Gaming the Past

Gaming the Past, Second Edition, is out with Routledge! I am so very grateful and excited to have had the chance to revise significantly and add to the first edition work that came out over a decade ago. If you’re interested in reading more about my bibliographical road to Gaming the Past First Edition and the decade between it and 2.0, I’m working on a series of posts about my time in historical game studies as one of the earlier academics.

— Jeremiah McCall

Stepping back about six months from the publications of GTP 1.0, at a couple of the GLS conferences I became friends with Kevin Kee (currently Dean at University of Ottawa). Kevin kindly invited me to a workshop of folks looking at video games and history in education — Playing with History. An old email I dug up suggests we met the very last weel of April in 2010. We had an unconference at Niagara on the Lake that was, hands-down, the most amazing HGS conference of my career. There I met many lifelong colleague friends, including Shawn Graham, Rob MacDougall, Sean Gouglas, . The book we created, Pastplay (Umich Press Free online) wasn’t published until 2014, but for me it represents my 1st peer-reviewed work on historical game studies, prior to Gaming the Past 1st edition. My contribution, “Simulation Games and the Study of the Past: Classroom Guidelines.” talked about “simulation games” and some experiences in my own classes, used to generate some principles of teaching and learning with games in history education. I used “simulation games” as a special term for games that had defensible historical models in the history class at the time, a term I used heavily in the first edition of Gaming the Past too. I stopped using the term at least a few years ago. While it may be revivable (as I still think historical games that claim to focus on referentially specific place and people are distinct from games that make less contextualized references), the field has certainly persuaded me that historical games come in all sorts and shapes and sizes. Plus the historical problem space framework works for all kinds of historical games so it no longer feels helpful to make this “simulation game” distinction.