, review all the text and link, and all the tools that I use, I link here. And also recently, I also do one thing is I have this sentence in all my email. I try to let everyone know that every digital work I am doing, I use AI, multiple agents, multiple models. So, and I think the arrangement of this talk is really good. Tore already have the first part of it is how we learn history from a game, right? And then this will be the second part is how AI helps us turn history into a game. So we are paying GTA to try to see if we can make GTA. So this is a YouTuber I really like. His name is Benjamin Bowen, and he also lived in Boston.

[25:58] So what he does is every day when there is a new model comes out and he starts to try to do a lot of tests, experiment with all the new models. One of his problems is to say, hey, can you create a GTA-like game for me? And then you can check different versions of different models what they can do. And then he also has a website that contains a lot of games that use only one single prompt and ask the AI to generate those games. And I learned a lot from his website, and I also built something that you can use. So I talked to a lot of people yesterday, and I found out maybe this may be the first time you really start to upholding generative AI in the last couple of years. to provide a little bit more background about why now AI seems to like invading every single aspect of

[26:59] our life. So in 2022, if you remember November 30th, that was the release of ChatGPT and then it started all the trend that now we are experiencing. But at that time, if you remember But a lot of people, especially a lot of my colleagues who are historians, they would just say that, oh, I try it. And then that answers my question very stupid. And then, no, no, it's not going to work. And then I would say usually in this kind of sense is the first impression is the last impression. So they usually don't turn back and then to look at it. But I can tell it has a lot of change. In 2023 and 2024, most of your interaction with generative AI is through the chatbot. So you have an interface, and then you can type things into it, and then the AI gives you an answer to it. But in 2025, something

[28:01] happened that is completely different. It started to see some what we call agents. especially the first one become very famous was Cursor now recently uh acquired by if i remember correctly is a matter and then um there are a lot of this kind of agent especially the Claude Code came out and then a lot of people start to see wow the way of agents to writing code is really really good. And then in 2026, now you have thoughts, you have views, a lot of different agents that start to try to do things for you. You don't need to go into command line, and then you can do everything in plain English. If you notice that actually Gen .AI is also a revolution in UI UX, user interface and user experience. Before 2022, usually we only have two ways to

[29:01] control your machine. One is through keyboard and mouse. And then you use mouse to drag different parts of something on your screen. We call it the graphical user interface, GUI. And then you use mouse to kick this, and then it will go into the next step and kick this button. It can bring you a function. Another way to do it is you use keyboard to type it. That becomes programming and it becomes command line usage of how you control the machine. But now everything changed because you can just tell the machine what they have to do in plain English or in any language that you want. So it's a change of user interface and user experience at the same time. So you may ask, okay, then why these agents are doing a much better job? So in the past, if you just start with a checkbox, then

[30:05] you have answer questions, and then go into the AI model, and AI model gives you the answer. But now all this agent actually is a loop. So you give questions to the AI model, and then the AI model think about the questions, and then it find out, okay, I may not be able to solve this problem. I need tools. I need to do some, I need to call some tools. And then it will go into a tool call, and then go a tool call, and then the tool call, the tool will give back results and or even the error message to say, hey, this is, does not work. And then all this go back again into the context. And then the context start to accumulating all the tool calls, all the tool results, and it find out, okay, let's go back to the model again. And if the model designing, oh, it's not yet done, the question does not solve, it go back to the two core and then go to the two results and then go

[31:07] back to the context, put everything into the context, we need another one. Until it say, hey, this is the goal bit, and then it's done. So you describe, so in the terms of games, is you describe the game in English, the agent does the coding, okay? So before Gen.AI, how people can make a game, you need a team, right? That's why the Rockstars and all those big studios. So you need a team of people who do story, try to find out what are the ports, what are the characters, and decide every single line of dialogue. And then you have the game logic. This is the most difficult part. I think you may see a lot of when you use social media Facebook, you see a lot of games, especially the shooting game that you keep shooting something and then something coming down, a lot of your enemy coming down those are the game logic you need to think about where should you get the reward where should you get

[32:07] the punishment and then you need to do research find out all the historical background and And art design, that's the most important part. You need to have to draw every single character. And then the coding is putting all this into code. And you need to have a group of people to testing, to do paying it multiple times, multiple times, and then you can create a game. And the most difficult part is the framework. You have to choose a framework before you can really make a game. A lot of people now use Godot. dots but for doing like triple a games you need to do something like unreal engine or even like unity for a mobile game so all this kind of framework when you use them you need to learn the whole framework how the framework work and also you need to load the programming language of it. So honestly, it's not a single person job you can do before

[33:13] 2022, I would say. But now what AI can do, what AI can take up your jobs is it can help you in different stage of your game making. It can help the story and then it can do the game logics, try to do experiment to see what can the game logic be, and then do some research. I would say for most of us as historians, we will save this part for ourselves. But art design, I'm not a good drawer. I cannot draw anything. So I usually just draw something like a match man and then throw it to AI, and then now you have a lot of image generation, right? You can do it much better. And then coding, I can do pseudo coding. I would say my coding technique is not that good, but everything now, coding is usually the best part of generative AI. And testing, the computer can test it many, many times. Okay? So one very big tool that the model can

[34:16] use nowadays is something it calls computer use. That means the model controls the whole computer. even they can move the cursor to kick a button to try to know all the logic of a software. So we stay with, as a historian, we stay with the sources, we stay with the argument, and also the final check. So recently, if you're familiar with the news, last week there was big things happened, was like anyone here is a user of adobe like photoshop premiere adobe pdf right a lot of you use adobe do you have subscription to them you pay a lot of money to them right but recently last week this came out it's called Artcraft what it said is we try to open source adobe okay that's the market that's the marketing strategy but

[35:17] what they really do is they try to coning try to cone and replicate adobe so every single functions in adobe software they try to replicate it in their own software honestly all this software now they're all in alpha version not even beta so it's very dangerous to use them if you want to use them in production but what showing here is If you have something as a model as A, the Gen AI model can kind of replicate it. Even you don't know how to do coding. You don't know how to do software development. So how this works in our teaching or our classroom. So this was a game that I really love to play. It's called Ace Attorney. The main character of the game is a lawyer.

[36:19] So what I need to do is kind of like a detective work. I need to help my client to find out he is a victim of this lawsuit. And then I need to find out all the coups and try to defend my client. So it was a really, really famous game in East Asia, Japanese game in a lot of language. one and is a big series now i think is the sixth episode so what i did i had a four days uh of ai workshops in uh in this summer so i would like to make some noise i would like to do some marketing so one thing i did was i made my own version of it and put the background into Qing dynasty that's the 18th and 19th century and then i have my all the characters generated by and then also all the story. The first version just took me 45 minutes to finish it.

[37:22] I used only one book, which was a novel, to do it. That was monolanguage, Chinese only. But because of this workshop, I know most of you don't speak Chinese. I also improve it. I add more material onto it, so you can pay it after the cast to find out is it good or not. So everything art design is generated by OpenAI. And then I can, this is kind of like you clone an idea of a game and then put it into your game and do your own resources. Okay. And then I also built another version because I think that version is more like a geek version And this version is I want to put it into my classroom. So in this version, almost this version is more focusing on reading the document.

[38:23] So in this version, I include the original text, the memorial, and then the law cook at that time, and also the newspaper report of this specific case. And then students need to read it and make their own decision of it. and then try to see, hey, what was the result? Why we get, like, rumors start to spread from one place to another place. Why these poor couples become kind of victims of this trial? And then try to, the training is more focusing on how we can read the text. That was the purpose of this second version. And then, okay, then you may ask, hey, Kwok Leong, now, if I want to, Do something like this. How can I start? So originally I was thinking, oh, maybe I need to do a workshop, but I know our times are limited. So what I did is I built a website. This is the website that you can go after the cast.

[39:26] And then when you go to the website, you can see all the instruction how you can start to build a game. Actually, it's very simple. There is one prompt. You just copy the prompt, and then you have your own AI agents, I don't know, you may use ChatGPT or you may use Claude. Just fold this in. And then what it does is it will start to ask you a question. It asks you a question, who are your students? Are you doing like a ninth grade or AP class or undergraduate or graduate class? What is your goal of teaching? What are the tools you want to use for this teaching? And how long you want to play this game? Are you going to pay it in class? or are you going to pay it as an assignment? And then it with your source. You provide your material to it and then it will start to analyze it and then mark each fact and then trying to see if it can analyze it.

[40:27] And then if you have a small version as the preliminary version, then you can check the version to see if the game logic works, once, then finally you will get one HTML file. That is a file that you can open with any browser. So this is the most difficult part is how you share your game. Because for a lot of games, you build it, like, for example, with Godot and all those framework. It's very difficult to share. You need to, like, build the whole game, ship it, and then send it. Or even, like, you need to deploy it on cloud. very troublesome to someone who is not in CS or software development. So what I try to do here is it just gives you an HTML file. You can share the HTML file with your student. You can post it on your canvas, and then people can see it. Also, this is not only limited to video game.

[41:31] If you want to say, hey, I want to do a card game, that I want to print some card and then students can pay card. You can do it. You just need to tell it at the very beginning, I would like to build a card game. This is not a video game. These are a card game for me. And then it may ask you a question, how I generate the image, what kind of image you use. So I do two examples. You can, sorry. And then you need to check it. Of course, you need to check the final product to make sure that the source are reliable. So I make two examples here. One is, I think this is very common, right? Everyone teach history. You need to do map quiz. So map quiz is usually something that you really hate to grade, but it's essential. So what I did is I tried to make a map quiz, and then people can pick A, B, C, D, and then finally it can generate a text file to submit. and this is a very simple one.

[42:34] And then another one that is, okay, I would say I have no chain link in American history. I took a class on Civil War, but that's it. But I know that most of the audience here will be American history audience. So what I did is I tried to say something that goes to pandemic. So I got some file from Library of Congress online. So what this game is, is try to pretend to be a newspaper editor in 1918. That was the time that there was a pandemic coming. So this was the six days before the pandemic. And then you, the student have to arrange all the information they have and try to put it into the first page, the front page of a newspaper. And then they have to discuss it. Each person has a different role and they have to discuss it. Feel free to pay it. If it does not work, remember to tell me it does

[43:38] not work. It's not like what you are thinking because honestly, I'm ignorant about this history. And then I just want to see what it can build with something that I provided with it. So at the end, I would like to also mention already some other university and and institution work on the gaming and gamification uh you you need to check out the UT Austin they have a very good uh i think this is already the third years of it is uh the japan lab so they have a course a seminar on japanese history literature frame and then people students have to decide what as a team to design games so they already created some games And also, there's a commercial startup by Chad Wilson, because he approached me before and then I tried some of his work. And if you want to say, hey, I want to do vibe coding, I want to

[44:39] do building games, but I want something that more than just HTML file, but I really don't have time to invest in like studying the framework. You also can try this because I know that there are quite a lot of users of this website, K-12, teachers. The last, if you're interested, please come to my website. I have done quite a lot of things. I have all my AI humanities workshops teaching material on it, and especially the summer workshop, more than 150 pages of the teaching material. So I have a teaching AI Chrome extension that build, which can use on almost all the machines with local model. And I have an OCR app for Mac. So almost can run on every Mac that after 2020. And it can do a little bit handwriting.

[45:39] I cannot promise fully can do. But compact layout, it works. And then I did a lot of things on the Library of Congress, subject headings, even I'm not a librarian. So this is the end of my presentation. Thank you. Wonderful. Thanks so much. So let's move into our conversation part, the phase here. And I'll remind both of us and myself more than anyone that when we receive a question, we will repeat it briefly so that those listening in online can hear it as well. But we'll start, of course, with folks who are in the room here. Questions for either myself or Kwok Leong. Hi, I'm Stephanie Young. I'm interested in maybe some specific scenarios in which you use some of these projects in the classroom. Are you using them as part of the lecture or using it in more of a format where there'll be a lot of back and forth students? Do they take these home and develop

[46:42] these? Can you just let me understand a little bit more how you would create these projects into the pedagogy? Oh, thank you. First, to be honest, I did not teach a content course for more than seven years. So the course that I teach every semester at Harvard is a methodological course. So I teach digital tools and digital methods and East Asian humanities. So that is how to use digital tools to study East Asian humanities. But a lot of my students love to build games for their final projects or for exercise they do. And so they use the vibe coding tools to once starting from 2023, they use the vibe coding tools to build games. So a lot of things actually I learned from them, not my own inspiration of all this work. And then also, I would say that I'm very privileged. I don't have big cars now. I don't have like 150 people cars.

[47:46] When I taught at Penn State, I have like 100 people. That is usual amount of. So honestly, I don't know how this will work in 100 people cars. Back to 2010, like once Kahoot came out, I already use it. Kahoot was a good gamification platform at that time. But something that you have invested a lot of time to build the questions, put everything in, right? I think you're very busy if something that can compress the time of making the similar things that you can use in a classroom for only one day. and then you may need to do the second one in the next day. So that could be something that I think useful. But I'm lack of those experiences of using all this in the content class, especially a big class. I'm Jack McDonald. My question is Tore.

[48:47] Two questions. One, do your students know that GTA 1 exists? um i was going to miss actually doing one or two besides i realized i didn't do the thing second one is you're using this to teach urban history you're very clear about that what about suburbs suburbs aren't really a big feature like you can find in the sub that my understanding of american urban history is the sub urban suburb dynamics teacher so how does that shape how's the game shape what you're teaching yeah thank you so was first about the GTA 1 and 2, which are conspicuously absent from my list, and then about the place of suburbs, which really don't appear in GTA, and how they fit into the class. So I began playing GTA 1 and 2 in high school. I played a lot of them. I don't include them because they really weren't made by Rockstar Games. They were made by this Scottish studio, DMA, that preceded Rockstar. And they're not grounded, and they don't have the same kind of social

[49:50] commentary, right? They're two-dimensional games. They're much more simplistic. None of my students have played them. I mean, maybe one in the entire class of 240. But most of them are, I mean, the vast majority have only played GTA 5 slash GTA Online. Some have played 4. Some have played San Andreas, things like that. So I basically just decided in all my work with GTA to leave those out. Different creators, and they don't have a chronological setting. They don't, I mean, they do and they don't. But because they're not 3D and because they're not voiced, they don't have actors really in them. I just think of them as rather different. Suburbs is great. So I didn't list it on here, but one of the city by day topics is the suburbs. So you're right that pretty much no GTA game actually features like low density, middle class residential housing, despite the fact that Los Angeles and Miami and, of course, New York, too, are defined, especially L.A., by sprawling suburbs. So I tell the students I make an exception on that day. You know, our whole semester is about foregrounding things that appear in the

[50:51] games. Today, we're going to look at something that doesn't appear in the games, at least visually. But it does appear in the sort of lore of the games because there's all sorts of parodies of suburbia on the radio, on television. People make fun out of suburbia in the games, though it never actually manifests within the physical built digital physical landscape. So make an exception on that regard. But everything else is stuff that comes up frequently in the games. Because, yes, you cannot teach contemporary American history if you don't deal with suburbia. And you can't understand racialized, you know, urban slums if you don't understand the sort of yin to the yang of suburbs and the ways that the federal government especially has been involved in the artificial creation of insulating both wealth and poverty in suburb and inner city. Thanks. Question is kind of for both of y'all. I have a friend of mine who works. Oh, I'm Savannah. George Mason. I have a friend of mine at Mason who works on video games and we were talking about it wasn't a Rockstar game and the company's

[51:55] slipping my mind but they in their new update actually have enslaved people as property in the game and so obviously that opens up a big conversation on what's the ethics of someone who doesn't understand the historical reality playing this game versus someone who does understand the historical reality. And so I'm curious how either maybe from your students or even from your own experiences and work, how you're handling race, gender, and class within these conversations. Thank you. Yeah. So the questions about fraught subjects, particularly race, class, gender within the games. Since I just spoke, Kwok Leong, you want me to go ahead? Okay, right on. So yeah, so it's something that I've foregrounded in all of my classes. And I think We think of what a video game, you know, how do they represent race and gender and various, you know, identity categories like this. There's two things we need to consider. One is the developer intent. And then there's what users do with it, because those are two very different

[52:59] things. Like it read that redemption, too. There were lots of horror stories about users in this game doing horrific things to the feminist suffragists who appear in the game, who are represented sympathetically in the game. to aid them. But of course, there's, you know, young men online who want to do other things with these and record videos for YouTube that portray, you know, horrific things. And oftentimes the games, their reputation gets tarred as a result of what users do with them. And of course, the question is, does that mean you just only represent white men in the game so that no one can, you know, play around or no one can violate the social norm, you know, pacts about race and class and all this? I don't think that would be accurate either. But so, yeah, I mean, in the GTA class especially, right, because it has a very negative reputation among millions of people, especially about its depictions of gender. That's something that I don't shy away from, and I don't pull punches in talking about, I mean, I don't pull punches in describing how the games represent women, for example, sex workers, for example.

[54:00] It's not that, the point of my class is not to make students hate GTA. That's just too easy, and it wouldn't lead to all that much that's successful. It's more about, of course, what can we actually understand about the modern United States through these. But so I foreground things like literally yesterday's lecture. The location was The Strip Club. The subtitle was How Sex Work Reveals the Paradoxes of Patriarchy. So, yeah, I show like, hey, you know, GTA is pretty sexist. This is how they depict women. But let's actually think, what's the industry of sex work look like in U.S. history? How does it change over time? How can we humanize the largely female participants? You know, I mean, lots of participants in it. But, you know, how do we understand why women chose to participate in this, whether it's in 1890 or 1990? So I lean into it. You know, like I make that stuff really, really central. I mean, the last third of the class is really just about African-American history. You know, trying to understand the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992, trying to understand the crack cocaine crisis.

[55:02] Eid is about crack cocaine. The games are very imperfect in representing race on the screen. But ultimately, this is not a game studies class. It's an American history class. So I'm just like, here's what it is. Here's how the games say it. Let me give you a much more nuanced and respectful, of course, evocation of the past. I do not have much discussion of similar topics in my class. I can only give one example. was also someone in this course mentioned that the Assassin's Creed series if you remember that the most recent series is using japan as a background but the characters in the game was a black male who is might or might not exist in real history but that is a game about japan but the only characters you can two characters, one of the two characters you can control is a bad man. So when the game released in North America that was not

[56:07] much discussion, but in Japan, immediately a lot of people become really furious about that because it seems like to them it's a black guy killing Japanese are okay when you're talking about Japanese story and then, so This kind of perspective sometimes is like, also there are a lot of discussion among the game circles. Now it's talking about all the components that used to be considered as good components, now are all taken away. And then some components that they don't consider that is necessary for the game, but now seems to enforce in every single game that's produced by the big studios. So I would say that that is something that also besides the races and also the causes, and also something that from different cultures, you may see completely different backgrounds or completely different perspectives from the same game, from the same

[57:12] discussion. Hearing that students today don't really understand satire, how do you introduce them? Right, so the question is, students have a tin ear to satire sometimes. How do I navigate that question? I mean, I guess the satire that I choose to invoke is often, at least from Grand Theft Auto, and Red Dead Redemption is much less satirical, is stuff that helps prove my points about American history. Like they show extremely powerful and influential finance capitalists in GTA 5, for example. And it's blown out of proportion in all sorts of ways. But I harp on that to understand like, OK, how can we understand the rise of Wall Street in the American economy and how it comes to eclipse manufacturing in the

[58:13] kind of old industrial sector? So I pick and choose. I just I stay away from stuff that that might be I mean, of course, I can never understand entirely how my students are going to interpret things. but I feel like I somewhat understand how they see the world. Maybe I'm completely wrong. But I just try to introduce satirical material that's going to play to my agenda and my advantages. And it's tricky. My question is related to generative AI and the creation of video games. I'm not too knowledgeable on the subject, but some of those games seem really similar to the actual games. that protects us if we wanted to use it in our classroom or is it just not available yet? You mean the games that are croning or created by generative AI? For example, your game is kind of similar to like base. I really love that game. I'm just wondering if I were to create a game that's

[59:13] similar to another game that exists, what's like protecting me or what would like get me in trouble? I would say DAO is a great show because, for example, that i i use it and all the names changed and then i can everyone pay the Ace Attorney they know that this is kind of like a coning of that game but at the same time everything changed like the background change the historical background change and then the characters change the name of the characters change and um so this is also the um there is something that if you're familiar with the manga feel right so there are a lot of like uh products that generated by the community using the same characters from those uh original like uh manga and all um original songs or dramas um i would say i don't i don't know about in north

[1:00:14] america but this is something is still in a great area in East Asia. And yeah, I cannot say there is a law that can protect you from using that, not getting sued by the company. Yeah, we want to cap them to cover that. Yeah, of course. I understand it. Yeah. I can't answer that question, but this is a really good question. Well, very brief question to close out. The same technologies that are made to the archives, when it's really easy to enforce copyright at scale. So it's a big thing about photographs or blogs, things like that. So if you are gonna make something that's blind to that, you're worried, don't put it anywhere that you're concerned. Okay, we've had experience with this. Well, it has hit 1230 and my microphone is probably picking up my stomach rumbling, which means it's about time for lunch. Thank you all so much for coming out. I'll be around all the rest of the day. I'm happy to continue the conversation.

[1:01:17] Love it. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you.