Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past , game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future.

What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The editors of this anthology have two interlocking theses: only professional historians (or really advanced students) have the background to read (and understand) history as nonpassive learners; popular, historically themed video games transcend the inherent passivity of nondigital learning methods by providing gamers with an authentic (if not always accurate) connectedness to the past. The readings--topically varied but uneven in scholarship--explore the limitations and strengths (mostly the latter) of history games with respect to linearity and causality, counterfactual narratives, Western ethnic and racial biases, and--through the players' modification of computer code--the remedying of deficiencies within the game. Missing, however, is solid evidence that people who play these games have a deeper understanding of, or even a desire to probe deeper into, the imagined past (besides purchasing another video game). Although the games' general overemphasis on technology, politics, and economics is acknowledged, what is most disturbing is the editors' failure to address violence as the normative solution to so many of the challenges found within the games, as well as the corrosive influence this approach may have on citizen-gamers' interactions with the real, nondigital world. Summing Up: Recommended. Professionals. R. T. Ingoglia Felician College