Video Games and the Humanities

This volume is the first to focus on the presentation of Ancient Egypt in video games. The contributions examine diverse topics concerning how Egyptian history, culture, monuments, and the land itself are portrayed across a diverse range of game genres. Over forty years of video games are analysed, including those from well-known franchises (Assassin’s Creed; Tomb Raider), as well as those from independent developers. The games studied employ Ancient Egypt in different ways, as the main historical setting of the game, as the inspiration for the game’s world, or as a point of reference for specific aspects of the game. Contributions by game designers from Oneiric Studios also reveal the motivations for using Egypt as the source for their game design and narrative (Path of Ra). The number of games discussed in this volume and their diversity demonstrates the important role that games play in shaping the popular imagination of Ancient Egypt.

From hypermasculine heroes’ journeys to the boyish play cultures of modding and hacking, popular imagination has long connected video games to boyhood. Yet there has been both a long history and rapid rise of girlhood heroines and a wealth of unnoticed girls’ gaming cultures that have gone unaccounted. This book explores the evolution of gender, youth, and identity in games, from the Game Boy Color Sewing Machine to the teen girl social and identity obstacles found in games like Life is Strange. Video games are shifting away from the heroes’ journey and towards the Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age tale; uniquely representing girlhood through play and interaction. Girlhood Games: Gender, Identity and Coming of Age in Video Games unearths a reflection on gender and games culture, youth and development, storytelling traditions and historical canons, self-expression and cultural production, and the resistant possibilities unveiled through play.

This volume sets out to investigate video games’ complex entanglement with colonial legacies. By means of its methodological diversity, it offers a rich perspective on the ideological working of coloniality in video games at the intersection with multiple other power structures and economic systems. Besides Global North/South and West/East tensions, it also focuses on postcommunist contexts and their bearings on video games.

Games create worlds made of many different elements, but also of rules, systems and structures for how we act in them. So how can we make sense of them? Mytholudics: Games and Myth lays out an approach to understanding games using theories from myth and folklore.

Myth is taken here not as an object but as a process, a way of expressing meaning. It works to naturalise arbitrary constellations of signs, to connect things in meaning. Behind the phrase ‘just the way it is’ is a process of mythologization that has cemented it.

Mytholudics lays out how this understanding of myth works for the analysis of games. In two sections each analysing five digital games, it then shows how this approach works in practice: one through the lens of heroism and one through monstrosity. These ask questions such as what heroic mythology is constructed in Call of Duty? What do the monsters in The Witcher tell us about the game’s model of the world? How does Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice weave a conflict between Norse and Pictish mythology into one between competing models of seeing mental illness?

This method helps to see games and their worlds in the whole. Stories, gameplay, systems, rules, spatial configurations and art styles can all be considered together as contributing to the meaning of the game.

Video Game Ecologies and Culture examines the environments that video games affect and are impacted by. The edited collection engages with the notion of ecology as a critical concept that allows to study video game conceptions of human, posthuman, and natural environments and explore the entangled eco-cultural formations in video games and gaming. The contributions discuss the theme of video game ecologies with an interdisciplinary emphasis on the cultural, political, social, and ecological discourses pertaining to the medium and reflect on the relations and imaginaries developed through eco/critical video game practices. These interrelations are carved out in essays on relationality, kinship, and capitalist ruins, immersion in virtual marine ecosystems, video games and the commodification of ecocriticism, eco-colonial power formations, playing and recording nature, gender and post-anthropocentric game worlds, time-loop chronotopes, and ludoaffective dissonance and survival in video games.

Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal. This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.

The open world role-playing Assassin’s Creed video game series is one of the most successful series of all time, praised for its in-depth use of historical characters and events, compelling graphics, and addictive gameplay. Assassin’s Creed games offer up the possibility of exploring history, mythology, and heritage immersively, graphically, and imaginatively. This collection of essays by architects, archaeologists and historians explores the learning opportunities of playing, modifying, and extending the games in the classroom, on location, in the architectural studio, and in a museum.

Videogames have always depicted representations of American culture, but how exactly they feed back into this culture is less obvious. Advocating an action-based understanding of both videogames and culture, this book delineates how aspects of American culture are reproduced transnationally through popular open-world videogames. Playing American proposes an analytic focus on open-world videogames' "ambient operations" and traces practices of "playing American" through the stages of videogame development, gameplay, and reception. Three case studies – concentrating on the Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dogs, and Red Dead Redemption franchises, respectively – highlight different figurations of "playing American." Thematic foci range from public discourses on systemic racism and neoliberal capitalism to the justification of real-world surveillance practices and to the reconfiguration of the Western in the digital age. Playing American provides those interested in either videogames or American culture with a fresh angle and new concepts regarding its subject matters. It demonstrates that videogames are agents of cultural reproduction that do distinct cultural work for American culture in the twenty-first century.

How do games represent history, and how do we make sense of the history of games? The industry regularly uses history to sell products, while processes of creation and of promotion leave behind markers of a game’s history. The access to this history is often granted by so-called paratexts, which are accompanying elements orbiting texts. Exploring this fully, case studies in this work move the focus of debate from the games themselves to wider, ancillary materials and ask how history is used in, and how we can use history to study games.

Video games are a relative late arrival on the cultural stage. While the academic discipline of game studies has evolved quickly since the nineties of the last century, the academia is only beginning to grasp the intellectual, philosophical, aesthetical, and existential potency of the new medium. The same applies to the question whether video games are (or are not) art in and on themselves. Based on the Communication-Oriented Analysis, the authors assess the plausibility of games-as-art and define the domains associted with this question.

Games can act as invaluable tools for the teaching of the Middle Ages. The learning potential of physical and digital games is increasingly undeniable at every level of historical study. These games can provide a foundation of information through their stories and worlds. They can foster understanding of complex systems through their mechanics and rules. Their very nature requires the player to learn to progress.

The educational power of games is particularly potent within the study of the Middle Ages. These games act as the first or most substantial introduction to the period for many students and can strongly influence their understanding of the era. Within the classroom, they can be deployed to introduce new and alien themes to students typically unfamiliar with the subject matter swiftly and effectively. They can foster an interest in and understanding of the medieval world through various innovative means and hence act as a key educational tool.

This volume presents a series of essays addressing the practical use of games of all varieties as teaching tools within Medieval Studies and related fields. In doing so it provides examples of the use of games at pre-university, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels of study, and considers the application of commercial games, development of bespoke historical games, use of game design as a learning process, and use of games outside the classroom. As such, the book is a flexible and diverse pedagogical resource and its methods may be readily adapted to the teaching of different medieval themes or other periods of history.

For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses.

But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, this book offers critical discussion of Rockstar as a company, their video games, and ultimately, their attempts at creating new narratives about U.S. history and culture. It explores the ways in which Rockstar’s brand identity and their titles coalesce to create a new kind of video game history, how promotional materials work to claim the "authenticity" of these products, and assert the authority of game developers to perform the role of historian.

By working at the intersection of historical game studies, U.S. history, and film and media studies, this book explores what happens when contemporary demands for historical authenticity are brought to bear on the way we envisage the past – and whose past it is deemed to be. Ultimately, this book implores those who research historical video games to consider the oft-forgotten sources at the margins of these games as importance spaces where historical meaning is made and negotiated.

Watch our book talk with the author Esther Wright here: https://youtu.be/AaC_9XsX-CQ

This volume focuses on the depiction of women in video games set in historical periods or archaeological contexts, explores the tension between historical and archaeological accuracy and authenticity, examines portrayals of women in historical periods or archaeological contexts, portrayals of female historians and archaeologists, and portrayals of women in fantastical historical and archaeological contexts.　

It includes both triple A and independent video games, incorporating genres such as turn-based strategy, action-adventure, survival horror, and a variety of different types of role-playing games. Its chronological and geographical scope ranges from late third century BCE China, to mid first century BCE Egypt, to Pictish and Viking Europe, to Medieval Germany, to twentieth century Taiwan, and into the contemporary world, but it also ventures beyond our universe and into the fantasy realm of Hyrule and the science fiction solar system of the Nebula.　

The World is Born From Zero is an investigation into the relationship between video games and science fiction through the philosophy of speculation. Cameron Kunzelman argues that the video game medium is centered on the evaluation and production of possible futures by following video game studies, media philosophy, and science fiction studies to their furthest reaches. Claiming that the best way to understand games is through rigorous formal analysis of their aesthetic strategies and the cultural context those strategies emerge from, Kunzelman investigates a diverse array of games like The Last of Us, VA-11 Hall-A, and Civilization VI in order to explore what science fiction video games can tell us about their genres, their ways of speculating, and how the medium of the video game does (or does not) direct us down experiential pathways that are both oppressive and liberatory. Taking a multidisciplinary look at these games, The World is Born From Zero offers a unique theorization of science fiction games that provides both science fiction studies and video game studies with new tools for thinking how this medium and mode inform each other.

Ylva Grufstedt investigates the role of counterfactuals in uses of history through game designers and through digital strategy games. It discusses the content, form and perspectives that define different types of counterfactuals in the context of game-making – an effort to outline and detail the values and frameworks that shape the past in this popular media.

Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games introduces critical food studies to game scholarship, showing the unique ways in which food is utilized in both video game gameplay and narrative to show that food is never just food but rather a complex means of communication and meaning-making. It aims at bringing the academic attention to digital food and to show how significant it became in the recent decades as, on the one hand, a world-building device, and, on the other, a crucial link between the in-game and out-of-game identities and experiences. This is done by examining specifically the examples of games in which food serves as the means of creating an intimate, cozy, and safe world and a close relationship between the players and the characters.

While video games have blossomed into the foremost expression of contemporary popular culture over the past decades, their critical study occupies a fringe position in American Studies. In its engagement with video games, this book contributes to their study but with a thematic focus on a particularly important subject matter in American Studies: spatiality. The volume explores the production, representation, and experience of places in video games from the perspective of American Studies. Contributions critically interrogate the use of spatial myths ("wilderness," "frontier," or "city upon a hill"), explore games as digital borderlands and contact zones, and offer novel approaches to geographical literacy. Eventually, Playing the Field II brings the rich theoretical repertoire of the study of space in American Studies into conversation with questions about the production, representation, and experience of space in video games.

Video game spaces have vastly expanded the built environment, offering new worlds to explore and inhabit. Like buildings, cities, and gardens before them, these virtual environments express meaning and communicate ideas and affects through the spatial experiences they afford. Drawing on the emerging field of embodied cognition, this book explores the dynamic interplay between mind, body, and environment that sits at the heart of spatial communication. To capture the wide diversity of forms that spatial expression can take, the book builds a comparative analysis of twelve video games across four types of space, spanning ones designed for exploration and inhabitation, kinetic enjoyment, enacting a situated role, and enhancing perception. Together, these diverse virtual environments suggest the many ways that video games enhance and extend our embodied lives.

In recent years, poetry and video games have begun talking to – and taking from – one another in earnest. Poets, ever in pursuit of meaning, now draw inspiration from digital-interactive fantasy worlds, while video game developers aim to enrich their creations by imbuing them with poetic depth. This book investigates the phenomena of poem-game hybrids and other forms of poetic-ludic interplay, making use of both a multidisciplinary critical approach and the author’s own experiments in building and testing hybrid artefacts. What emerges is the suggestion of a future where reading and playing are no longer seen as separate endeavours, where the quests for sensory pleasure and philosophic insight are one and the same.

The fall of 2016 saw the release of the widely popular First World War video game Battlefield 1. Upon the game's initial announcement and following its subsequent release, Battlefield 1 became the target of an online racist backlash that targeted the game's inclusion of soldiers of color. Across social media and online communities, players loudly proclaimed the historical inaccuracy of black soldiers in the game and called for changes to be made that correct what they considered to be a mistake that was influenced by a supposed political agenda. Through the introduction of the theoretical framework of the ‘White Mythic Space’, this book seeks to investigate the reasons behind the racist rejection of soldiers of color by Battlefield 1 players in order to answer the question: Why do individuals reject the presence of people of African descent in popular representations of history?

This work looks at the gendered nature of the US video gaming industry. Although there were attempts to incorporate women into development roles and market towards them as players, the creation of video games and the industry began in a world strongly gendered male. The early 1980s saw a blip of hope that the counter-cultural industry focused on fun would begin to include women, but after the video game industry crash, this free-wheeling freedom of the industry ended along with the beginnings of the inclusion of women. Many of the threads that began in the early years continued or have parallels with the modern video game industry. The industry continues to struggle with gender relations in the workplace and with the strongly gendered male demographic that the industry perceives as its main market.