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 […]
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 […]
This interview features Dr Victoria McCollum and Dr Andrew Sneddon (Ulster University) in conversation with Kirstin Mitchell (PhD student with Cardiff University and Amgueddfa Cymru/Research Assistant for Historical Games Network). It explores Andrew and Victoria’s 2023 collaborative project with Carrickfergus museum, titled “Reimagining the Islandmagee Witches: An Interactive Exhibition.” This exhibition sought to communicate experiences […]
Videogames offer us the possibility to create spaces to enjoy and engage with in ways that approach the past visually and interactively. We can play with history, and we can play to do history. But playing and history are also gendered. Playing with history and gender can open possibilities for events that happened in a moment in human history […]
A long time ago, in a world almost, but not quite, like our own… The city-state of Castamont, a centre of scholarship and commerce on the shores of the scenic Ousarine Bay, is buzzing with excitement! An anonymous knight, an armour-clad Mystery Knight who never removes his full-faced helmet, has arrived to joust in this […]
There are staggering problems with historical games’ representation of women. Based on an analysis of games with identifiable protagonists from the HistoriaGames database, less than 7% of historical games have female protagonists, and more games feature plots in which women are abducted or killed to motivate the storyline than have female protagonists. Sexualisation and gratuitous nudity are rife, […]
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 […]
The world of FromSoftware’s 2022 RPG Elden Ring is not governed by strictly realistic systems. Death has been abducted, the flow of time eddies around levitating islands, and Patches has been inexplicably reincarnated for a fourth time. Yet despite this, the game works within its own system of dream logic, focusing primarily on the relationships […]
In this video essay, Regina Seiwald traces the lineage of women central to the development of the UK games industry, from the 1970s to the present day. Watch the video below, or find it on YouTube. Dr Regina Seiwald is a Teaching Fellow in German at the University of Birmingham, UK. After completing her PhD […]
The medieval period offers an opportunity to think about gender through its popular stories and use of arms and armour to construct the bodily identity of those involved in combat roles. This blog post examines how these themes are brought to life through medievalism and fantasy in video games. The blog aims to introduce three […]