Introduction. The UN Secretary General A. Guterres calls for rethinking the whole informational-communicative structure of the educational process, taking into account global digitisation. Among the numerous media tools and platforms being mastered by the educational environment today, video games occupy a special and very promising place. In this case, they are defined as multimodal cybertexts with unique rhetorical capabilities. The research aims at determining the educational potential of the video game ‘Valiant Hearts: The Great War’ in the context of studying History.
Materials and Methods. The methodology of the theoretical part of the study is based on the procedural-rhetorical (J. Bogost), medial (A. Ensslin) and multimodal (J. Hawreliak and W. Toh) interpretation of video games. The experimental-practical part of the research is based on the Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) method by M. Prensky.
Results. It has been revealed that the video game ‘Valiant Hearts: The Great War’ has significant media-rhetorical potential for representing information on the topic of World War I. Its narrative focus provides a number of new opportunities for relating historical subjects. An educational experiment demonstrated the high efficiency of using ‘Valiant Hearts: The Great War’ in studying the history of World War I. This cybertext quickened the students’ interest, considerably increasing their academic motivation and interest in the educational process. The user study of its plot enabled the students to discover a personal-existential dimension in studying the topic of World War I, as well as to focus on its anti-humanistic nature and the clash between people’s destinies and state interests. At the same time, these DGBL practices turned out to be associated with a substantial amount of time necessary for studying video game cybertexts. Their incomplete factual relevance to the academic history course was also noted.
Conclusion. Using the DGBL method in studying history can be recommended, but only in particular formats – first of all, within the framework of extracurricular classes, homework and long-term project activities. Also, a mandatory condition for working with non-specialised video games is methodological support aimed at focusing the students’ attention on learning tasks. Taking into account these features, we consider it appropriate to incorporate into the educational process of studying history certain videogame cybertexts (for example, ‘Valiant Hearts: The Great War’), capable of optimising the study of history and creating new, multimodally oriented semiotic modes of persuasion in the practice of the academic process.
Keywords: Digital Game-Based Learning, historical video games, history, narrative video games, history education, video game media rhetoric
For Reference: Belyaev, D. A., Smirnov, M. Yu., & Voronin, I. V. (2025). The narrative media rhetoric of the video game ‘Valiant Hearts: The Great War’ in studying history: the theory and practice of implementation in an educational context. Perspektivy nauki i obrazovania = Perspectives of Science and Education, (4), 591–602. https://doi.org/10.32744/pse.2025.4.38
Information about the authors:
Dmitriy A. Belyaev (Russia, Lipetsk) — Associate Professor, Dr. Sci. (Philosophy), Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Political Science and Theology. Lipetsk State Pedagogical University named after P.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shan | Lipetsk Cossack Institute of Technology and Management (branch) | Moscow State University of Technology and Management named after K.G. Razumovsky (First Cossack University). E-mail: dm.a.belyaev@gmail.com
Mikhail Yu. Smirnov (Russia, Lipetsk) — Associate Professor, Cand. Sci. (Phys.-Math. Sci.), Associate Professor of the Department of Natural and Technical Sciences. Lipetsk Cossack Institute of Technology and Management (branch) | Moscow State University of Technology and Management named after K.G. Razumovsky (First Cossack University). E-mail: m_u_smirnov@mail.ru
Ilya V. Voronin (Russia, Lipetsk) — Senior Lecturer at the Department of Natural and Technical Sciences. Lipetsk Cossack Institute of Technology and Management (branch). Moscow State University of Technology and Management named after K.G. Razumovsky (First Cossack University). E-mail: iv@voronin86.ru
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