Need Help Choosing...

any paradox game

You can search for a tag "history" in steam search. You will find many strategy, FPS and other war games. About western wars, samurai battles, knights ..?
Don't know how beneficial are those games though. But if you need games about civilizations and important people, then you'll find it in the strategy games mostly

Company of Heroes?

1. Valiant Hearts: The Great War - The game follows the major events of World War I (French and German) and gives an emotional perspective of the history. IIRC, there's a "historical" menu or some form of fact sheet in the game.

2. Never Alone - It's a game that has these short documentaries that unlock as you play the game (side-scroller platformer). Real Iñupiaq people share their stories and you learn bits of their culture up in Alaska and the traditions that they've had for hundreds of years.

3. This War of Mine - "The game was inspired by the poor living conditions and wartime atrocities that Bosnian civilians endured during the 1992–96 Siege of Sarajevo, the longest city siege since World War II." Haven't played it, so I can't tell you if you actually learn any history from it, or if it's more of a personal experience.

As for your poll question, we had games in elementary school installed on the computers, and we'd have a "computer lab" involving them twice a week. I recall Reader Rabbit being one of the series, but there were others that involved teaching basics such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, tenses, typing, opposites, basic mathematics, etc.

Have you ever played video games for school?

Does playing 4DBoxing and Scorched Earth in the computer lab while we were supposed to be in class count? If so then yes.

Can't say I really know any games that would fit. Age of Empires back when I was younger showed me what "bronze" age and all that were, but Idk if it'd be better or any different from Civ 5.

Hmm, I can't think of any off hand besides the history-based strategy games people have mentioned, but have a bump.
I just wanted to say that I think it's really cool that gaming was incorporated in school! The only time video games were even mentioned was in elementary school, like Number Munchers and typing games. It's wonderful to see that the professor is open-minded and taught history through Civ V!

I played Oregon Trail for school. :) Is that dating me too much?

You can check a bunch of games by Koei - Romance of the Three Kingdoms & Dynasty Warriors both deal with the end of the Han dynasty. Samurai Warriors deal with the period in Japan. These would give them a taste for something other than Western history. Koei also did a few other games (not sure if they are all on Steam) that dealt with Joan of Arc and a few others.

While I haven't played the more recent ones, the Total War series might be good. Napoleon time period (they did one in this time period) is pretty darn interesting in my opinion (hopefully the Total War games do it justice).

I've heard amazing things about Crusader Kings II but I think that would be a wee bit too complicated to just pick up and experience.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War™ / Soldats Inconnus : Mémoires de la Grande Guerre™

First of all, it's (in my opinion) a very good game - easy to play, cute graphics, nice story.
It's set in Western front in WW1 and manages to represent the feel of the era even though it's a cartoonish and often silly game.
It has all this mementos for player to collect, which give encyclopedia like text about important events/inventions etc of the period.

Someone suggested Total War: Sengoku 1, Medieval 1 and somewhat Rome 1 might be useful as a history teaching tool, later ones are just lacking in anything apart the (somewhat) historical unit types.

EDIT: You might wanna check out The Guild (1&2), they are "medieval life sims", one of those weird niche games in which you can do a million different things, but the game itself is poorly optimized and riddled with bugs.

we had the students play Civ 5

Then, don't be surprised if they think that Gandhi was a psychopathic tyrant who often resorted to brute force...

You could try any Microsoft Studios' RTS: Age of Empires II, Age of Empires III, Rise of Nations, even Age of Mythology.
Or the Total War series, they cover a good amount of historic battles.

While the Total War series is not extremely accurate, nor gives in-depth analysis of events, it's a fun series that is, compared to other grand-strategies, not too hard to learn. I played it a lot in my youth. Just because I enjoyed the game so much I checked out facts about nations and history I encountered in that game.
If the game is fun, then the chances are higher that someone might do outside-reasearch, so I would recommend that series.

The Assassin's Creed series taught me alot about history XD

We played Worms on a Beamer in a seminar once...though I cant remember the purpose of it anymore xD
And my math teacher once caught me playing Online Poker in class...he was so interested in it he made a lesson about it the next week d(ﾟ∀ﾟd)

I haven't tried it yet(only bought it yesterday :P) but from what I hear Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway has a quite good representation of WW2. Quote from an article I found on the subject: "Brothers in Arms follows a squad of men of the 101st Airborne Division, led by Sergeant Matthew Baker through the Allied Operations during World War 2. Though it’s been criticized for its bugs and slightly lackluster gameplay, it’s very historically accurate and received accolades for its portrayal of WW2."

Another couple titles that i don't see mentioned yet(again, not personally played, just found on the interwebz) are Unity in Command and Red Turn: The Road to Berlin.

souce: http://topyaps.com/15-historically-accurate-games-must-played-everyone

I second first reply in this thread. Paradox games should be good for that. I play Europa Universalis IV causally and I enjoy historically inspired events there.
Generally many strategy games could be helpful. >tires to summon Fnord and his extensive knowledge to the thread<

It would be easier to recommend something if you said what time period or topics you'd like to touch next.

80 days, even fictional, many events in the game are based on history. So students could do a comparison of the in game facts to the historical ones. Might be motivating.

Maybe youcould use (city) simulators to promote different epochs, e.g. Caesar games for roman stuff, Stronghold for medieval times, Anno series for 1500-1700s, Sid Meier's Colonization for 1600-1800s.

Just a bump.

Verdun, for obvious reasons of learning about World War 1 (the only problem being that I'm not familiar with your education system so I'm really not sure what age your students are :P).

EDIT: To elaborate, the game could show how (generally) WW1 was fought, the fact that it was mostly a positional war, tanks weren't used very often, same with automatic weapons. The game's loading screens tell about individual battles.

Playing History: Slave Trade

Emphasis on Slave Tetris. It really shows you how compacted they were in the ships.

Preparing for blacklists.

Sorry for not noticing this until now (despite Entropia trying to summon me).

I'll agree with the Paradox recommendations. They can be a bit heavy to get into, but they're also rather good at conveying the general themes of the periods they're trying to represent. You won't learn the exact way things worked, but you'll get a good idea of why many of the things that happened happened. If you want to give the students a good feel for how things change, then you can let them play the games in chronological order, starting with Europa Universalis: Rome, then Crusader Kings II, Europa Universalis IV, Victoria 2 and finally Hearts of Iron IV. You get a good feel for how different the different time periods actually were.

If you're in need of something that goes a bit more in depth for a certain period, the AGEOD titles are good, but also more complex. Most of them focus on a single conflict.

I would actually recommend against the Total War series. They are inspired by historical time periods, but the developers also tend to take some strange liberties with things. Sometimes just inventing new unit types because they sound "cool". They're also aiming for balance, which creates some very unhistoric army compositions (Shogun 2 is a good example, where you have Samurai running around with just katanas, where historically this was a side arm). These can actually be a lot worse than games that are clearly not based on history, as they give the impression of being historically accurate. This is actually one thing that's very important to keep in mind in general when it comes to using games as a teaching tool: How accurate do they look/feel and how accurate are they really?

Twilight Struggle was recently released on steam. it's based on a board game (by the same name), and it does a good job at portraying how people thought the world worked during the cold war. The "domino theory" that it's based on has turned out to be wrong, but many decisions were made with this faulty theory in mind.

A game like Unity of Command might give you a good idea about the importance of supply in war in a very direct way. It's not the most historically accurate game, but its presentation does not give any false impressions.

Finding more peaceful games is surprisingly hard. Both the Anno series, and the games by Impressions Games (Cesar, Zeus and so on) might give you some odd impressions on how things worked. A game like Patrician might be better, because while again, not perfectly accurate, it's better at conveying the general themes of the era. East India Company would also not be a terrible pick here, though the victory conditions make you play in a way that's not as accurate as it could have been. Commander. Conquest of the Americas is a better, and more detailed, game than East India Company, but it might also end up teaching the students faulty things.
1979 Revolution: Black Friday is an interesting game. It's important to know that when playing it that the author did bring certain biases with them, but the game does a good job at portraying the overall turbulence of the time period, and while you can tell where the author's opinions lean towards, it does make a good effort at trying to show that this was not a one-sided conflict. The Cat and the Coup is another game that focuses on Iran, and it what made it into what it is today.

I've not tested the Playing History series, but I remember Playing History 2 - Slave Trade causing quite a stir due to the "slave Tetris" min-game. By the looks of it, that mini-game does an excellent job at conveying the message of just how dehumanizing the salve trade actually was, and you're supposed to feel uncomfortable playing it.

Also, one thing that might be interesting would be to give the students simulators showing things from different time periods. Letting them play something like Rise of Flight, followed by IL-2 Sturmovik, and then Strike Fighters 2: Vietnam might give the students a good feel for how airplanes evolved over this period.

Oh, and here's one that someone above scoffed at.... The Assassin's Creed Series. Yes, they are terribly historically inaccurate in many different ways. But look at the architecture, look at the clothes that people wear. A lot of research went into getting this right. For teaching you about historical events, the AC series is terrible, but from AC 2 and onwards, the environments are quite good. The AC series does have one big advantage here, over other "inspired by history" games in that you can easily tell that it's not accurate, and thus the students won't learn a lot of faulty things that are hard to un-learn.