Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) offer the player the illusion of infinite possibility. In videogames, however open the world, players are constrained to take the actions that have been built in by its designers and developers. By contrast, in TTRPGs the decisions you take are theoretically only limited by the imaginations of the players. This is […]
Our first HGN event, for our Historical Truth theme, took place on 26 May. It was very successful, our speakers were great and the audience provided some great questions and engagement. You can find the video below. This event officially marked the end of our first HGN theme, and so we now move into the […]
How can creatives make history entertaining and accurate? Although we are seeing green shoots pointing to normality, the comforting duh duhnn sound of the Netflix app still offers welcome escape. Recently I was drawn to The King, directed by David Mechod and starring the wonderful Timothee Chalamet. The King tells the story of the lusty […]
At the risk of stating the obvious and revisiting an often-addressed point of interest in historical game studies: game design and gameplay both problematize and upend history. By most definitions of agency and gameplay, surrendering any amount of control to the player is, well, the whole point. The results of playing, then, are degrees of […]
Our take in our Lovecraft + Aztecs title – Javier Rayón Javier Rayón is the writer and director of Dream of Darkness, a Lovecraft+Aztecs video game for PC. With his startup he tells the real mysteries of history, starting with his hometown of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, current Mexico City. Humanity is at a […]
In 2014, while working as a postdoctoral fellow at the LiNCS research centre at the University of Gothenburg, I was given the opportunity to design a course as part of the centre’s fantastic DSES (Doctoral School in Educational Sciences) program. These courses invited PhD students from universities all over the world to come to Sweden […]