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 the environment in, of and around historical games, and its role in our explorations and understandings of the intersection between history, play and games.
In case you missed it or would like to watch it again, you can find the video of the event below.
Our call for contributions had asked various questions: How do games define, depict, and negotiate the “environments” they engage with, and what role does this play when we make meaning about the past? How might games help us to understand past environments? How are games deployed and positioned within present-day spaces to develop ideas and understandings about history and heritage? How do games mobilise the spaces of the future to help us think about the past? The panellists took on these and other questions from the audience.
This was the final event of our fifth theme and as always we are very grateful to the many people who contributed to the theme over the past few months. You can check out the full articles and posts from the contributors here.
We now move on to our next theme, Development. The ‘development’ process of games has as much in common with software development as it does with content creation. How these processes and pipelines influence and shape the product is often invisible to the player. Chapman introduced the concepts of both model of video games as popular/public history and introduced the concepts of the “player-historian” and the “developer historian” and where they meet helps shape the (hi)story-play-spaces and historical narrative production in historical games (Chapman, 2016 p.51). We’re looking forward to hearing from a range of ‘developers’ and thoughts on how the ‘development’ process, pipelines and people influence historical games! If this is something you want to contribute to you can read the call for contributions here.
As usual, the contributions will lead us into our theme event, which we currently expect to take place in mid-December or possibly extend to January!