Gaming the Past

UPDATE (1/26): This bibliography has been superseded by the main GTP bibliography I maintain, with a section on Civilization.   I’m adding new entries there.

Enough interest in research about the Civilization series pops up every so often, that I thought a quick bibliography might be helpful to refer to. I have more to add, but here’s a good start.

Burns, A. (2002). Civilization III: Digital game-based learning and macrohistory simulations. Retrieved from http://www.alexburns.net/Files/CivilizationIII.pdf

Capps, K. (2016) What Civilization VI Gets Wrong about Civilization. Citylab. https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/10/what-civilization-vi-gets-wrong-about-civilization/504653/

Chapman, A. (2013). Is SId Meier’s Civilization History? Rethinking History 17(3). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13642529.2013.774719

Ford. D. (2016)“eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate”:Affective Writing of Postcolonial History and Education in Civilization V. Game Studies, 16. http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/ford

Koebel, G. (2017). Simulating the ages of man: Periodization in Civilization V and Europa Universalis IV. Loading … , 10(17), 60-76. (available online)

Lammes, S. (2010). Postcolonial Playgrounds: Games as Postcolonial Cultures. Eludamos 4(1): 1-6. https://eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol4no1-1/149

MacQuarrie, A. (2018). All Rise and No Fall: How Civilization Reinforces a Dangerous Myth. Rock Paper Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/15/all-rise-and-no-fall-how-civilization-reinforces-a-dangerous-myth/

Read more…

Just tweeted a thread on the videogame, When Rivers Were Trails, which was developed by a partnerships between the Indian Land Tenure Foundation and Michigan State University’s Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab. https://indianlandtenure.itch.io/when-rivers-were-trails… by lead designer Elizabeth LaPensée, PhD. and lead artist Weshoyot Alvitre (and many others). 
Then I thought I would put this on GTP and, at the same time, experiment with a different short review style for the blog)

What it is: A FREE, beautifully illustrated, choice-based interactive text for Mac and PC with just a bit of a resource model. Players read about the main character and make choices by clicking on the relevant text with the mouse. The player character has three main attributes affected by gameplay:  a medicine and food inventory and a level of wellbeing that can increase and decrease. Navigation across the map is carried out by clicking on a simple compass rose. According to the introduction to the game on itch.io:

“An Anishinaabeg in the 1890’s is displaced from their traditional territory in Minnesota and heads west to California due to the impact of allotment acts on Indigenous communities, facing Indian Agents, meeting people from different nations, and hunting, fishing, and canoeing along the way as they balance their wellbeing.”  In short, the game offers a different, less-often seen perspective on the suffering, resistance, and adaptation of indigenous people in response to the US policies of forcibly seizing indigenous land and forcing indigenous peoples to relocate and re-start in places far from their homes.