Historical Games Network Discussion Panel - Player Practices

This discussion event brings together experts from game design and development, historical game studies, and museums and cultural heritage practice to explore the relationship between history and games, of all kinds, and the way players interact with them.

Our guest panelists: 

Marie Foulston is a leading curator behind exhibitions, installations and experiences that specialise in videogames, play and digital culture. She is co-founder and creative director of Good Afternoon, an experiential design creative agency. Previously she was Curator of Videogames at the V&A where she lead the curation of the headline exhibition ‘Videogames’, was guest director of experimental games festival ‘Now Play This’ at Somerset House and co-founded the UK alternative videogame collective the Wild Rumpus. Across her career she has worked alongside a host of international organisations and leading cultural institutions including the Smithsonian, ACMI, PlayStation, the Design Museum, Netflix, Channel 4 and Nintendo.

Holly Nielsen is a historian, writer, and narrative designer based in London. She is currently completing her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her thesis is titled 'British Board Games and the Ludic Imagination, c.1860-1939'. She has published a number of academic pieces about her research exploring topics such as; geographies in nineteenth century board games, imperial preference in interwar British trade games, the depiction of the gendered experience in twentieth century chance-based board games, and multipurpose domesticity. Alongside her academic work Holly is a game developer, working as a writer and narrative designer for video games. Her latest work can be seen in the IGF Excellence in Narrative nominated game, Neurocracy. Before pivoting to academia and games, Holly was a journalist and arts critic, with bylines including The Guardian, The New Statesman, and Vice, among others.

Dr Michael Pennington is an Associate Lecturer in Historical and Critical Studies at Bath Spa University, UK. His main research interests explore the mounting challenges of game preservation, and how history is uniquely portrayed and interpreted within videogames. His PhD explores how history is curated and interpreted in Hearts of Iron IV. He has also published work on the history of women’s football and the FIFA series and the importance of online wikis as videogame paratexts. His current and upcoming research focuses on how videogames uniquely curate, reflect upon, and preserve, modern and contemporary Japanese history. As a former Digital Curator, he led the National Videogame Museum’s “Animal Crossing Diaries” oral history project, uncovering the personal stories of players of Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the COVID-19 pandemic and times of unprecedented social isolation.

Chair: Nick Webber (Birmingham City University) 

About our "Player Practices" Theme: 

The historical consequences of historical games do not end with the interaction between the player and the designed game. As discussed in our Education theme, players are often prompted by historical content to undertake further research and engagement with the past (Beavers, 2020), and to discuss it and to argue about it. It is this kind of activity that leads us towards our next HGN theme: Player Practices.

Players do not necessarily accept a game designer’s account of the past. Although player debates about historical games are sometimes limited to identity politics, they can also be characterised by a search for concepts to explain what is seen to be happening in games, alongside valuable discussions about history and about meaning. Games are used by players to tell historical stories to others, for example through machinima, through Let’s Plays and streams which include historical commentary or reflection, and through the creation and sharing of particular scenarios or maps. Mods in particular have been central to discussions around historical games (e.g. Loban & Apperley, 2019), affording player desires to extend or reshape games to create new possibilities, from new outfits or colour schemes through to entirely new plotlines or mechanics. Alongside examples of subversive play, these can advance new or altered historical narratives, and make new interventions into ongoing arguments about ‘historical accuracy’ or ‘authenticity’ (e.g. Burgess & Jones, 2021; Donald & Reid, 2023; Wright, 2022).

The historical practices of players also extend considerably beyond this, however, as players do things, with history, around games. Many of these practices are also understood as aspects of fan culture, and there is a substantial overlap between fan work and historical work (Stevens & Webber, 2022). Importantly, and as with historical games more generally, player historical work does not necessarily concern itself with ‘real world’ history, although it will often be focused on what we might call ‘lore’ (in effect, the past of any storyworld, fictional or otherwise). Players curate extensive resources – wikis, videos, archives – which gather this material together, but which also serve to blur the boundaries between history in games and history of games. In such resources, they may combine the careful detail of after-action reports or walkthroughs with other materials which capture the history and memory of (historical) gameplay, along with its social and cultural context. How, for example, do we think about a character sheet from a historical tabletop roleplaying game held in a personal archive of gaming memories?

In this theme, then, we seek to explore the huge diversity of player historical practices around historical games – starting with historical games, then, and working outwards into the context in which they sit. Where, when, and how do players do history in relation to historical games? When players act as historians beyond games, do they extend the role of the player-historian (Chapman, 2016), do they serve as or become public historians (Webber, 2016), are they fan-historians, or something else? What do player practices around historical games tell us about history, and about the place of games within the historical enterprise? And of all of these player contributions, which are the most significant and why?