[Commlist] New Special Issue 'Digital Games through Muddled Pasts and Modded Histories', Digital Culture & Society, 11(1) published

The Special Issue of Digital Culture & Society, 11(1), 'Digital Games 
through Muddled Pasts and Modded Histories', is now published:
<https://www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/dcs/11/1/html 
<https://www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/dcs/11/1/html>>
<https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-6869-8/digital-culture-society-dcs 
<https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-6869-8/digital-culture-society-dcs>>

Digital Games through Muddled Pasts and Modded Histories
Guest editors: Eduardo Luersen / James Wilson (Eds.)

The emerging field of historical game studies has dedicated significant 
attention to representations of the past in digital games, a topic of 
particular importance given the political and epistemological 
implications of historical knowledge when explored through this medium. 
Numerous contributions, including several edited collections, have 
addressed these and other dimensions of the relationship between games 
and historical knowledge. More recently, a growing strand of scholarship 
has begun to examine the role of production processes in shaping 
gameworld representations, including the concrete settings in which 
simulations of the past are produced. Despite the potentially 
significant impact of these conditions, however, and aside from notable 
and important exceptions, the practical dilemmas and technical design 
decisions that shape how the past is represented in digital games have 
often remained secondary to broader interpretive debates about these 
artefacts. Cultural representations are always embedded in a web of 
formal, technical, ideational, and socio-economic factors. Accordingly, 
the imaginations of the past in games emerge through a combination of 
design aspirations, constraints and, at times, contingent circumstances 
that shape development processes from their inception and throughout 
game design pipelines. With this special issue, we aim to foreground the 
processes through which such games are produced and the ways in which 
historical knowledge is articulated through the practice of game 
development. In doing so, the issue seeks to contribute to established 
research on how digital games negotiate imaginaries of the past, their 
educational potentials and limitations, as well as the broader set of 
values, rationalities, and ideologies about the past that circulate 
within game development and distribution processes.

Table of Contents:

Digital Games through Muddled Pasts and Modded History: Introduction
Eduardo Luersen and James Wilson
pp. 7-19

Source Material and the Problem of Authenticity in Historical Game 
Development
William Hepburn and Jackson W. Armstrong
pp. 23-40

Historians Making Games: Unveiling a History Game Design Ethos
Magnus Henrik Sandberg, Eirik Brazier and Ragnhild Hutchison
pp. 41-62

Enchanted Imaginings: Involving Museum Visitors in Heritage Adventures
Eva Kingsepp and Linda Ryan Bengtsson
pp. 63-81

Cultural Combinatorics and Conjured Spectres: The Representation of 
Culture and Cultural Hybridity through the Game Mechanics of Crusader 
Kings III
Michael A. Conrad
pp. 85-111

Playing Adewale: The Politics of History in Assassin’s Creeds Freedom Cry
Osvaldo Cleger
pp. 113-135

Historical Empathy and Player Agency in Computer Roleplaying Games: 
Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Pentiment
Robert Houghton
pp. 137-160

The Truth(iness) is a Lie: Historical Re-visions of the Cold War through 
Call of Duty Paratexts
victoria l. braegger, Samantha Blackmon
pp. 163-185

Queering Hong Kong: Modded History in A Summer’s End: Hong Kong 1986
Diego Barroso Sánchez
pp. 187-210

Calculated Actions: How Game Code Makes Arguments About the Past
James Baillie
pp. 212-230

Re-Enacting 9th Century Baghdad: Interview on the Narrative and 
Worldbuilding Aspects of the Past, as Rendered in Assassin’s Creed Mirage
James Wilson, Eduardo Luersen, Raphaël Weyland, Sarah Beaulieu
pp. 231-240
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