Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games

by Zach Whalen (Editor), Laurie N. Taylor (Editor)

Playing the Past brings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars to examine the complementary notions of history and nostalgia as they are expressed through video games and in gaming culture. The scope of these related concepts moves from the personal to the cultural, and essays in this collection address video game nostalgia as both an individual and societal phenomenon, connecting the fond memories many of us have of classic gaming to contemporary representations of historical periods and events in video games. From Ms. Pac-Man and Space Invaders to Call of Duty and Reloaded, the games many of us have played since childhood inform how we see the world today, and the games we make and play today help us communicate ideas about real world history. By focusing on specific games, historical periods and media ecologies, these essays collectively take an in depth look at the related topics of nostalgia for classic gaming, gaming and histories of other media, and representations of real history in video games.

Genres: Video Games

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Mjhancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Playing the Past" is an anthology book that examines the way videogames play with history and nostalgia. The essays cover an impressive range of theories and themes. Natasha Whiteman's "Homesick for Silent Hill" applies fan related cultural studies to the Silent Hill series; "Remembrance of Things Past" by Anna Reading and Colin Harvey (which wins for best title pun) uses affection and nostalgia to create a reading of the Battlestar Galactica video game, and James Campbell goes back to Johan Huizinga in "Just Less than Total War" to argue that the current generation of WII-based FPS games rewrite history to turn total war into a controllable ludic play. While all the essays are informative, some of them are poor fits under the text's stated topics. Bailey's discussion on video games and computer science and Gersic's essay on game sound both barely touch either history or nostalgia, Magelssen stretches the concept of a game pretty far in investigation of the online versions of living history museums. Again, the essays themselves are almost uniformly well written, but some seem a little out of place in the larger context.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best essays in this book are the ones near the end that discuss the documentary potential of video games. A lot of the rest of them are kind of absurdly inaccessible, pairing the most banal subject matter with the most impenetrable academic language.