I guess I hadn't got around to telling y'all that I got accepted to the conference in Toronto! Great news. Sent of another abstract to a book called Adolescent Medievalism: The Past Packaged for Children and Young Adults, here is the abstract:
Rethinking History: Playing with ‘Historical Authenticity’ in Videogames.
History and historical events are common themes in videogames, and have been from their pre-commercial days. This chapter will argue that history is typically deployed in computer games in two ways; either as a diegetic backdrop and aesthetic influence (e.g. Medal of Honour, Crimson Skies), or as a simulation of the flow of history, in particular the development of a culture through time (e.g. Civilization, Age of Empires). In particular I will examine one game from the second group: Civilization III; in order to focus on the productive and creative ways that these games are utilised by their players.
Taking the form of an on-line ethnography, and utilizing site-based fieldwork and interviews conducted with children in Melbourne, Australia and Caracas, Venezuela during 2005, this paper will shift the focus from the games themselves to the way in which the two games are used by their players’ to negotiate the concept of ‘historical authenticity’ in relation to the demands of entertainment. In his recently published book The Nature of Computer Games: Play as Semiosis (2003) David Myers examines the earliest computer games and earmarks an underlying contradiction that governs the experience of game-play that exists between the law of physics and the law of play. Myers’ observation pinpoints a major division in the players of Civilization III.
This paper will argue that this contradiction has become of key importance among a certain segment of this game’s players, who deploy significant historical knowledge to critique the games, and also to a certain extent combine their historical knowledge with a minor knowledge of programming in order to customize more ‘authentic’ or ‘entertaining’ versions of the original games. Specifically, I will demonstrate that the strict adherence to the historic ‘facts’ incorporated into the game design, combined with an engaged and productive audience creates a potential for a critical reading by its audience that suggests Civilization III, and other simulation games that model history, or historic events, may provide a space for critical evaluation of history that contradicts the generally held opinion that in the postmodern era historical references in children’s media and generally nostalgic, meaningless examples of surface play that lack depth, or critical concerns.
Tom Apperley is a PhD student in the Media and Communication Studies Program at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne. He has recently returned from fieldwork in Caracas, Venezuela.
