1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Video Games and History
Section One: Making History
Chapter One: What is History in Video Games?
Angela Schwarz
Chapter Two: Method and Methodology in Historical Game Studies
Keerthi Sridharan, Corine Gerritsen, and Angus Mol
Chapter Three: Counterfactuals: An Alternate Path for Historical Game Studies
Angus Mol
Chapter Four: The Semi-Fictional Basil: History, Historical Video Games, and Transmedia Characters
Emily Joy Bembeneck
Chapter Five: Elsinore’s Hamlet: Adapting historical plays into video games
Angshuman Dutta
Chapter Six: Postcolonial, Mythological, and Imagined: Indian History’s relationship with Video Games
Aditya Deshbandhu
Chapter Seven: Video Game Genres and Ancient History
Dunstan Lowe
Chapter Eight: Historical Indigenous Game Design: Drawing on Indigenous knowledges to craft historical video games
Rhett Loban, Christopher Duncan, Magali Segovia, Leandro Wallace, and Yeong-Ju Lee
Chapter Nine: The African Video Game Industry: Rendering Visible and Forging Cultural Identity through Indigenous Heroes and Myths
Antonio–Cesar Moreno–Cantano and Salvador Gómez–García
Chapter Ten: Mobile games and antiquity: Simply a complex simplification of the past
Joel Gordon
Section Two: Analysing History
Chapter Eleven: Of Monuments and Military Men: The Ancient Mediterranean in Video Games
Bret Devereaux
Chapter Twelve: The Military Shooter and its Discontents: Enemies in War Games
Holger Pötzsch and Zoheb Mashiur
Chapter Thirteen: Historical Characters in Antiquity Games
Alexander Vandewalle
Chapter Fourteen: Building Religions: The Representations of Ancient Mediterranean Religion in Historical Strategy Games
Hamish Cameron
Chapter Fifteen: Rome Was Built in a Day: Economies of the Ancient World in Historical Video Games
Christian Rollinger
Chapter Sixteen: Seen But Not Played: Children in Ancient Historical Video Games
Jennifer Cromwell
Chapter Seventeen: Medicine in Historical Roleplaying Video Games
Jane Draycott
Chapter Eighteen: Periodisation beyond Sid Meier’s Civilization: Standing the Test of Time? Robert Houghton
Chapter Nineteen: Women & Sexism in Historical Games
Kate Cook
Chapter Twenty: ‘Is it really that bad?’ A feminist reading of Pentiment
Alan van Beek
Chapter Twenty-One: ‘“...it’s really pathetic seeing a grown man cry”: Masculinity and the Medieval
Katherine J. Lewis
Chapter Twenty-Two: Iron-clad Bodies, Fluid Beings. An Idea-historical Approach to Queer and Posthuman Bodies in Medievalist (Roleplaying) Games
Aska Mayer
Chapter Twenty-Three: Brothels, Buffs, and Breeding: Sexuality in Historical Video Games Anise Strong
Chapter Twenty-Four: Cultural Memory, Games, and Company of Heroes 2: The Soviet Union as Barbaric Asiatic Hordes
Emil Lundedal Hammar
Chapter Twenty-Five: Race and the Digital World Wars: Representing non-white soldiers in First World War and Second World War video games
Stefan Aguirre Quiroga
Chapter Twenty-Six: “What else have these people hidden away in here?” Slavery and Memory in Historiated Games’ Blackhaven
Alyssa Sepinwall
Section Three: Playing History
Chapter Twenty-Seven: ‘Interact with history like never before’: Modding the Past in Historical Video Games
Richard Cole
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Fandom in History Games
Esther MacCallum-Stewart
Chapter Twenty-Nine: History as Political Myth. An exploration of two central functions of historical settings in digital games
Eugen Pfister
Chapter Thirty: Black games, Historical Settings, New Future?
David Leonard, Regina Hamilton, and Kishonna Gray
Chapter Thirty-One: Advertising America in Rockstar Games
Esther Wright
Chapter Thirty-Two: Ludic Learning and Historical Computer Games: Audience education through Isonzo
Vanda Wilcox and Chris Kempshall
Chapter Thirty-Three: Historical Games in Class: An Introduction for Educators
Jeremiah McCall
Chapter Thirty-Four: Navigating the Labyrinth: Engaging the Past through Reflective Game Design in Pentiment
Blair Apgar
Chapter Thirty-Five: Medieval Lore on the Bohemian Civil War in Kingdom Come: Deliverance – Using Historical Gameplay for Research and Scholarship on Localised Military Massacres
Ben Redder
Biography
Robert Houghton is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Winchester. He has published extensively on engagement with the medieval period in games of all sorts, including most notably his 2024 monograph The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism.
Kate Cook is currently a Lecturer in Greek Culture at King’s College London. Her research focuses on women in historical video games, and gender and language in Greek Tragedy. She has published on a range of topics related to gender in historical games, and was the co-editor of Women in Classical Video Games (2022).
Chris Kempshall is a public historian who specialises in transnational experiences of allied warfare and modern media representations of history. He is the author of numerous academic works on these subjects, including; The First World War in Computer Games (2015). He is currently the Historical Consultant for BlackMill Games. His book The History and Politics of Star Wars: Death Stars and Democracy was published by Routledge in August 2022.
