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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

Ever since sophisticated real-time 3D graphics became a thing, I've often heard the idea expressed that we could learn about history by experiencing it "first hand". An incredible VR experience, surely.

The problem is that a meticulous recreation is really hard even if you have a bunch of historians doing the work, and very likely to reproduce a ton of modern biases without good documentation of every tiny detail. For medieval Europe, it's probably simply impossible to get right. The written record just isn't good enough.

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Although I agree with the problem you’ve framed. I still think the idea of building VR experiences to learn and educate about ancient times has a lot of potential.

Since, to a great extent, the problem you’ve outlined extends to every medium. And I still believe that movies and books that try to capture the state of the art in our understanding of previous civilizations play a major role in getting people interested and to care about digging deeper into the topics.

Defile what I defile, Lisa.

Assasin's Creed odyssey actually has a "Tour Mode" where you can get a tour of Athens or other open world locations. They tried to make it accurate.

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2019/9/10/20859403/assassins...

Of course then you get a bunch of historians on youtube complaining that this or that detail isn't 100% correct ... But thats just people

I can only imagine it's incredibly difficult and would require quite a bit of subjectivity, even for academics. I don't have any insight into that. However, being a game designer, I have a related point to make: "game" output should be separated into two distinct categories when considering accuracy. They are:

1) Video games geared towards entertainment:

Historical accuracy will ALWAYS take second fiddle to providing a great gaming experience, as it should.

2) "Serious" games and simulations:

Some of the same academics that do all of the other research on these topics are now using game engines and 3D modelling tools to make accompanying models, and though I haven't seen any personally, probably more involved simulations. They're no more or less likely to be accurate than any other academic work on the topic. Critique by other academics seems like a pretty traditional way to advance a field even if the medium is pretty new.

Assessing the historical accuracy of an entertainment-based medium seems to me a bit like assessing jokes for factual accuracy: perhaps useful as a qualitative study, but probably missing the point if it's a quantitative measure of value. That said, if the marketing copy makes specific claims, then those claims absolutely deserve to be evaluated for accuracy.

There's also an aspect of "reality is unrealistic". A modern audience would likely be baffled, by, say, brightly painted ancient Roman statues and buildings; while that was the contemporary reality, it's not at all what people expect.

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