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 […]
Our next theme is focused in and around ‘technology’ and historical games. We define historical games broadly, and we encourage contributions that consider technology in all its guises. We’re interested in a wide-range of technology-inspired contributions, whether these are reflections on technology represented in games, narrative techniques, game progression, aesthetic choices, user-generated content tools or […]
The landscape and implications of sandboxes, modding and user-generated content in historical games The evolution of game modding As video games grew in popularity, their developing player communities quickly took advantage of their mutable nature, particularly on PC platforms. Especially early on, games were often installed with non-obfuscated code and assets which could be easily […]
Single player games present a difficult barrier in carrying out recognisable anti/decolonial gameplays, considering that those games are meant to be played alone. The reason for this solitude is also at the core of the debates around perceptions and representations of who the player is and who the games are aimed at. If I am […]
A few weeks back I was invited by a friend to attend a regency and renaissance dance class. Whilst I enjoy dance I admit I was mostly lured by the opportunity to cast myself for an afternoon as a romanticised heroine attending a ball in some BBC period drama adaptation – the BBC’s 1995 Pride […]
On 21st March 2024, the HGN hosted our 9th panel discussion on the theme of Player Practices, featuring guest panelists Holly Nielsen, Marie Foulston and Michael Pennington (chaired by Nick Webber). You can watch the recording here (or via YouTube), and read more about the theme here. Catch up with our guest panelists contributions to […]
Click here to download and play “You’re ruining my lore” (via Holly Nielsen, itch.io) This is a short interactive fiction vignette I created to explore some of the ideas (and my own personal perspective and feelings) around “lore” in games, what it has come to mean, and the role of players in the creation of […]
“EA Sports. It’s in the Game”. This infamous refrain will be very familiar to the sports-videogame enthusiasts amongst us. (There are dozens of us. Dozens!) However, when considering player practices and history, it is fascinating to look beyond the confines of digital game content and instead examine the paratexts that are produced around and outside […]
Earlier this year, we at the 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 […]
The early decades of the twenty-first century can be somewhat tricky to define, ideologically and historically. In the Anglosphere it is largely remembered for the triumph of the Third Way – the victories of the Democrats and New Labour cementing neoliberal capitalism as the ideology of ‘the West’ during what Fukuyama called ‘the end of […]