História, escola e games: a utilização de jogos históricos brasileiros no ambiente escolar

Abstract

Digital games are cultural products with singular characteristics which are fundamentally responsible for their current immense popularity and relevance. Their relationship with education, however, is not a recent advancement. Over the last fifty years, researchers and enthusiasts have tried to comprehend the possibilities of videogames within the classroom, believing them to be a suitable medium for teaching through Serious Games. With the establishment of Game Studies as an academic field, new perspective and concepts have been proposed, especially in the mid-2000s thanks to the Historical Games. This research aims to bring light the usage of the so-called commercial games with the History of Brazil in context and their application, considering the school’s issues and reality. To that end, we will analyze the history of videogames throughout the decades and the discourse about the topic before and after the establishment of the industry, leading to an analysis of four national games within the framework proposed by Jeremiah McCall, the Historical Problem Space. The educational product resulted will be an e-book called “Playing the History of Brazil: A guide to educators about videogames in the classroom”, with the main objective of presenting digital games in an objective and dynamic view, highlighting their benefits to teachers, as well as justifying and proposing strategies for their use.