Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice

by Adam Chapman

This book provides the first in-depth exploration of video games as history. Chapman puts forth five basic categories of analysis for understanding historical video simulation and epistemology, time, space, narrative, and affordance. Through these methods of analysis he explores what these games uniquely offer as a new form of history and how they produce representations of the past. By taking an inter-disciplinary and accessible approach the book provides a specific and firm first foundation upon which to build further examination of the potential of video games as a historical form.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Technology, Video Games

290 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2016

Reviews

[David Wagner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crucial founding stone summarising decades of both thinking about games and about history, cant imagine wading into the topic without the frameworks it provides.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seminal book on the relationship of history and digital games (-a.k.a video games). The author draws in decades of scholarship in history, film and history, popular history, heritage and reanactment, public history and of course gaming to develop a theory of games and history. This is not a book for the casual reader but one interested in an academic treatment of the subject.

[stercz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is practically a mandatory read for everyone studying history in games: it neatly sums up previous research and offers a very usable framework of terms to apply to specific research areas. Chapman communicates his ideas clearly and exhaustively. It might be a bit dry at times, but that's because it covers so much ground in terms of theory (and that every chapter is to an extent an independent entity, so some repetition is unavoidable).

[Aivaras Žukauskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A coherent, well-written, very readable, and most important of all, sober account of the power of video games as they relate to history and 'historying.' A good introduction into the field.