Games and Historical Narratives

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The academic study of games — from board games of strategy to online multi-player video games — challenges and disrupts epistemologies held dear in the humanities. Traditional scholarly products such as monographs and journal articles, and to a lesser degree blog posts, are meant to be passively read, whereas games are meant to be actively played. Games may present a narrative like the traditional texts studied and written by academics, but player influence on the selection of narrative choices presents unique questions about authority and interpretation.

Going Beyond the Textual in History

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Andrew Mason

Because of my interest in both history and games, I’m always on the look-out for good writing or new takes on how to bring elements of the gaming world into the framework of historical inquiry. Increasingly, I’m finding my best sources of this kind of reading from my Twitter stream, as was the case when Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) pointed me towards an article in the recent edition of the Canadian Game Studies Association journal, Loading…, titled “Beyond the ‘Historical’ Simulation: Using Theories of History to Inform Scholarly Game Design.” Tackling what they call ‘gamic action’, the authors of the paper look to use elements of ‘procedural rhetoric’ combined with ‘valid and scholarly means’ of constructing the past (modeled on the monograph or print article) to produce ‘reasonably justified truths’ compatible with current methodologies in use by many historians.¹

Jantley on Journal of Digital Humanities

Games and Historical Narratives

Going Beyond the Textual in History