The discourse surrounding Holocaust-based simulation exercises and games underscores pedagogical and moral possibilities and limitations for educators or designers. Holocaust simulations are viewed as an outlet for participants to emotionally and psychologically engage with the past. Holocaust-themed exercises invite participants to experience victimhood, complicity, lack of agency, and loss. From Ron Jones’ Third Wave experiment […]
At this point, it’s not hard to understand the colonial viewpoint fundamental to the ideology of the Civilization series. There have been plenty of articles dissecting such things as the tech tree, the love of explosive growth and war, the great man theory embedded in the game, and the colonial philosophies that each of these […]
The British Library established a Digital Scholarship department in 2010. Its purpose was to explore and promote innovative and creative reuse, as well as computational and data-driven research using the Library’s data and digital collections – both the digitised analogue collections and increasingly, born-digital material. I was one of the founding members of the initial […]
Communities of play are vast and varied. The deeply competitive speedrunning community that still surrounds Nintendo’s 1985 release Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), wherein players compete to complete the game as quickly as possible, is a deeply varied community, and the parameters of this goal differ between communities of speedrunners and […]
In part 1 of this post, I described how historical strategy games have a natural tendency to function according to colonial logics, asking players to reenact the history of colonialism in order to succeed. I argued that this because this theme has an inherent resonance with games’ frequent use of space as power and the […]
There is a rumour. A rumour that is whispered only around the academic campfires at select conferences. A legend of a time back in the misty days of yore, when there was only a handful of us poking around, searching for scraps at the base of the mountain of ideas that would one day become […]
It’s something of an open secret that increasingly, people are learning much more about the past from games than they are from “older” forms of popular history. Students of all ages develop an interest in particular periods and events by engaging with digital and analogue games of all kinds (Houghton 2016; 2021; Stirling and Wood […]
Update (14 December): Unfortunately one of our panelists, Meghna Jayanth, has had to withdraw due to illness. However, we are very happy to say that experimental video game developer Nikhil Murthy has kindly agreed to step in at very short notice. Nikhil is currently working on the post-colonial 4X game Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation, which you […]
Shaping a genre Only a select few games come close to Sid Meier’s Civilization‘s fame. As with Doom or Super Mario, the name itself has been firmly committed to cultural memory. And similar to those titles, the name Civilization signifies more than just a specific game: As Doom defined First-Person-Shooters (without technically being the first), […]
The topic of postcolonialism in Asia is directly linked to the aftermath of World War II, when many regions sought independence, like Indonesia. Nationalism in Indonesia developed from the 1910s to the 1940s, as people started to think of a future Indonesia as a single nation free from the Dutch, but these movements were suppressed […]
