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Technology

Video Game Guns: ‘Reacting’ to Firearms Technology

From the classic ‘super shotgun’ of DOOM 2 (1994) to the non-lethal ‘Portal gun’ from the game series (2007-2022) of the same name, the gun is an important piece of technology represented in countless games and one of the primary means by which the video game player interacts with their world. Famously, it has spawned […]

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Memory

Memory and Historical Games – thoughts in light of the Imperial War Museum’s ‘War Games’ exhibition

In 2022, the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London opened ‘War Games’, an exhibition about video games and war, which it was my privilege to curate. Focussing on how video games tell stories of war and conflict, the exhibition featured a range of games, with contributions from their developers and historic artefacts from the museum’s […]

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Development

Modifying History

Modifying History When exploring the topic of development, our current quarterly theme, it is always tempting to adopt the easy terms, unidirectional relations and well-defined economic and industrial terminology of mainstream discourse about production. However, as literature, media and cultural studies have now long argued, the notion that production occurs entirely separately from the eventual […]