Playing with the past: History and Historical Reception in Digital Gaming

This course examines the relationship between current historiographical debates and the public dissemination of and engagement with the past. How well are up-to-date scholarly interpretations of history communicated to wider audiences? What tools can best foster a sense of critical historical inquiry? To approach these questions, this course will focus on digital games as an increasingly important source through which people interpret the past, but whose distinctive immersive and dynamic format can inform other contexts in which many history graduates find employment, from museums to classrooms to the media.

In this course, we will critically evaluate the way digital gaming content and mechanics try to communicate important issues in current historiography such as gender, environment, imperialism, and conflict. In seminars, we will assess how these themes are understood by historians in a range of concrete social contexts, in relation to scholarly case studies of their virtual representation. Students will also use theoretical approaches grounded in reception history to independently conduct a sustained analytical playthrough of a chosen historical game. The aim is to go beyond treating games simply as a source of ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ historical knowledge to consider their complex relationship with both more traditional forms of historiographical analysis on one hand, and the cultural value of history on the other.