When I resisted this idea, arguing that the game might misrepresent Ancient Egypt to uncritical players, they suggested that it might at least inspire students to do more research into Ancient Egyptian history. I asked my students what they thought of the historical setting of the game, and they suggested that the game would be valuable for teaching Ancient Egyptian history, perhaps to upper elementary through high school students. And I will admit, it is a very engaging game. We played it early in the semester, and their love for it only grew as the semester continued.
#Temple complex ptah pharaoh game Pc#
I used Pharaoh as one of the ten required games for a semester-long Composition II course on 20th century PC games last spring, and it was one of my students’ favorite games. (screen capture from the introduction animation of Pharaoh) Pharaoh as a teaching tool? I’m not too sure either. I claim that Pharaoh demonstrates the same principle in a historical simulation game–and that this principle is further demonstrated by the failure of Zeus and Poseidon to effectively translate Pharaoh‘s Ancient Egypt-specific mechanics into Ancient Greece.
I often tell my freshman composition students that the narrower and more specific their topic is, the more they’ll be able to say about it and the more interesting their writing will be for it. Pharaoh maintained the utopian civilization-building aspirations of SimCity and the themes of empire and conquest from Age of Empires and Empire Earth, but narrowed the scope of both by locating itself specifically in Ancient Egypt, rather than offering a list of civilization or–as SimCity does–positioning the player as the architect of an imagined civilization that is some abstraction of what it means to be a (modern) city (which corresponds, generally, to Earth’s modern western civilization). Others approached the problem of making interesting mechanics out of this genre by getting narrower in their scope, such as Maxis’s SimFarm and SimAnt. Some of these games had vast aspirational subjects: Maxis’s SimCity series, Microsoft’s Age of Empires series, Sierra’s Empire Earth, and so forth. Pharaoh was released in 1999, toward the end of a boom period for simulation games, in which it was necessary to make each new simulation game somehow distinct from all the others. This time, I want to do neither in this post, I will examine how specificity strengthens Sierra’s Pharaoh in terms of both historical representation and gameplay. It’s easy to criticize games with historical settings based on their inaccuracies, and equally easy to defend them on the basis of gameplay.
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