Years before Tore Olsson became an associate professor of U.S. history and director of graduate studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, he was a teenager using video games as a gateway to community and companionship.
Video games are violent and usually senseless, Olsson said, and when life became serious after high school, he thought he’d left his life as a gamer far behind. There wasn’t time to commit to both a virtual and a literal reality.
When the Covid-19 pandemic forced professors to rethink teaching methods, Olsson decided to take a closer look at his courses, which already relied heavily on pop-culture references and the integration of music and film, and brainstorm ways to better connect with students.
Meanwhile, as he was stuck spending a lot of time indoors, he found himself back in a GameStop aisle, surrounded by high-energy, action-packed, violent games.
He picked up the latest copy of Red Dead Redemption II, for no reason other than because it was popular. He was surprised to find not only a compelling game, but also an enriching virtual environment that wrestled with themes like industrialization and racial integration in 19th-century America. Students could really learn something from playing Red Dead, he reasoned.
So he decided to create a new course where they could do just that.
Bringing pop culture into the curriculum is an increasingly common engagement strategy that’s also frequently criticized, with some scholars saying that Taylor Swift and video games are gimmicks that cut against academic rigor. But for professors like Olsson, finding fresh ways to get students invested in learning is top of mind, particularly after pandemic-era disruptions caused an uptick in students not showing up to class or doing assignments.
Also on Olsson’s mind is a growing skepticism of the value of the humanities. Students more often opt for programs of study that will directly lead to a job. Many colleges with tight budgets are cutting programs in subjects like history, English, philosophy, and religious studies, citing declining enrollment.
Olsson has turned his curricular experiment into a book that’s publishing in August, which he hopes will attract even more people to the study of history.
“A lot of the inspiration to do this class and, ultimately, the book was drawn out of my own desire as a historian to make what we do meaningful and accessible and engaging to regular audiences, whether at the university or beyond,” he said.
‘Not a Stupid Game’
Imagine a course where the professor pulls an Xbox controller from a briefcase instead of a handout. Before diving into the day’s lecture, the professor spends a few minutes wandering through virtual towns atop a black stallion, and reading historical newspapers depicting the first stages of American feminism and racial integration.
“Red Dead America” debuted as a history course in the fall of 2021. It quickly became popular, Olsson said, amassing more than 60 students in each of its semesters, compared to a dozen students in his typical electives; the latest iteration this spring enrolled 75. The course is open to all students.
Red Dead Redemption II, the game featured in the course, transports players to the American frontier in 1899 to live as outlaw cowboys. Players are required to survive through a harsh winter, hunting and foraging for their food, before embarking on an adventure of train heists and robberies to support an ongoing gang war.
A lot of the inspiration to do this class and, ultimately, the book was drawn out of my own desire as a historian to make what we do meaningful and accessible and engaging to regular audiences.
“Yes, it’s an overly violent game and bizarrely unrealistic, but it’s also not a stupid game,” Olsson said. “I was impressed as I was playing the game how, fairly often, it would gesture towards some of the biggest dilemmas in American history of that period.”
The women’s suffrage movement. Corporate capitalism in the West and South. African American rights after the Civil War. The memory of the Civil War in the South. War between Native peoples and the U.S. government. “All of those things show up in the game,” Olsson said.
In the course, students are asked to complete think pieces simultaneously analyzing the game and the history. For instance, one assignment asks students to compare fictional newspapers in the game to real newspapers from the period. They try to put themselves in the shoes of video-game scriptwriters and newspaper editors, and consider what would be important to newspaper audiences of that time.
In students’ assignments so far, Olsson said he has been “dazzled by the creative energies that they harnessed in their love for games, and their fascination with history and the power and inequality that really shaped the United States at the late-19th century.”
For the final project, called “Gamifying the Past,” students individually complete a narrative script for an original video game based on an element of the course — placing the tensions of politics, race, gender, and class at the center of their game.
While UT-Knoxville faculty have already incorporated video games like The Oregon Trail into history courses, it takes a special game to fill an entire syllabus, Olsson said.
“You need a game that is rich enough that it has these strings you can pull on and do more with. It needs to have that initial richness within the game, but then it also has to be popular,” he said.
Brandon Wilhoit, a recent UT-Knoxville graduate, said he had no prior video-game knowledge or experience before taking Olsson’s class, just a passion for history and an appreciation for the use of pop culture in learning. Wilhoit had taken a previous class taught by Olsson on U.S. and Mexican history.
In “Red Dead America,” Wilhoit said, “he would actually pull up the game in class with his controller, and take us through different scenes in the game and essentially just use the game itself as a tool.”
Wilhoit, a political-science graduate, said one of his favorite assignments involved comparing the Confederate statues in the video game to their real-life counterparts. The class frequently paired academic texts and novels about the cowboys and the American Wild West with scenes from Red Dead Redemption’s fictional town.
“We weren’t necessarily dissecting the game, but [Olsson] wanted us to notice the historical accuracies and even inaccuracies,” Wilhoit said.
A Broader Audience
Professors have been incorporating game-based play, usually through card or board games, in classrooms for at least the last decade, said Victoria Mondelli, founding director of the University of Missouri at Columbia’s Teaching for Learning Center.
Mondelli helped create a model, known as the “Allure” method, to incorporate games into learning exercises. The approach was inspired by the Decoding the Disciplines strategy, she said, in which instructors arrange their course into a series of steps that each tackle different obstacles to student learning.
Trends have shifted more toward digital game-based learning through video games in recent years, Mondelli said, such as courses like Olsson’s.
Olsson’s forthcoming book, Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America’s Violent Past (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), aims to bring much of the “Red Dead America” curriculum to a general audience. Like the course, the book uses the fictional Red Dead world to better understand the underlying themes of 19th-century capitalism and race during the Reconstruction Era.
Olsson will speak this month at Comic-Con International, the major comic-book and gaming gathering that takes place in San Diego each year, alongside Roger Clark, the main actor in Red Dead Redemption II, who is also narrating the audio version of Olsson’s new book.
Olsson said he’s become the unofficial resident historian for the fantasy and video-game community, speaking at conferences and on panels for people who usually don’t have much interest in academic discourse. Expectations were low for his most recent speaking engagement at a Red Dead Redemption video-game convention, hosted in Deadwood, S.D. What true gamer, he thought, actually cared about the historical intricacies of post-Civil War America?
Hundreds of Red Dead Redemption fanatics not only showed up for Olsson’s panel but also filled the room with insightful questions, pushing Olsson to engage in the scholarly debates he’s often seen at academic conferences. The experience showed, he said, that an audience exists beyond the classroom for video games to be contextualized for their players — especially when they’re rooted in modern history.
He also sees that potential exists for his framework to be replicated with other video games for other humanities courses.
“The core lesson for me is that there are smart people making video games, and there are smart people playing video games,” Olsson said, “and the academic world could do much more to engage fans about things they’re familiar with, but then take them in totally unexpected directions after that initial hook.”
