'Gaming' History?

Despite the global importance of the gaming industry, and the centrality of video-games and contemporary boardgames as cultural artefacts in the modern world, historians have often failed to consider games seriously as historical sources, while game-industry professionals rarely consider explicit historical methodologies when designing games set in the past. 

In 2023, the global gaming market (digital and analogue) was valued at upwards of $40 billion USD.¹ Triple A game franchises, such as Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty, are played by millions of people worldwide; no longer the preserve of a minority of dedicated ‘gamers’ or fans, but rather part of a leisure market as broad, varied and widespread as that of TV or cinema.² 

The socio-political representations and anxieties which games and their developers present are arguably as crucial to the cultural landscape of the time in which they were created as those portrayed in literature, film, journalism, or any other form of media, and many disciplines, including cultural studies, literature, media studies, and postcolonial studies, have long recognised games’ centrality as cultural artefacts in the modern world. And yet, serious consideration of games as historical sources (as opposed to the history of science and technologies which support them) is still in its infancy, corralled into the niche subfield of ‘Historical Game Studies’, and ignored by ‘mainstream’ historians in the academy.³ 

At the same time, while game developers may pay lip service to the notion of historical ‘authenticity’ or ‘accuracy’ as part of their marketing strategies or construction of a brand identity, serious consideration of historical methodologies or responsible use of sources in creating historical game-worlds is currently a rarity.⁴  

This project’s aims are twofold: 

1. Drawing on relevant disciplines, including games studies, media studies, literary and cultural studies, and postcolonial studies, we will lay the groundwork for an ambitious and methodologically innovative framework for treating both digital and analogue games (and their surrounding paratexts, as created by players and developers) as legitimate historical sources beyond the purview of Historical Game Studies, tracing historiographical genealogies which reveal the implicit bias within the discipline in privileging ‘high’ over ‘low’ culture sources, and interrogating the inherent conservatism which has meant that any novel type of source, from oral history to popular culture, is forced to justify its existence from the margins before being accepted into the canon of permissible source-bases. 
   
   
2. It will bring together scholars from relevant disciplines and game developers / design professionals to kickstart conversations and potential collaborations between academics and the game industry – one goal being to set up a summer school / interdisciplinary MA in Game Design which will broaden Durham’s reach and relations with local and global tech. companies. 

Planned Outcomes:

• Interdisciplinary Workshop in June 2025, bringing together academics and game-industry professionals, and formulating further plans for advancing the project (e.g. network grant / seedcorn funding for a larger research grant) 

• 2 articles in peer-reviewed journals, one outlining our methodological framework for treating both digital and analogue games as sources within a cultural-history framework;⁵ one slated for a mainstream historical journal (THJ or History), outlining the importance of these developments and treating Historical Game Studies seriously as a field. 

• Make plans to put together a proposal for a handbook of Historical Game Studies with a major academic press (e.g. OUP). 

• Formulate initial plans for a summer school / interdisciplinary MA, in conjunction with the new Durham Games Studies Network. 

References

1. https://www.statista.com/topics/868/video-games/ (accessed 4/11/2024); Marco Arnaudo, The Tabletop Revolution: Gaming Reimagined in the 21st Century (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2024), 9. 
2. e.g. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1423305/assassin-s-creed-players/ (accessed 4/11/2024).
3. Cf. Jeffrey Lawler and Sean Smith, 'Reprogramming the History of Video Games: A Historian’s Approach to Video Games and Their History', International Public History, 4/1 (2021), 47-54.
4. Esther Wright, Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022).
5. On the massive under-representation of modern boardgames in current scholarship on games, see Paul Booth, 'Missing a Piece: (The Lack of) Board Game Scholarship in Media Studies', The Velvet Light Trap, 81 (2018), 57-60.