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 […]
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 […]
Earlier this year, 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 war video game […]
The study of history in digital games related to memory culture often focuses on games that directly address a specific historical period or topic with the goal of increasing players’ understanding and knowledge. This can range from simple educational goals, to creating emotional connections to the past, to ideological and moral goals. Much less often, […]
Our next theme concerns how games connect and interact with “Memory”. We’re interested in exploring how games – as always, broadly defined – engage with memory, commemoration, cultural remembrance (and forgetting), remembrance practices and memory organisations. Our aim has always been to bridge the gap between academia, the games industry and cultural heritage organisations and […]
In this video, Corine Gerritsen presents some of her ideas around the theme of “alternatives”, focusing on “fantastical Romans”. Grand Strategy games are particularly attractive to experiment with all kinds of historical alternates. This video pays special attention to Imperator: Rome (2019), the mods made for this game and mods for fantasy games that feature […]
Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) offer the player the illusion of infinite possibility. In videogames, however open the world, players are constrained to take the actions that have been built in by its designers and developers. By contrast, in TTRPGs the decisions you take are theoretically only limited by the imaginations of the players. This is […]
This is a guest post from Johnnemann Nordhagen, one of our panellists for the forthcoming Alternatives theme panel. You will be able to watch the panel event as a live stream from the TIPC3 conference. The entire conference is being streamed here, but if you are just tuning in for the HGN Panel. This will […]
Event details Date 26 May 2023 Time 13:30PM CET (11:30 UTC) Location Virtual (Twitch) | Join here Speakers Edmund Hayes | Johnnemann Nordhagen | Corine Gerritsen [Chair: Esther Wright] We’re trying something new! Working with the fabulous VALUE Foundation, the next Historical Games Network Panel will be coming to you from The Interactive Pasts 3 […]
Fall of Bali is a historical strategy game set in Bali in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Balinese kingdoms fought each other, their rivalry having started when the Gelgel Empire dissolved in 1686 and made many vassals independent. The game allows players to control, manage, and build one of the Balinese kingdoms in this […]
