HIS4325 – Playing with the Past: History and Historical Reception in Digital Gaming

This course examines the relationship between current historiographical debates and the public dissemination of and engagement with the past. How well are up-to-date scholarly interpretations of history communicated to wider audiences? What tools can best foster a sense of critical historical inquiry? To approach these questions, this course will focus on digital games as an increasingly important source through which people interpret the past, but whose distinctive immersive and dynamic format can inform other contexts in which many history graduates find employment, from museums to classrooms to the media.

In this course, we will critically evaluate the way digital gaming content and mechanics try to communicate important issues in current historiography such as gender, environment, imperialism, and conflict. In seminars, we will assess how these themes are understood by historians in a range of concrete social contexts, in relation to scholarly case studies of their virtual representation. Students will also use theoretical approaches grounded in reception history to independently conduct a sustained analytical playthrough of a chosen historical game. The aim is to go beyond treating games simply as a source of ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ historical knowledge to consider their complex relationship with both more traditional forms of historiographical analysis on one hand, and the cultural value of history on the other.

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to

• identify and explain examples of historical reception in digital games through an appropriate theoretical lens
• Perform and document purposeful gameplay to enable historical analysis of this kind of digital source
• Apply historiographical perspectives to constructively analyse modern creative approaches to past societies
• Critically reflect on the relative aims and effectiveness of different strategies for communicating historical knowledge in the public sphere

Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.

If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.

This course is for students admitted to Historie (master) and European History (master).

This course consists of eleven 2-hour seminars.

Compulsory activities consist of:

• Class attendance (minimum 60%)
• Purposeful play journal (based on min. 2 hour gameplay per week). Each student will be assigned to one historical game to analyze in-depth over the course of the semester. They will be responsible for responsible for making tangible weekly progress through their assigned game using purposeful play, and documenting their observations and questions in their journal prior to class. The final journal will take the form of answers to prompts selected from a list, submitted at regular intervals over the semester. No genAI may be used for any part of the assignment.