We’re thrilled to be announcing the panel date/time and our wonderful speakers for the theme of Education and Historical Games. You may have seen our call for contributions for the theme, which focuses on the challenges that face both educators and developers when making games about the past. The theme kicked off with the fantastic […]
Practical and Ethical Concerns In my last post, I explained why I hesitate to wholeheartedly recommend the use of historical games for the delivery of content in formal education. In particular, I considered the potential for overlapping biases, which can influence the research discourse surrounding games and learning. I also explored the potentially troubling dominance […]
Playing with Pedagogies Studying history in games often involves moving between diverse academic fields, regularly finding oneself amongst scholars from literary studies, film studies, media studies, educational sciences, psychology, and of course those from the more conventional sections of archaeology and history. Many of these scholars will be encountering the field of historical (or vanilla) […]
Apologies for the long delay! It seems like an age since we posted and somehow it’s now March! At HGN we initially paused content in solidarity with the strike action taken by University staff across the UK. HGN decided not to post new content and cross the digital picket. This strike action continues and we […]
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 […]
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 […]