Back in the Saddle

Well I presented at Challenge the Past 2015 in Gothenburg, not bad for my first international conference. I also note that it's been a couple of weeks (how about months) since the last blogpost, but seeing how there's been papers, potential chapters (shh), and six or so classes to teach, I'm not going to berate myself too much.

So! Sweden, international conference on historical games! From Valiant Hearts to Civilization! From historical reconstruction, to constructing (gasp!) fictions in museums and the fun business of how their can be history in videogames (ahem, ahem* my paper). Here's a link to the conference proceedings if you're interested.

To my surprise it was a very busy conference, both in terms of different ideas and the number of people present. Not that I was complaining, it was a good collision of minds, so much so that I may have been tempted a number of times to completely change my thesis topic (since it's only a year in, simple child's play). Though I didn't, what I did do instead was remain captivated by a number of presentations on everything to do with history in videogames. Dale Andrews, Edwidge Lelièvre,

Johannes Koski, Josh Unsworth (impressive talk, basically historical-diegetic mechanics), Carl-Erik Engqvist (with a great boardgame workshop), Tara Copplestone (great survey research on developers, historians, and players), Adam Sofronijevic, Iain Donald, and Michal Zmuda, were just some of the speakers that I saw and talked to throughout the conference. There are others of course, but these are the people who spring to mind first, and also, perhaps more importantly, the ones who I know I wrote down notes for - or at the very least scholars that I want to borrow ideas from. 

So the plan is over the next two weeks (while I have  a "break,") is to do a mini write up of a couple of the presentations, put down some thoughts, criticisms, and highlight interesting notions that I'd like to see followed up. In lieu of that tonight I'll put up my B roll of presentations, so that people can see what could've been.

Enjoy!

Title: A Cleaner history, no slaves, no plagues, more fair, less real. Civilization's development towards gaming.

Games: Civilization 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

Focus: 2, 3 and 5

Brief: Development of Civilization series to be more politically correct, but also fairer from a gameplay perspective. Historically not so much. Slight comparison to Alpha Centauri and Beyond Earth.

Title: Terrorism Could Nod. Westwood pre-empting the development of Terrorism.

Games: Command and Conquer, and Command and Conquer: Generals

Brief: A look into the perspective of Westwood's development of political fiction. A comparison of global events at the time of the original Command and Conquer, and the later developments made for both Command and Conquer: Generals, in it's portrayal of China and terrorist groups.

Title: The World that Never was. Crimson Skies and Harold Hughes: living the impossible dreams.

Game: Crimson Skies

Brief: Alternative history is firmly based upon some historical facts/experimental design. This can be shown in a case study of Crimson Skies. Furthermore alternative histories takes great pains to match or at least mirror current history. (Perhaps slight reference to Battlefield - Secret weapons of WW2/weapons in WW2).

Title: The Last Express – Historical accuracy and fiction intertwined?

Game: The Last Express

Research direction : Look at Jordan Mercher interview, and notes on The Last Express, and the situating nature of the game.

Brief: A look into the mixture of historical fact and fiction throughout the development, and later gameplay of The Last Express. (Potentially link the idea of the Firebird with Vladamir Propp's Morphology of Folktales for some meta-narrative/meta-scholarship).

Eventually I actually presented on the much less awesomely sounding (but more accurate) The Bibliography of Videogames, which did the job of turning a lot of scholarly heads. Here's the brief: 

Video games have increasingly made use of both historic events and scientific information to inform their design. However the representation of such academic, historical and scientific documentation is not a constant within video games, as such the accuracy, let alone the effect that these sources have is hard to gage. Games such as Call of Duty 2¸ Assassin Creed, and Total War: Rome place their references in external sources (interviews, game strategy guides, commentary, etc). However a small number of games point to these sources directly in-game. Games such as Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and Fate of the World (both through internal referencing and the presence of a bibliography). The reasons for this split in methods – providing bibliographic information outside of game, and alternatively within the game – will be explored in this paper.

Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to cover everything, but I managed to explain the reasons for why there 'appears' to be bibliographic information in games (hint it may have something to do with marketing and paratext). I'll leave the nitty gritty details for when a publication becomes available.

So until my next bout of free time, I'll catch you.