Past Orientations: Edutainment, Computer Games andHistorical Consciousness

I do not want to preach to the player what is right and wrong.But I want to give them a chance to get in touch with themselves about how they do feel."(Bunten Berry in Leyenberger 1985) 1With these words Danielle Bunten Berry described what players could learn from playing The Seven Cities of Gold (Ozark Softscape 1984).This historical game about the exploration and conquest of the Americas published by Electronic Arts (EA) was labelled as edutainment, a type of software that promised to blur the traditional distinctions between art, entertainment, and education. 2Edutainment intercepted parental anxieties around screens and digital literacy, benefiting from the idea that the computer could be considered a "good screen" in contrast to the "bad screen" of the television (Ito 2013, 21).Differently from contemporary educational games, Seven Cities was not meant to teach history or logical skills.Rather, the pedagogical value of the game was in the freedom of choice given to the player, and the emotional feedback provided by the game.Describing the game's complexity, an advert from the time claimed that Seven Cities "gives you a sort of feeling that's unexpected in computer games.It's deeper.Maybe disquieting.It plays as much in your head as it does inside your computer" (Electronic Arts 1984).The concept of a historical game that could be both fun and pedagogical had existed since the 1960s, but it was only with the diffusion of computer games in the late 1970s that it 2 Many contemporary sources cite this instance as the invention of the portmanteau "edutainment".While the actual origin of the term is contested, the anecdote remains ubiquitous.