Historical game studies

A number of approaches to historical games may be traced before the development of the academic field in full. Multiple scholars have especially suggested William Uricchio's 2005 paper 'Simulation, History, and Computer Games' as a key early example of a historical game studies approach: the field then developed more strongly in the early to mid 2010s, including the foundation of specific academic networks and events.^[3][4][5] A further milestone was the 2013 volume Playing With the Past, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, which historian Esther Wright cited as "the first defined space that assembled a (large) cohort interested in how the past was represented, and how history was expressed, through digital games".^[6]

A number of organisations and bodies exist for the furtherance of historical game studies. Perhaps the first and most prominent of these is the Historical Games Network (initially the Historical Game Studies Network) which was set up in 2014-15.^[7] Other initiatives focus on specific historical periods, such as the Middle Ages in Modern Games conference series.^[8]

The distinction between approaches focused on accuracy (the extent to which a game or game element precisely replicates a historical situation) and authenticity (the extent to which a game or game element feels like it represents a situation to the audience) is a common theoretical starting point for historical game studies.

Prominent scholars in the field have tended to reject accuracy as a strict metric, citing that the importance of games is in the impact on players and the ways that games contribute to mythologising and building new understandings of the past.^[9][10] However, authenticity has been noted as being 'nebulous' and difficult to assess because of its subjective nature and the difficulty of proving particular impacts.^[11] Furthermore, some scholars have noted the importance of measures that ensure accuracy in building and retaining feelings of authenticity for parts of play communities.^[12]

A further common theory, more specific to games with fully historical settings, is differentiating reconstructionist, constructionist, and deconstructionist games.^[13] Reconstructionist games are those that assume a singular, real past, associated with realist simulation, recreating specific situations with very high fidelity, especially visually. This happens in for example the more historical elements of the Assassin's Creed game series. Constructionist games attempt to recreate the mechanisms and processes of history, as for example in the Crusader Kings series, and are associated with a more conceptual simulation style. A rarer category of deconstructionist games such as Pentiment gamify and take into account questions of sourcing and historical memory to call the basis of a player's historical knowledge into question.^[14]

Historical game studies also uses and develops frameworks for thinking about the player's position within a game in a historical context, most notably the Historical Problem Space approach which focuses on how a game provides a player with a good (or bad) representation of the choices available to historical actors.^[15]

Approaches based around ethnic or national identity are also common in historical game studies.^[16] Particular conceptions of history are often important in constructing modern ideas about gender or nationality and their origins, and these can be transmitted through game media. Related historical dynamics that still have strong resonances in the present and may be played out in games, such as colonisation and postcolonial processes, can also be of particularly significant interests to scholars seeking to question how games interact with modern understandings of the past.^[17]