This examination will analyze the possibility of using the game Battlefield 1 while teaching history. Throughout the analysis, Battlefield 1s campaign which is called War Stories will be analyzed together with the introduction of the game which is called Prologue. The analysis of the campaign will be to check how the campaign uses history and what potential historical consciousness can a player of the game obtain. After these two are analyzed, there will be ananalysis on the possibility of using the Prologue and the War Stories while teaching history. In order to analyze the Prologue and the War Stories use of history and historical consciousness, Peter Aronsson and Klas-Göran Karlsson’s theories on how history can be used and their ideas on historical consciousness will be present. A reason for analyzing the Prologue and War Storiesis to see if there is a possibility to use a game that is about World War 1 in the classroom. There are five different War Stories and each one will be analyzed to see how it uses history and if it raises a potential historical consciousness for the player who plays the game. The method for this examination is that the Prologue and the five War Stories will be analyzed through the framework of professor Martin A. Wainwright’s seven thematic units. The Prologue and the War Stories use history in different ways such as an existential way of using history and they raise potential historical awareness on how World War 1 potentially looked like. They also raise knowledge on historical places, figures and weapons such as Lawrence of Arabia and the iconic British tank Mark V. There is a possibility of using the Prologue and War Stories during history lessons, but the main thing for that regards to time and knowledge by the teacher. You have to have time to teach pupils on the game and its mechanics and also the knowledge for how the game is played. This research field regarding videogames and education is not a developed field, and therefore there is a lack of an analysis model for using videogames while teaching. Hopefully, this examination will contribute the research field, so it gets more developed regarding videogames and education.

This essay’s main purpose is to analyze the historical facts and data that are presented to the player during the game’s main missions and their use of history. This will mainly be done through source criticism of the historical events that occured during the great war’s time era and trying to connect these events with the ones in the missions. However this turned out to be harder than expected because no dates are presented in the game and rerely the exact geagraphic location so alot of research about the different battles of the war had to be done to complete this task. Even though most of the ”hard facts” such as when the battles takes place are accurate, there are some less impactful facts on a lower level such as characteristics of vehicles and weapons that hurts the historical authenticity by a tiny fraction but increases the player experience by alot.  The conclusion, of what I managed to analyze from the game, is that alot of apects of the game is made out of pure comercial intentions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing since more people are therefor willing to buy the game and experience the great war, but the the facts that the players encounters seems to aim to satisfy historical stereotypes. Overall it’s a relatively historical corretct game in the sense of historical authenticity and the intentionally exaggerated stereotypes does not have much of an impact on the storytelling and as a player you rarely even notice, it rather makes the game more playable and enjoyable.

This thesis examines two works from different mediums, the short story “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien and the video game Battlefield 1, to compare how each constructs empathy using virtual reality and mimetic communication between audience and the work. The thesis draws from both digital media studies and affect theory to construct a nuanced view of how empathy functions in the works. The body responds to empathy physically. As social creatures, humans feel the emotions of those around them, even if those around them are virtually constructed. In other words, the thesis will explore how video games have been used historically and what their effects are on gamers, especially gamers’ bodies and emotional responses to the constructed virtual reality. This work aims to show how the lines of fiction and reality become blurred to establish empathy within a narrative and virtual reality space.

The thesis is a comparative case study, that applies the typology of deployments of history of S. A. Metzger and R. J. Paxton on the World War I video games Battlefield 1 and Valiant Hearts. The objective of the thesis is to compare the studied games and to evaluate the usefulness and limitations of the applied typology as an analytical tool. A. Chapman's analytical framework for the formal analysis of historical video games is used as a methodological guideline. The "texts" of the video games serve as the main data source, complemented by the use of Let's Play videos, that allow a deeper level of analysis in certain areas and offer a glimpse of how historical representations and narratives are being consumed. Results show that both games present a rich and critical view of the World War I history and that they offer space for representation of marginalized groups. The game Valiant Hearts, unlike the game Battlefield 1, has a strong anti-war message and tells its story from a transnational perspective, emphasizing the Franco-German reconciliation. The game Battlefield 1 celebrates the combat heroism of the soldiers of individual nations and avoids completely the portrayal of civilians and the impact of the war on their lives. The World War I in this game is likened to the Second World War and it...