[Commlist] Call for Abstracts - Special Issue of Digital Culture & Society: Digital Games through Muddled Pasts and Modded History

we would like to kindly invite contributions to the forthcoming Special 
Issue of /Digital Culture & Society/. The deadline for abstracts or 
expressions of interest is 25 August 2024.

Please find the full call below:

--
*Digital Games through Muddled Pasts and Modded History
*
/“My men do not fear death, they welcome it and the rewards it brings”
/
In recent decades, digital games have become an increasingly ubiquitous 
medium for popular engagement with history. For many players, these 
digital representations provide a deeper level of engagement with the 
past than the scientific and scholarly interpretations presented in 
academic monographs and journal articles.

The above quote is how players of Assassin’s Creed are first introduced 
to the so-called “leap of faith”, an important gameplay mechanic and 
navigational element where characters jump from implausible heights, 
before landing unharmed in carts filled with hay. It has since developed 
into a signature feature of the franchise, which encourages players to 
climb culturally and architecturally significant buildings to obtain 
more information about the surrounding area. Yet many players do not 
realise that the episode represented in the opening scene of this hugely 
popular game is adopted almost verbatim from a 13th-century Old French 
chronicle (Daftary, 1990: 6). Likewise, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, set in 
9th century Baghdad, actively engages with controversial historical 
subjects such as the ‘Islamic Golden Age’, the Zanj slave rebellion, and 
the ‘translation movement’ from Greek to Arabic that was patronised by 
the Abbasid Caliphate.

These and many other tropes in digital games raise questions about how 
historical imageries and imaginaries are developed for the medium. 
Inquiries include the extent to which game designers want to recover, 
select, update, and re-enact multifaceted, contested aspects of the 
past. Similarly, so-called Serious Games have been traditionally 
designed for education and training purposes across disciplines, but 
what are the implications of drawing upon historical leitmotifs within 
this format? Putting these questions into a broader perspective of the 
digitisation of culture and knowledge practices, this special issue of 
Digital Culture & Society addresses how knowledge about the past is 
crafted and curated in and for digital games.

In addition to developing deliberate visions of the past through 
narrative design and gameworld imagery, the embedded practical 
interactive experience provided by gaming has become an important means 
of making historical material accessible to wider audiences. This 
possibility, which has evolved over at least the past three decades 
through numerous genre codes into more multisensory experiences, led 
contemporary history-themed games to be compared to a form of historical 
tourism (Schwarz, 2024).

Therefore, while addressing sensitive historical themes, digital games 
are also expected to serve as new drivers of popular history. 
Consequently, they incorporate contemporary cultural debates into the 
historical settings they recreate. This phenomenon is not unique to 
gaming. Other mass media, from literature to cinema, have grappled with 
similar issues when representing the past. However, digital games 
highlight the need to update these discussions, as computer simulation, 
rule structures, and user-oriented media affordances can offer features 
to engage players through particular narrative architectures (Jenkins, 
2004), procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007), and affective experiences 
(Jagoda & McDonald, 2018). Computer games exhibit similarities but also 
very significant differences to how other means, including traditional 
institutional structures and pedagogical platforms, propose engaging 
with history and heritage (Houghton, 2023). Therefore it is relevant to 
understand how these differences influence the representation of the 
past in digital games, especially in games that advert fidelity or 
realism as hallmarks of their worldbuilding.

As the scope of themes in digital games stretches to the past, gameworld 
imaginations paint vivid pictures of transcontinental expeditions, 
previous civilisations, and political or religious conflicts. Yet, while 
the representation and the immersive experiences based on these motifs 
raise several important epistemological questions, the concrete social 
contexts in which these historical images are created have received 
comparatively little attention. The social studies concerning the 
practical production of historical games remain only marginally explored 
(Sotamaa & Švelch, 2021). Observing how the decision-making process in 
historical games is tailored between developers, narrative designers, 
and historical advisors, one can better understand the importance placed 
on historical knowledge within the gaming industry, especially when 
questions of so-called historical ‘authenticity’ collide with the 
demands of user-oriented digital media.

Therefore, with this special volume of Digital Culture & Society, we 
wish to explore the epistemological, political, and practical issues 
that arise through the intermingling of digital games and history across 
multiple dimensions. We aim to do so by being open to multiple branches 
of research, ranging from the representational gameworlds and playful 
experiences about the past to the paratexts surrounding historical game 
releases, from the diverse methodological approaches applied to study 
the intermingling of games and history to the game production aspects 
that play a decisive role in how such games are shaped.

The special issue is led by a set of questions concerning the practical 
and conceptual intricacies of developing and presenting games about 
historical themes to a global audience:

- How are the imageries of in-game historical conflicts or 
cross-cultural ‘tolerance’ developed?
- How does the categorisation of digital games into different genres 
influence how we analyse historical aspects of this medium?
- In which ways are history-based games serious?
- How are game logics and structures used as engagement tools by 
organisations, companies, and states?
- What are the different implications of digital games for the reception 
of historical knowledge when history is meant to be played as a 
user-oriented medium?
- What are the benefits that can be gained from analysis of paratexts, 
and which insights can they provide into these processes?
- How is the decision-making process tailored between developers, 
concept designers, and historical advisors?
- What are the game studio dynamics that play a role in shaping how 
historical games are developed?
- What interdisciplinary methods can be developed to study the 
intersection of digital games and historical knowledge?

We encourage communication, media and game studies scholars, historians, 
designers, anthropologists, sociologists, as well as researchers from 
other disciplines engaged with history-related topics in digital games 
to contribute to this special issue.

*Journal Sections:
*
When submitting an abstract, please state to which of the following 
issue sections you would like to submit your paper:

/Field Research and Case Studies (full paper: 6.000 – 8.000 words)
/We welcome articles that explore empirical findings on the relationship 
between games and history. These articles may examine aspects ranging 
from gameworld representations and game paratexts to the processes 
involved in game production or reception. These studies might be based 
on empirical investigations or autoethnographic research.

/Conceptual/Theoretical Reflection (full paper: 6.000 – 8.000 words)
/conceptual and theoretical dimensions of intertwining historical 
knowledge with digital games. This may involve examining the challenges 
posed to the discipline by the format of games, employing comparative 
media approaches to address the potential and pitfalls of engaging with 
the past through digital games, or exploring the inherent complexities 
of dealing with the past through this medium.

/Entering the Field (2.000 – 3.000 words; experimental formats welcome)
/This experimental section presents initial and ongoing empirical work 
in historical game studies. The editors have created this section to 
provide a platform for researchers who would like to initiate a 
discussion concerning emerging (yet perhaps incomplete) research agendas 
and plans, as well as methodological approaches to historical game 
studies. Contributions may also include discussions about the handling 
of sources or archival work conducted specifically for developing 
digital games.

*Deadlines:
*
Expressions of interest/Initial abstracts (max. 300 words) and short 
biographical note (max. 100 words) are due on: _25 August, 2024_.
Submission of full papers: _25 January, 2025_.
Final versions with the amendments suggested by reviewers are due: _31 
April, 2025_.
*
*
*Publisher and Open Access:
*
DCS is published by transcript Verlag in paper and digital copies. All 
articles will be published as open access on the jounral's website 12 
months after the initial publication. Previous issues are available 
here: http://digicults.org/issues <http://digicults.org/issues>

/There are no Article Processing Charges (APC), therefore, no payment 
will be required //from the authors//./

*Edited by:
*
Eduardo Luersen (Zukunftskolleg/Department of Literature, Art and Media 
Studies, University of Konstanz) and James Wilson 
(Zukunftskolleg/Department of History and Sociology, University of Konstanz)

Please send expressions of interest/initial abstracts and short 
biographical notes to Eduardo Luersen ((_eduardo.luersen /at/ uni-konstanz.de) 
<mailto:(eduardo.luersen /at/ uni-konstanz.de)>_) and James Wilson 
((_james.wilson /at/ uni-konstanz.de) <mailto:(james.wilson /at/ uni-konstanz.de)>_).

*Selected References:
*
Bogost, Ian (2007) Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. 
Cambridge: MIT Press.

Daftary, Farhad (1990) The Isma’ilis: Their History and Doctrines. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Houghton, Robert (2023) ‘Awesome, but Impractical? Deeper Engagement 
with the Middle Ages through Commercial Digital Games’, Open Library of 
Humanities 9(2).

Jagoda, Patrick and McDonald, Peter (2018) ‘Game Mechanics, Experience 
Design, and Affective Play’, in Jentery Sayers (ed.) Routledge Companion 
to Media Studies and the Digital Humanities. New York: Routledge, pp. 
174–182.

Jenkins, Henry (2004) ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture’, in Noah 
Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrington (ed.) First Person: New Media as Story, 
Performance, and Game. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 118–130.

Schwarz, Angela (2024) ‘Discovering the Past as a Virtual Foreign 
Country: Assassin’s Creed as Historical Tourism’, in Erik Champion and 
Juan Francisco Hiriart Vera (ed.) Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: 
History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 169–187.

Sotamaa, Olli and Švelch, Jan (2021) Game Production Studies. Amsterdam: 
Amsterdam University Press.


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