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Crisis in the Château
Interactive Learning at its Best |
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Every once in a while, though, a real winner drops out of the ether. Rob Friedel's Crisis in the Château is one of them. Quite simply, this is the best product of its kind I have ever had the pleasure to review. In fact, if it was up to me, the government of Canada would buy one copy for every Jr. high school in Canada. Why? Because you just can't play this game without learning. There are no short cuts here. There are no secret command codes that allow you to skip levels. If you want to move forward you must watch, listen and learn. If you want to move forward, you must answer questions based on the material you have just covered. Each segment of the game is followed by five true-false questions. Once you've answered these, you must answer three more sets of five. The passing grade is 100%. Anything less and you must start over. It's a rigorous standard, but it works. I don't care how much you know -- or think you know -- about the history of New France, this game will teach you something new. If it doesn't, write me and I'll send you a fleur de lis. How it works The year is 1663. The setting: New France. The colony is on the brink of collapse. Competition from the Dutch and the English to the south is killing the fur trade and devastating the local economy. While church officials and the trading companies squabble about the morality of arming the colony's Huron allies, Iroquois attacks are creating an atmosphere of utter hopelessness.Louis XIV, King of France, has sent you to investigate the crisis and is committed to enacting your recommendations. The fate of New France is in your hands. Make war or make peace. Arm your allies or heed the Church. You will make the final decision. At your fingertips are all of the tools you need to make an informed decision. On your bench are books and exhibits. In front of you are seven witnesses each representing an important segment of the local population. Your personal library is in the room next door. |
Interview the witnesses, examine the evidence and tell the King of France what to do. Do it in two day-long sittings or break it up into smaller pieces and conduct your inquiry over several weeks. The beauty of Crisis in the Château is that you are able to learn at your own pace.
Technical Review Crisis in the Château can be played as a stand-alone game on your PC (or Mac) or installed on a network. Either way it works well -- with one exception.
this game. The problems with Windows 2000, as I discovered when I first started playing the game, are beyond work-arounds. They make the game unplayable. Nearly every sentence uttered by the narrators is clipped short. The audio in the audio-video segments sounds like a visit from the Borg ("We are the Borg. Resistance is futile.") and the video is choppy. Worst of all, the text is scattered and distorted beyond comprehension. All of these problems disappeared when I moved the game over to the computer in our family room, however. On Windows 98 with 96 megs of RAM and a 350 MHz Pentium Celeron, the game played like it was supposed to. 16 hours of play time turned up not a single flaw. And the same was true on the kids' unit (Windows Me, 128 RAM, 667 MHz Pentium Celeron). Crisis in the Chateau uses multimedia appropriately. It rarely gets in the way of the learning experience and generally enhances it. The background music is usually well chosen and occasionally delightful. The images are plentiful and varied but repeated where repeating them makes them more effective. If there is a technical downside to this game it lies in its requirements for mousing and clicking. A lot of this is required in order to get through it all. That said, however, it should be remembered that I chose to play this game in two 6-hour sessions rather than six 2-hour sessions. Exhaustion was probably inevitable. Historiographical Review From an historiographical point of view, Edutech Productions and Arnold Multimedia certainly could have picked an easier topic for their first Canadian history "learning adventure." |
Understanding the history of New France in this period (1534-1670) requires more than linear thinking. In order to wrap your mind around even the basic issues you need to have some understanding of a number of issues including the colonial dreams of France and Great Britain and the disparate cultural views of Europeans, North Americans and First Nations Peoples.
Complex as this may seem at first blush, Crisis accomplishes it astonishingly well. Each of the seven virtual "witnesses" presents a single point of view. Each of the five virtual "background volumes" treats a single subject. Conclusions -- where history gets messy -- are left to the judges (players) to include in their written recommendations. This successfully lets the game's authors off of a whole lot of hooks and allows them to create and maintain a sense of balanced coverage. This sense of balance, though, is more than simply an illusion created by the format. Indeed the section on "Cultural Exchange" is among the most balanced treatments I have ever seen. The fur trade, for example, is presented in its true light as a fur-for-metal-goods exchange in which each society chooses to trade something of little value for something of greater value. Moreover by constantly returning to the themes of Church vs. Trader on the colonial side and Christian vs. Pagan on the First Nations side throughout the game players are constantly reminded that history is the result of humans choosing and not the result of divine guidance or movement along a fixed evolutionary path. Indeed the fact that the "future fate" of New France is left in the hands of the player at the game's end underlines this sense of choice and contributes to the sense of empowerment which all good games create -- and which all good historians understand. At $49.95 CDN, Crisis in the Château is about the price of a Nintendo game. For $79.95 CDN you can have it installed on the network in your school's computer lab and Arnold Publishing with throw in a full suite of teacher's tools including the ability to access screens for student files to monitor individual progress and mark student judgments. If you are looking to buy this as gift for one student contact Edutech Productions by clicking here. If you are looking to buy this as a gift for your local school contact Arnold Publishing by clicking here. © Brent Johner. Originally published on Canadian History on About.com, March 2001. |
