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 […]
La Desbandá 1937,[1] a historical role-playing game, transports players to one of the most harrowing episodes of the Spanish Civil War: the mass exodus of civilians from Málaga to Almería in February 1937, known as la desbandá. In 1936, a failed coup d’état had ignited a civil war in Spain. By early 1937, Málaga was […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Modifying History When exploring the topic of development, our current quarterly theme, it is always tempting to adopt the easy terms, unidirectional relations and well-defined economic and industrial terminology of mainstream discourse about production. However, as literature, media and cultural studies have now long argued, the notion that production occurs entirely separately from the eventual […]
