By offering environments in which play can take place, games provide their players with resources from which they can craft their own narratives. In historical games this includes the capacity to create stories set in the spaces of the past, but players can be seen to engage in historical work in relation to a range […]
While researching my dissertation, I came across a recent book by Andra Ivănescu, entitled Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game: The Way It Never Sounded (2019). It’s a very interesting read, particularly the opening chapter, which talks in depth about the BioShock franchise and how the appropriation of genres of music, along with cultural […]
SPOILER WARNING: This blog contains key plot details from The Forgotten City. What do we do with memorials that make us uncomfortable? Recently there has been a collective reckoning with the physical reminders of contentious histories. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 targeted many statues and memorials with links to slavery. The question of […]
This blogpost might feel slightly tangential to Historical Games – are sports games historical games? HGN always aimed to explore the relationship between history and games, of all kinds and broadly defined! To that end, it’s worth considering how sports games demonstrate the evolution of design and technology, how they use history and how the […]
Of all the themes we have so far had on the HGN, this is perhaps the broadest. As we noted in our call for contributions, digital historical games clearly depend upon virtual environments that often function as representations of past ones. But all games are also themselves played within certain environments, something that often becomes […]
Simulation games refer to instruction delivered via virtual experience that immerses trainees in a decision-making exercise in an artificial, and suitable, environment (Sitzmann, 2011) depending on the nature of the activity. Traditionally these types of games were developed in response to real-world activities where the audience, or hobbyist, desired the ability to explore and increase […]
Our fourth HGN event, for our Education theme, took place on 13 April. We were delighted that the panellists and the audience, generated a lively discussion and prompted more questions on how historical games can be used (or misused) in education. In case you missed it or would like to watch it again, you can […]
Historical games of all kinds are made up of many components, combining elements of gameplay, interaction, agency and challenge with modes of representation such as images, characters, narrative and space. The environments of historical games sit precisely at the intersection between gameplay and representation. In historical games, space and the environments it contains not only […]
So. I’m a curator and a game designer. I work on a lot of different sorts of games: games to play at home, games for museums, games for festivals, games for schools, occasionally even games for computers. Often, these are games with some sort of connection to history, usually made as half of Matheson Marcault, […]
In recent years, different types of video games have created new opportunities to explore and learn about history. With technology improving at a formidable rate, pushing the fidelity and possibilities to uncharted territories, it raises even more questions about the value of historical references, research, and re-enactment in games as a tool to teach history. […]