Shaping a genre Only a select few games come close to Sid Meier’s Civilization‘s fame. As with Doom or Super Mario, the name itself has been firmly committed to cultural memory. And similar to those titles, the name Civilization signifies more than just a specific game: As Doom defined First-Person-Shooters (without technically being the first), […]
The topic of postcolonialism in Asia is directly linked to the aftermath of World War II, when many regions sought independence, like Indonesia. Nationalism in Indonesia developed from the 1910s to the 1940s, as people started to think of a future Indonesia as a single nation free from the Dutch, but these movements were suppressed […]
Around six hundred years after his death, Gajah Mada, a mahapatih (prime minister) of the Majapahit kingdom, became one of the first precolonial figures that rose to prominence in early postcolonial Indonesia. His popularity continued during the Sukarno and Suharto regime, and was reinvigorated in the early 21st century by the writer Langit Kresna Hariadi through a series […]
Today on the HGN YouTube channel, and as part of the Network’s current theme of (Post)Colonialism, we are featuring an interview between Javier Rayón (writer and director of Dream of Darkness) and Tlaxcalteca and historian Fabiola Carrillo. The interview explores ways in which historians and the games industry can collaborate to address longstanding problems of […]
Within games is there not a huge gap in the creation, availability, and discovery of non-western perspectives? What space do game-makers have to challenge the norms of working within a discourse of global capital, of industrial histories entwined with capital and power? Where is the gameplay that does not simply revolve around victory sought through […]
The history of the First World War (1914–1918) cannot be fully understood without understanding the important role that colonialism played in the war’s development. The conflict did not only earn the title of the First World War because of its geographical reach, but because its participants came from every corner of the world. This was […]
Our second HGN event, for our Ethics theme, took place on 1 September. We were delighted by both the panellists and the audience, who gave us a fantastic discussion and raised some thought-provoking questions. In case you missed it, or would like to watch it again, you can find the video of the event below. […]
Ethical game design is still a fairly new topic. It was not really a consideration at all when the first arcade games appeared, as games had to be so abstract that it was hard to map real-world issues onto them. Over time, of course, this changed, and the world around games changed as well. In […]
As an archaeological ethicist, my work involves considering how archaeologists ‘do’ archaeology, and the ramifications of our professional choices and actions as archaeologists. More specifically, my main area of research is digital archaeology, and the archaeology of immaterial places like video-games, virtual worlds, and internet-based communities. To be an archaeological ethicist studying immaterial places, I […]
In public discussions of history, it is sometimes said that ‘history belongs to everyone’. This is often used to assert someone’s authority to interpret the past, their attempts to understand, talk or write about things which they perceive as having happened. It is also used to reject the (now old-fashioned) idea that professional historians have […]