In this blog, Abbie Hartman explores the impression of women’s history given through video games and its impact on informal education.

Video games have a problem with women. Or, more accurately, video games about history are particularly prone to replicate existing historical narratives. These narratives, at best, often place women as marginal to the machinations of history, and, at their worst, skew the historical narrative to such an extent that it is difficult to understand who these women were, and the role they played in their histories.

I don’t think it’s bold to say that this is a fairly universal problem; from World War II games being boycotted due to their inclusion of women, to the inclusion of female generals causing bad reviews. Overall, including women in historical video games seems to cause problems for developers. However, the way that women are portrayed is equally as problematic.

The first time you meet Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator) in Ubisoft’s 2017 historical video game Assassin’s Creed Origins you’d be forgiven for thinking that you are playing through an accurate representation of the Ptolemaic period. Afterall, Ubisoft often espouses their use of historians and creation of a ‘credible’ history in this series.

You first come across Cleopatra, the last Pharoah of Egypt, you overhear the following conversation:

Cleopatra: I will sleep with anyone! As long as they agree to be executed in the morning

Male party goer: Like Xantides?

Cleopatra: He was well satisfied with his bargain.

Ubisoft’s Cleopatra consistently configures herself through her sexual worth and capabilities. Cleopatra is beautiful and prized for being a sexually desirable woman, not a woman with great political aptitude. This representation is routed in historical sources, namely in the propagandistic writings of Plutarch and Cassius Dio who both wrote significantly after Cleopatra’s death, and who focus on Cleopatra’s beauty and her use of her sexuality to manipulate Julius Caesar as a way to explain that Cleopatra’s involvement with these Roman generals was an anomaly, rather than a serious threat to the power of Rome. It is this version which, over the succeeding 2000 years, has shaped popular understandings of Cleopatra.

In actuality, and according to non-Roman sources, Cleopatra was a powerful, intelligent, ruler who not only learnt the Egyptian language, but ruled the Egyptian people with an understanding of their culture and her position as Pharoah. But, when it comes to video games, this doesn’t matter. And, for me, that is a huge problem because I firmly believe that video games are uniquely good at teaching the public about history.

The history of video games

In 1949, cultural historian Johan Huizinga suggested in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture that “Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society.” Indeed, board games have been found in societies as far back as ancient Egypt and remain popular in the twenty-first century.

Many video games owe their existence to the legacy of wargaming, beginning with the popularisation of kriegsspiele by Prussian Army officers in the early nineteenth century. These kriegsspiele developed with a practical purpose in mind: they provided a scale representation of a given battle and enabled different strategies to be explored without any risk to human life. The civilian interest in wargames led to the development of one of the most recognisable roleplaying games, Dungeons & Dragons.

The first commercial video game console was conceptualised in the early 1950s by Ralph Baer. A schematic and proof of concept was eventually developed for Sanders Associates in December of 1966, ‘Baer’s Brown Box’ (later the Magnavox Odyssey) was released by Magnavox on 22 May 1972. This success of this console began a flurry of video game development which continues to the present. As technology became increasingly available, video games found mainstream commercial success with handheld and home consoles. Still recognisable industry giants soon emerged, such as Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.

In 2025, we have a plethora of ways to play video games. Mobile games have proven very popular since 2008 and have expanded the market for video games as they appeal to a new market of ‘casual’ gamers. Among the most popular mobile game is Fruit Ninja, published by Brisbane-based developer Halfbrick. The most recent trend in gaming is that of ‘virtual reality’ (VR) and ‘augmented reality’ (AR) games. Crowdfunded consoles such as the Oculus Rift purport to be able to change the way players experience gaming and to provide a more immersive experience.

But who actually plays these games?

Although there are an estimated 3.09 billion video game players worldwide, development companies often assume that the only audience for their games are young, white, heterosexual men. However, this is not the reality of video game players in the United States, where 46 per cent of players identify as female and there average age of players is 32, nor is it true for the four out of five Australians who regularly play video games and who are equally likely to be male or female.

Video games and education

Really, we have known for a long time that video games are adept at teaching – they have to be, because if a game cannot teach a player its own mechanics, the way to successfully play the game, then it limits its own playability. If it limits its playability, then it will struggle to be commercially successful because players won’t want to play it and will not recommend the game to other people, which limits their audience and therefore their potential revenue. Which is a huge problem because profit is, after all, the core goal of many entertainment mediums (video games included).

While there are some moves towards using video games to support formal learning, most players will engage with video games in an informal setting. There is a distinct difference between formal and informal learning, primarily linked to learning contexts.

The most relevant conceptualisation of formal learning is that it is the learning within a schooling system, linked with criteria/curricula and, at least partially, mediated through a teacher. Informal, or tangential, learning, in contrast, happens outside of this formal setting and without the presence of an educator-mediator. In the case of historical video games, this likely means when a player is engaging with games in a private setting.

So, if players can learn how to play via a game, the idea is that they can learn other things – in the case of historical video games, they learn about historical systems, settings, and people. Or, more accurately, how history has been interpreted, refracted, and reframed through popular culture and how this has then been presented in video games.

This mode of informal education has a vast potential to engage players who would not usually study history in a formal sense, and therefore has the potential to bring little known or otherwise marginalised histories into the mainstream. It’s just that video games so often don’t do this.

What history is really being learnt?

So, in a context where we know that approximately half of video game players identify as female, and where we frequently see portrayals like that of Cleopatra discussed above, we need to ask ourselves exactly what impression of women’s history, of their own history, are these players walking away with.

Unfortunately, for the most part, this is a history still deeply embedded in patriarchal views and one that there seems to be little hope to shift.

Dr Abbie Hartman is a cultural and public historian working at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research interrogates the knowledge created when the public interacts with history through popular culture, with a particular emphasis on historical video games.

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