Historical Video Games Have Promise--but Only If They're Honest

You can almost smell the drying fish as you step into Ubisoft's latest Discovery Tour, Viking Age, a free add-on for Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (also available to play stand-alone, without the game). Previous Discovery Tour titles have allowed players to take a combat-free jaunt through Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece during the Peloponnesian War, and now early Viking Britain--all "curated by historians and experts," according to Ubisoft. In partnership with UKIE, the British gaming trade association, the game developer wants to introduce Discovery Tour to 52 schools across the UK. But this isn't the first time someone has deployed a video game for education. As early as 1971, when Paul Dillenberger showed The Oregon Trail to his students, the effect gaming could have in a learning environment was apparent.