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Development Player Practices

You’re ruining my lore

Click here to download and play “You’re ruining my lore” (via Holly Nielsen, itch.io) This is a short interactive fiction vignette I created to explore some of the ideas (and my own personal perspective and feelings) around “lore” in games, what it has come to mean, and the role of players in the creation of […]

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Player Practices

Reflections on Player Practice and Online Wikis

“EA Sports. It’s in the Game”. This infamous refrain will be very familiar to the sports-videogame enthusiasts amongst us. (There are dozens of us. Dozens!) However, when considering player practices and history, it is fascinating to look beyond the confines of digital game content and instead examine the paratexts that are produced around and outside […]

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Development Education General Memory

IWM War Games Jam – Phantom of the Battlefield

Earlier this year, we at the HGN were very fortunate to work alongside several other partners, including historian Dr Chris Kempshall, the University of Glasgow Games and Gaming Lab, and sponsored by World of Tanks to co-host the Imperial War Museum’s War Games Jam. The War Games Jam asked participating teams to create an innovative […]

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Memory

Remembering Baghdad: Videogames and the War on Terror

The early decades of the twenty-first century can be somewhat tricky to define, ideologically and historically. In the Anglosphere it is largely remembered for the triumph of the Third Way – the victories of the Democrats and New Labour cementing neoliberal capitalism as the ideology of ‘the West’ during what Fukuyama called ‘the end of […]

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Player Practices

Call for Contributions – Player Practices

(header photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash) The historical consequences of historical games do not end with the interaction between the player and the designed game. As discussed in our Education theme, players are often prompted by historical content to undertake further research and engagement with the past (Beavers, 2020), and to discuss it and […]

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Memory

Recording: HGN Panel on “Memory” (October 2023)

The eighth HGN panel event took place on 25 October and discussed the theme of “Memory” in games. We were delighted to welcome Dr Kate Marrison (University of Sussex, United Kingdom), Casilda de Zulueta (freelancer technical artist and animator, indie developer and animation teacher based in Germany) and Ian Kikuchi (Historian and Curator at the […]

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Memory

Fear to Remember: The Development of 13 Rosas

13 Rosas is a horror adventure game currently under development about the characteristics and mechanisms of fascism in general and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in particular. Albeit its necessary incursions with historiography (in the sense of methodologically retelling and contextualizing the past), the game relies on fictionalizing the player actions (you are not a […]

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Memory

Remember. The Children of Bullenhuser Damm: A Landecker Digital Remembrance Game

Kate Marrison in conversation with Markus Bassermann (October 2023) The sharp rise in interest in the potential of digital media to preserve, revive and enhance Holocaust memory and education is intricately entangled not only with the passing of the survivor generation, but the emergence of new media technologies and the increasingly central role digital media […]

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Memory

Memory and Historical Games – thoughts in light of the Imperial War Museum’s ‘War Games’ exhibition

In 2022, the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London opened ‘War Games’, an exhibition about video games and war, which it was my privilege to curate. Focussing on how video games tell stories of war and conflict, the exhibition featured a range of games, with contributions from their developers and historic artefacts from the museum’s […]

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Memory

Astroneer and the Paradoxes of Memory in Historical Space Exploration Gaming

Astroneer, seemingly a portmanteau of ‘Astronaut’ and ‘Pioneer’, is a sandbox low-poly space exploration game in which players take on the role of a spacesuit-wearing individual or robot whose identity remains obscured. While future-focused, it is also a historical game based on memory. Players explore uninhabited, procedurally-generated worlds that mostly appear natural, but feature ruins […]