Gaming History

Undergraduate / Graduate

How do video games reflect, theorize, and alter history? This lecture course will draw on strategies from history, media, and game studies to understand the place of games in the history of knowledge and our knowledge of history. How have historical simulations, ensconced in media objects, represented scientific, social, and cultural processes? How do games invite players to perform and inhabit historically specific subjectivities? What is the role of digital media in the public understanding of history? By representing alternate and future histories, games articulate theories of historical change, suggesting and popularizing modes of political, economic, and social agency. We will consider how games represent the structure of time, causality, and choice, and how the hardware and software of video games constrain and enable certain representations of history. Through lectures, discussions, group play sessions, written and practice-based assignments, and theoretical readings, we will think about what it means to 'game' history and to historicize games.