MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Historical video games are an enormously popular genre of entertainment. Yet, they have received scant attention from professional historians. They are typically dismissed without a second thought, and when they are actually considered, a sense of trepidation creeps in: they are inaccurate, reductionist, cartoonish, obsessed with violence, and generally outside the historian’s domain.

There is certainly a measure of truth in this view. The challenges of making a video game satisfactorily ‘historical’ are almost insurmountable. Should, then, historians pay as little attention to them as they currently do? What merits are there in taking historical video games seriously as a medium for historical education? What are the problems, both theoretical and practical, in doing so?

I seek to address some of these questions in a paper accompanied by a multimedia presentation that offers, tentatively, a theoretically oriented approach to historical video games. Examining a range of titles, from Assassin’s Creed to The Witcher 3, I ask a series of questions about the work history does in these games. I start with a basic one, often overlooked but of fundamental importance: what makes a video game ‘historical’? I next tackle the interaction between academia’s vision of the past and that of the historical video game. I suggest a sort of pop-culture filtration process in which certain elements of the past attain more significance than others and wind up occupying a central place in historical video games. Finally, I consider how the unique format of video games shapes their historical narratives. My overarching message is a call-to-arms for historians to take gaming seriously and consider its use as a pedagogical tool. I hope my presentation can help lay the theoretical foundations for realizing this potential in the future.