Gaming the Past

This is the first in what will be a series of dialogues with game studies scholar Eugen Pfister. Like all GTP dialogues, we focus on discussing ideas as they seem to us rather than finely proofed essays. Eugen starts us off with a broader question about the appeal of history that will lead us to topics in historical games studies.

EP: So let’s start with that: I am very excited that we are now trying this here. I’ve been waiting for a suitable occasion to do something together for years. (J: Me too!) So let’s talk about our “stuff”: History and Games. This is in fact a particularly good time in my academic biography. I’ve been researching digital games and history for I think about ten years now: history in digital games, the history of digital games and now increasingly also the philosophy of history and digital games. From my school education in a French lycée as well as my university education in Austria, France, Germany and Italy, I was trained to search for a “gain in knowledge” and to develop a pertinent research question in advance of an investigation. In other words, research is supposed to make sense, to help us better understand ourselves in contrast to just describing what we see. Never stop asking questions.