ABSTRACT
Now that we have considered the basic criteria for identifying an effective simulation game for the classroom, it is time to consider the various genres of games available and how these genres fare when it comes to addressing common curricular content in history and social studies courses. Commercial historical simulation games, and many free ones, can usefully be thought of as generally belonging to one of seven main genres: city-building, nation-building, trade, political management and tactics, life management, war, and combined nation-building/real-time battle. Games in each category will focus on different periods and places in the past and even different aspects of the category. Still, the common features of each genre generally lend themselves well to lessons about certain kinds of social studies curriculum content, and less well to others. The trade games, Patrician 3 and East India Company, for example focus respectively on fifteenth-century northern European trade and seventeenth- to nineteenth-century European trade with South and Southeast Asia, but both address core issues in economics. Since the core gameplay and content of a successful simulation game implementation must meet the curricular demands of a course, this chapter surveys the general connections between particular social studies curricular concepts and the various genres of video games.
