“Hitler was a Silly”

In contrast to their singleplayer counterparts, World War Two-themed multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) games often lack an explicit narrative and refrain from actively addressing a player's views and ideas about history. These games do not build on the interaction between the game and the player, but on the interaction between players themselves, which is facilitated by the game acting as a social platform. Through these games, players face a social environment in which a potentially huge amount of historical knowledge, insight and opinions about the war can be shared between players. Additionally, the majority, if not all popular multi-player first person shooters provide ways of communication between players, both voice- or text-based. These pre-programmed communication channels, however, are not the only ways through which players of a game can communicate with each other. Most commercial games have at least one easy-to-find website with an official forum, through which a virtually endless amount of questions can be answered, requests fulfilled, and information can be published. Thus far, the growing field of historical game studies has not focused on researching the ways in which history is used and addressed within the gamer communities that exist through these channels, leaving much of their influence on their members’ grasp of WWII-history and historical practice in obscurity. What and how do gamers learn about the Second World War in WWII multiplayer FPS gaming communities? Through a thorough content analysis of historical (and not so historical) discussions in one of these communities and the ways in which these are influenced by both the community itself and the characteristics of the social platforms it utilizes, this thesis attempts to answer this question. The Heroes & Generals (Reto-Moto, 2014) community provides a case study, which is analysed using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison et al., 1999) and Peter Seixas’ ‘benchmarks of historical thinking’ (Seixas, 2006). The results show that these gamer communities can be very capable of sustaining sophisticated historical discussions, in which many indicators of historical thinking are apparent. The main reason for this is that community forums and dedicated historical forums in particular provide an effective learning experience, but only when the criteria dictated by the CoI framework are met.