Playing with the Past

Reviews / Votes

Playing with the Past is a serious cultural contemplation on a media genre that forever changed the way a generations thinks. An engaging exploration into the way media engages and redefines history, Playing with the Past is a groundbreaking work in Media Studies and an essential text for the study of video games and the history of ideas. -- C. Jason Smith, Professor of English,The City University of New York-LaGuardia, US Elliott and Kapell have gathered a remarkable collection of contributions-engaging deep issues about what history IS, and how one can present its issues in a vital contribution within contemporary studies. The scope is compendious, from Rome to Native America, from Japan to Colonial America; this book just might become the basis for up-to-the-minute narrative/historical/digital mediations, and should be of interest in the many fields of the superior college or university. -- William G. Doty, Professor Emeritus, University of Alabama, US Playing with the Past is an innovative, lucid and engaging collection that strikes a number of carefully constructed and rewarding balances. The tone is both serious and playful. Its analysis and findings are simultaneously rigorous, illuminating and entertaining. Playing with the Past provides a neat summation of the previous work which has explored the relationship between digital games and their interaction with history as a foundation to establish, with great sophistication and clarity, the critical and conceptual terrain for the current and future debates. -- Stephen McVeigh, Associate Professor, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University, UK Playing with the Past is a far-reaching volume, guiding readers through ancient civilizations, modern wars, and futures premised upon counterfactual pasts. In this reflexively-organized array of essays, game scholars will find both a primer on historiographic inquiry and a series of cogent analyses that are not simply conversant with issues driving the field but also bring new depth and insight to their examination. -- Gerald Voorhees, Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Communication, University of Waterloo, Canada The individual contributors handle their parts in this ambitious program well. Each chapter involves a kind of ethnographic exploration of its particular game space, often with first-person reports (though not always) about the game, coupled with close readings of the code itself [...] the chapters fall easily within the narratology or ludology folds as understood from game studies. * Journal of Interdisciplinary History * Playing with the Past is accessible for general readers, especially since it provides a wide range of examples of games and how they simulate history. It is also a good choice as a textbook in introductory courses on games engaging with history and in courses in public history. -- Jan Frode Hatlen, Department of Historical Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology * Journal of Design History *