Bibliography of Major Works in Historical Game Studies & Related Fields

The major book-length studies on historical digital games include J. McCall, Gaming the Past (2011), E. Champion, Playing with the Past (2011), M. Kapell & A. Elliot (eds.), Playing with the past: digital games and the simulation of history (2013), D. Kline (ed)., Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages (2014), A. Chapman, Digital Games as History. How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (2016), F. Zimmerman & M. Lorber (eds.), History in Games. Contingencies of an Authentic Past (2020).

Historical Game Studies also includes works discussing video games from the angle of heritage studies, memory studies, or postcolonial studies. This we find in E. Champion, Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage (2015), Mol et al. (eds.), The Interactive Past: Archaeology, Heritage & Video Games (2017), S. Mukherjee, Videogames and Post-colonialism: Empire Plays Back (2017), J. Majewski, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Its Audience as a World-building Benchmark for Indigenous Virtual Cultural Heritage (2018), and E. Hammar, Producing & Playing Hegemonic Pasts. Historical Digital Games as Memory-Making Media (2019).

Non-digital role-playing as cultural phenomena, heritage practices, or educational tools are explored in M. Carnes, Minds on Fire (2014), T. Hagood & E. Watson (eds.), Playing to Learn with Reacting to the Past (2018), V. Agnew et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies (2020), and M. Mochocki, Role-play as a Heritage Practice: Historical LARP, Tabletop RPG and Reenactment (2021). Games and gamification have also entered the heritage and tourism industry, as evidenced by K. Beale (ed.), Museums at Play: Games, Interaction and Learning (2011) and P. Bulencea & R. Egger, Gamification in Tourism: Designing Memorable Experiences (2015).

We invite historically-minded game scholars to join us online on the 20-21st November 2021 in reflecting on prior achievements and contributing new thoughts to this ever-expanding field of inquiry. Speakers are invited to submit papers to our open-access journal Homo Ludens (ISSN 2080-4555): https://www.ptbg.org.pl/HomoLudens.