Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games

12. Performing the (Virtual) Past: Online Character Interpretation as Living History at Old Sturbridge Village

201 12 Performing the (Virtual) Past Online Character Interpretation as Living History at Old SturbridgeVillage Scott Magelssen Old Sturbridge Village, a major living history museum in Massachusetts, stages and interprets a 1830s New England community for thousands of visitors year round. Recently, Sturbridge developed an online program that allows students in classrooms to conduct a virtual interview with Sturbridge “villagers” from the past. For fifty dollars an hour, these nineteenth-century characters answer students’ questions and talk about their lives in real time. They can supplement this dialogue with image and sound files. While other living museums have experimented with live, interactive television programming, Sturbridge is the first museum to adopt a strictly electronic medium for interaction between virtual museum visitors (users1 ) and character interpreters. The online chat format offered by Sturbridge challenges and alters traditional text-based narratives of history, while at the same time appearing to pose a counter-trajectory to the non-text-based norm of living museum historiography (i.e., offering visitors the chance to learn about history by interacting with live bodies). The program itself is an exquisite paradox—using twenty-first-­ century technology to produce a believed-in experience of interacting with a nineteenth-century individual. Based on research and interviews with Old Sturbridge Village education coordinators, and an analysis of my own classroom’s experience with an online chat, this chapter inquires into the historiographic and performative issues that emerge when considering online, real-time character interpretation as a virtual living-history experience : How are notions of historical accuracy/authenticity negotiated in the slippage of virtual space? Can a virtual interview performance provide performer-spectator relationships as rich and layered as those created by 202 Playing with the Past traditional on-site museum programs? Can this mode of interpretation still be called “living history”? Old Sturbridge Village is one of the oldest living museums in the United States. Begun as a collection of artifacts by A. B. Wells in central Massachusetts, it adopted living history programming in the 1970s, following the lead of Plimoth Plantation, its living museum neighbor to the east.2 Now billing itself as the place “Where Early America Comes Alive,” Sturbridge employs several character interpreters and third-person costumed staff (who do not speak in character), and offers year-round educational activities, including “second-person interpretation” in which visitors can dress in costume and immerse themselves in the past as some of its inhabitants. The “Discovery Camps” program, for instance, gives youths an experience of going to school, learning crafts, and doing chores as their peers would have in the nineteenth century.3 The online chat with a nineteenth-century villager is one of Old Sturbridge Village’s newest programs. Interactive computer activities intended for classroom history pedagogy or as independent play for history buffs at home have been developing and expanding for the last three decades. My first encounter with computer-screen historiography was in my fourth-grade classroom, playing The Oregon Trail in the early-mid 1980s.4 Now gamers can choose from a multiplicity of simulated historical experiences, from ancient and classic civilization games to experiences that offer simulated warfare strategizing of the last century and documentary games that recreate the JFK assassination and the terrorist attacks of 9-11.5 Old Sturbridge Village’s online chat program is one of the latest articulations of the intersection between history and simulated computer experience. While the case may be that a given individual might not immediately place Sturbridge’s online chat program into the category of “video game,” it becomes quickly clear upon closer examination that obvious and explicit parallels can be drawn between the two, and at the very least it may be demonstrated that they are strongly related. On a fundamental level, as many of the essays in this volume articulate, video game interface experiences are grounded in the assumption of a mediated bodily presence—that is, the user must willingly suspend his/her disbelief and imagine an interaction with an other (a character or characters, helpers and antagonists, etc.). This assumption of a mediated bodily presence— and a concomitant strategic “forgetting” of the reminders of quotidian reality (i.e., the mediating technology)—is precisely the suspension of disbelief required for the Sturbridge chat program to seem authentic to classroom users. Players must suspend their formal acknowledgment of Performing the (Virtual) Past 203 the structures that inform them that this is an artificial...