Videogame genres have long served as the kindling on which game studies discourse fires rage. As long as there have been discussions around the categorisation of videogames, the specificities that characterise games in virtual environments have spawned genre names that range from the instructive (Platformer) to the comparative (Roguelike) to the needlessly wordy (Multiplayer Online […]
If you take a look at famous combat-flying action game franchise Ace Combat (Namco, 1995-), at first glance it would seem an innocuous pastime. You pilot jets shooting at others, focused in its tightly-packed set pieces with realistic and science fiction concepts. With a contemporary fictitious world serving as a background, the series has an arcade style […]
Around two and a half years ago I set out to adapt The Mabinogion as a video game. The text itself is a collection of medieval Welsh tales, and one of the most significant works of Welsh literary heritage. The motivation for the project largely came about through an exploration of my own family history: born in […]
Codice Lugo 1945 – Le Carte della Liberazione is an urban card game created by PopHistory ETS (an Italian association of various types of professionals operating in the field of public history) and commissioned by the Municipality of Lugo (Ravenna, Italy). The game was designed to meet two primary goals: to bring to light memories […]
Games are a significant medium through which ideas of nationhood, identity, history, and cultural belonging are produced, circulated, and contested. Whether through historically themed simulations, military shooters, strategy games, role-playing experiences, or satirical independent titles, games often engage with narratives of national identity while simultaneously reflecting the global contexts in which they are developed, distributed, […]
On the 19th May 2026, we hosted our 14th HGN discussion panel for our Analogue theme, with guest speakers Izzy Bartley, Liz Davidson, and Andrew McKelvey (chaired by Nick Webber). You can now find a recording of the event via the HGN Youtube channel (and embedded below). As ever, you can read all of the contributions […]
Back in June 2023, the HGN ran the workshop ‘Re-Playing with History: Revisiting Historical Games Studies’ at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) international conference in Seville. This was a follow-up to the ‘Playing with History’ workshop held at the DiGRA/FDG conference in Dundee in 2016. The 2023 workshop aimed to revisit several of the […]
Since May 2020, I have conducted over 200 interviews for my podcast, Beyond Solitaire. A significant number of these focus on historical gaming, and one of the most common recurring themes among them is “accuracy vs. authenticity”–in other words, remaining true to historical fact versus capturing an accurate historical feeling, at least as far as we […]
Many museums in Britain have their foundations firmly planted in the colonial project. I am a White British woman, educated through the English national curriculum and I work as a Digital Learning Officer in one such museum service – Leeds Museums and Galleries (LMG). Through the processes of collecting, classifying, cataloguing, displaying and interpreting artefacts […]
In 1980s American popular culture, men with Uzis were everywhere. In The Terminator (1984), the titular killer cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger demanded an “Uzi 9mm” from a gun store owner prior to executing him. Clad in double denim and a bandana, Chuck Norris wielded not one but two Uzis on the poster for action movie Invasion […]