7 Questions With Shane Newell, Historian, Collector, and Game Developer

 

Shane Newell is the Senior Director of Real Estate for Baystate Health in Springfield, Massachusetts. He serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Baystate Medical Office Building Association and as Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Pioneer Valley Federal Credit Union. Shane is also a historian, essayist, and art collector. He is the author of The Essential Guide To Stevens Decoys, Joseph Warren and the Boston Rebellion, and inventor of Franklin's Fortune deck-building game. 

1. How and when did you get hooked on history?

My interest in history began as a hobby enterprise – treasure hunting for valuable antiques in the mid-1980s. As I researched the things I found, I began to take interest in the story behind the objects. This became a love for both history and the artistic objects that lent physical and visual connections to the story being told. A single object can represent generations of human endeavor.

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life? 

I have a library of mentors and role models that help shape my thinking. I read historical biographies to learn about human nature because, while it is imperfect, it can be understood and predictable. Love, greed, fear, integrity, courage, and all the rest of human nature has been with us since creation. I believe we can learn more from studying historical lives than we can from historical events. Historical mentoring is most useful when the insight is applied to our own nature and patterns that we want to strengthen or overcome. 

3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career? 

My career as a corporate real estate executive may appear to have little relationship with history, but from history we can give context to our modern working life, our important communications, the business cycles we encounter, and human behavior.

4. Why is studying/knowing history important? 

Without history, being “in the moment” is meaningless, or it will be meaningless after the moment is over. Without history, we are in aimless spell. We confuse change, modernizing, smoothing, simplifying, and streamlining, with human progress – that being, ideally, the quest for human happiness. Yet, with all these conveniences and more, our society is no happier than it was 50, 100 or 200 years ago, perhaps much less. History teaches us that lasting happiness is born in a gritty connection to the earth, our personal and public trials over time, and doing something useful for others. Mobile devices and conveniences can’t offer the kind of happiness known by people for thousands of years, long before these recent inventions. The only way we can learn about lasting happiness is by understanding human history. When we value our past, we can be happy in the moment. 

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

I enjoy artistic and biographical interpretations of the American patriots from 1750 to 1800. I study the ideological constructs related to self-government. I find the time period most compelling and revealing of the American Spirit – the quest for enlightenment, common sense, liberty, resolve, justice, and having the courage to trust in the virtue of the People to govern themselves. It’s been a long and difficult road forged ahead by a special kind of unified hope for America.

6. What is Franklin’s Fortune and how did it come about?

Franklin’s Fortune is a deck-building game that I developed based on the works of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin knew that to learn, we must be involved.  This is the reason I decided to “gamify” Franklin’s timeless wisdoms. Few educational systems consider the value of balancing energy, experience, opportunities, wealth, courage, wisdom, persistence, and the virtue gain by overcoming obstacles. My game is designed for this purpose – to have real-life usefulness. Each game mechanic represents a guiding principle taught by Franklin. Many players have shared with me how Franklin’s Fortune has changed their outlook on life, realizing that success is simply balancing energy with meaningful pursuits. 

7. Like Franklin, you’re a man of many talents. Please tell us about a book or project or two?  

I think we all want to do something interesting, and that usually requires trying many different things. Franklin did many interesting things, and he was uniquely successful with all of them. My projects haven’t been commercially successful, but their purposes are served. My book about Stevens Decoys helped introduce this unique and indigenous folk-art to many types of collectors. My pamphlet, More Common Sense, is a reflective essay about modern society and administrative government. My book about Dr. Joseph Warren and the memorial art collection creates new interest about this astonishing patriot leader. At the outset of American Revolution, Joseph Warren was known throughout America, and dubiously feared in England. Today, only a few hundred people understand his important role as a Leader. I want to help restore his legacy with a project called The Joseph Warren Center for History and Leadership. I enjoy writing essays about these topics – along with an occasional personal, and amusing, story – on my website shane-newell.com.

7 Questions with Ros Evans, History Video Gamer and Creator of the Mission Past YouTube Channel

 

Ros Evans created the Mission Past YouTube channel to explain, explore and celebrate history in video games. He has an academic background in archaeology and has been making independent short videos about history for over a decade. His film about the English Civil War won the award for best narrative at The Archaeology Channel International Film Festival in 2012 and in 2015 he co-founded the local history podcast in the UK called A Good Walk Spoiled. Mission Past takes his love of history and morphs it with his passion and experience for video games to explore how history pops up in the multi-billion dollar gaming industry. The channel can be found at  www.youtube.com/c/missionpast

1.How and when did you get hooked on history?

When I was a kid in the late '90s there were two big influences that really got me interested. One was a British TV series called Time Team where a group of archaeologists and historians had three days to evaluate a historical site. The second was the video game Age of Empires, released on PC in 1997. It allowed you to play as one of a number of ancient civilisations. Both of those vividly brought history to life through computer imagery. I remember thinking “wow people used to live like this? I have to find out more!”

2.What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

Studying history gives you a drive to ask how things came to be the way they are. In the construction of objects, places, technologies, cultures and so on. I think that this curiosity to get back to the essentials of things is a way of thinking that stays with you once you learn it and you can apply it to practically anything.

3.How does history play a part of your professional life/career?

I have a Masters in Archaeology for Screen Media and for the last six years I've been a freelance videographer. I occasionally get the opportunity to work on historical projects – recently I've been involved with an interactive project exploring the history of Malmesbury (a small town in the south of England) and it's been a pleasure to highlight the unseen layers of history that are everywhere in the modern world. I also had the opportunity to do some work experience on Time Team shortly before it was discontinued which was great.

4.Why is studying/knowing history important?

History is the key to unlocking who we are. But to be slightly provocative, very often TV shows and the like blandly tell us that our ancestors were just like us, which is of course true to some extent. But they also perceived and thought about the world in a radically different way to us. There is a great positive message from studying history and thinking about how much has changed in the way people have perceived and constructed society. It underscores humanity's incredible ability to change.

5.What is your favourite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

My favourite historical period is the English Civil War of the 1640s because the country was in flux. Not only was there a devastating civil war going on but also fundamental questions were being asked which were influential for hundreds of years in Europe and further abroad. It culminated in the execution of King Charles I, who was after all apparently placed there by god himself. I must say that I also love prehistory (although it doesn't technically qualify for this question!) because every little scrap you find out illuminates part of our past that seems so distant and foreign to us today. I've been lucky enough to help excavate sites from both of these periods too which gives you an instant and very direct link to the history.

6.How did Mission Past get started?

For over a decade I've tried to create accessible and entertaining videos about history because I want to get other people interested in the past just as I did when I was younger. The idea to discuss video games came to me about two years ago initially because I wanted a visual aid for the history I was talking about but then I realised that video games are hugely understudied compared to the cultural footprint they have (the industry is now bigger than the movie and music industries combined). And after all it was a video game that really had an impact on me to take up studying history. I'm also pretty well qualified having spent longer than I'd like to admit playing video games since the late '90s.

7.How difficult is it to strike the right balance of history and enjoyability in a game? What are the hallmarks of a great historical game?

I wrote an essay on this topic when I was studying my Masters, it's fascinating. Video games have to be entertaining and engaging and (perhaps unfortunately) the history has to come second to this. That's not to say that games don't have a duty to represent the history in good faith, they do, but because of the nature of the medium it has to be streamlined. The balance between enjoyability and historical veracity is very difficult and it's practically impossible to satisfy both requirements.

I have always seen the point of good historical games as giving the player encouragement to go and find out more about the history they feature, whether that's inside or outside of the game. For that to happen they need to immerse the player in the past. That's exactly how I first became interested in history. Games are a relatively young medium and they are getting better and better at including information for those that are interested, for example by featuring an interactive historical game mode or encyclopedia.