Computational identification of historical themes in informal learning contexts: the case of board games
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_clio/clio.2022487369Keywords:
Game-Based Learning, Digital Humanities, Informal Learning, Topic Modelling, Data Visualization, BoardgamesAbstract
Board gaming is an emerging cultural industry tightly linked to informal learning activities over a diversity of disciplines such as biology, math, and language. History is one of the most important fields of knowledge represented in these games as thousands of historical boardgames have been launched since the beginning of the industry 50 years ago. These games depict a large variety of eras and historical events, from Prehistory to the Cold War. There is a growing academic interest indeveloping Game-Based Learning methods where these boardgames can be used as learning devices. However, most of these works are focused on the use of video games in classroom contexts, and there are but a few authors who have focused on the interest of board gaming as an informal learning activity.
This work explores the historical content found across thousands of board games understood as informal learning devices. The goal of this analysis is to know what History themes appear in commercial boardgames, thus contributing to the players' learning experience on History. A computational method based on topic modelling and data visualization has been applied to automatically identify themes in boardgames based on their text-based descriptions.
The analysis presented here focuses on a comparative study of three periods at different scales: a) Medieval era, b)19th Century, and c) World War 2. Results show how themes included in boardgames are directly related to the era they represent, and reveal the existence of noticeablebiases towards the overrepresentation of wars and European History. These findings suggest that boardgames can promote informal critical learning of historical events while reinforcing an unequal public perception of our past.
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