Wired has an article up talking with Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, and his thoughts on the value and potential of 'god games' and other open-ended sandbox games that let people think "counterfactually." While Ferguson is an economic historian, he's also a big fan of 'counterfactual history,' where historians attempt to reimagine the past. Theorizing what would've happened if the Normandy landing had failed or if X event had played out just a little differently is counterfactual thinking.

Ferguson thinks becoming skilled at counterfactual thinking is helpfujl to any sort of job that requires thinking along 'what if' lines. And what does this have to do with video games?

The power of counterfactual thinking is that forces us to step outside of our comfort zones. When we think about historical events, we have 20/20 hindsight — so we forget how confusing and uncertain they were at the time ...

When we play with sims, they knock us off our pedestals — because crazy things usually happen we don't predict. Yet the chaos is useful, because we can run the same situation again and again, changing one little thing each time, until we've war-gamed it deeply and understand it better than ever.

Ferguson teamed up with company Muzzy Lane to design a game - due out in 2008 - that will "model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran."

Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games [Wired]