This September, in collaboration with the Imperial War Museums Institute and the Royal Society of Edinburgh‘s Curious Festival 2025, the Historical Games Network will be hosting a discussion panel event exploring history, fantasy, digital games and media. Curious is a festival of ideas – open to all and driven by connection, conversation, and discovery. It’s a chance to […]
Imagine you are playing a game. Where are you? And does the location where you play shape your experience in any way? The game experience always happens in a place, public and/or private [1]. There could be multiple reasons why you are playing in a private or public place, depending on the kind of game […]
The fifth HGN panel event took place on 14 September and discussed the theme of “Environments”. We welcomed Dr Emma Fraser (University of California Berkeley), Dr Tine Rassalle (Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans) and Daniela De Angeli (Echo Games) as panellists. Hosted by Dr Adam Chapman, the panel discussed the role of […]
When I think about the first ‘historical’ game that I ever played, I come up short. I didn’t play series like Age of Empires or Sid Meier’s Civilization until I was older – not because of my age, but because I didn’t have ready access to a gaming PC setup until I was in my […]
If there’s anything that is constant, it’s that everything changes. Cities grow, villages disappear, buildings go up and buildings get destroyed. What is old makes place for the new. Add to this the destruction of war, natural disasters, and the effects of global warming, and we can see the natural and human landscapes that surround […]
Many years later, as I face my laptop now, I remember a distant afternoon in 2002 when my cousin in college took me to discover Age of Empires II. While enjoying the old game two decades later, I noticed some issues from the perspective of environmental humanities. Different from other critical perspectives, such as feminism […]
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 […]