Gaming the Past

This is a quick post just to start a conversation and/or further work. It might be useful to notice all games with worlds can likely be helpfully be analyzed as Agential Problem Spaces, building off of the Historical Problem Space framework for analyzing (and thus thinking about designing) historical games–analog, ttrpg, and digital.

In origin, I proposed the Historical Problem Space Framework to point out that the ways Historical games characterize any given part of their history content cannot be considered independently from that parts functional role in the game’s historical problem space. https://www.playthepast.org/?p=2594

And that developed into a full framework that is still developing (even into current book project, Designing Historical Games for the Classroom). Bottom line, though, is that systemically functional nature of games about worlds–regardless of whether those worlds are fictional historical etc.
https://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/mccall

So any game with a world (and inhabitants if that’s not understood) can be analyzed using something like the Historical Problem Space framework. I really have not had time to explore this in detail, but I’m going to start referring to it, for consistency and connection to HPS, as an Agential Problem Space.

Now, I’m a historian and a history teacher and a historical game designer and a historical game studies academic. I do NOT have ANY substantial grounding in (post Roman) literature or literary theory. So when I speculate next, why seeing games as agential problem spaces might be useful, it is based on my perspective in all those areas listed in the last paragraph

So since HPS is also a theory for how games shape historical content maybe? an Agential Problem Space framework for literature-based game studies interested in how game designer present a world in their game that is
1) based on a literary / text lore corpus
2) purporting to be the “real world” or a “real historical world”

Because then an Agential Problem Space can help with terms and tools for seeing how a game medium shapes literature and lore and perceptions of the world into a game, which basically means a medium that is structurally like an historical game. ???

I also think an Agential Problem Space framework might? be very helpful for teachers in other disciplines than history, not least of all lit & lang (but any subject that purports to represent the world: science, social science, etc.) As an approach to how they & their students could design world-based games in their areas?

What do you folks think?