Let’s start with some big questions. Why do historical games look the way they do? Why are player’s possible actions constrained in certain ways? What goes into the decision-making process behind the culture we regularly use to engage with the past? How do game companies determine questions of which periods, which perspectives, and what actions […]
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 […]
Classical video games are not immune to the ailment most video games suffer from: at best erasing and at worst denigrating and/or abusing women. This becomes increasingly problematic when history is concerned not just because it legitimizes the representations included in the games through association with historical events and – it is present in a historical […]
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 following post by Arturo Iannace is a reply to the HGN blogpost by Dr Adam Chapman for our (Post)Colonialism theme. In turn Adam has considered the points and his response is included here. Arturo Mariano Iannace is a PhD candidate at the IMT School of Advanced Studies, in the curriculum of Cognitive and Cultural […]
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 […]