One morning, my history teacher drew the numbers 1066 on the blackboard. “Can anyone tell me what happened in this year?” she asked. My classmates seem to lapse into a semi-stupor. But for me, those four digits set off a cascade of images and ideas in my head. When I raised my hand, my teacher raised her eyebrows.

“Yes?” she asked, pointing to me, squinting with suspicion. Until that point, I had rarely spoken in class. I opened my mouth, and to everyone’s surprise the answer just spilled out. Dates, names, places, battle tactics. I could have taught the class that day.

My teacher’s eyebrows rose even higher. “Where did you learn that?” she asked. “A video game” I responded. She snorted derisively, and turned back to the board.

For a few minutes, it seemed like the countless hours spent sitting at my father’s desk, playing Empire Earth on his clunky Dell desktop, was actually going to connect to something in my dreary formal education. The video game had taught me not just the dates, but the major players: the Normans (led by Duke William), the Saxons (led by Harold Godwinson), and the Vikings (led by Harold Hadrada).