Shaping the Past: Counterfactual History and Game Design Practice in Digital Strategy Games

Product Description

This series provides a multidisciplinary framework for scholarly approaches to video games in the humanities. It focuses especially on the dialectics of methodology and object: how do different scholarly fields apply their theories and methods to video games, and how do video games in turn affect these theories and methods?

This series seeks to reconnect media-centric Game Studies to the disciplines it had to distance itself from in its foundation, such as literary studies or film studies, in an attempt to use their differences and contact zones in a mutually productive dialogue. It also seeks to present innovative approaches in other fields in the humanities that have yet to consider video games in a systematic way, and give a home to ground-breaking publications that push the boundaries of existing discourses and debates. In this endeavor, the series is committed to a decidedly global scope as it assembles perspectives from different cultural and academic contexts.

In short, this series wants to see what the humanities do with video games and what video games do to the humanities.

Proposals can be send to: [email protected]

Advisory Board:

Alenda Y. Chang, UC Santa Barbara

Katherine J Lewis, University of Huddersfield

Dietmar Meinel, University of Duisburg-Essen

Ana Miloševic, KU Leuven

Soraya Murray, UC Santa Cruz

Holly Nielsen, University of London

Michael Nitsche, Georgia Tech

Martin Picard, Leipzig University

Melanie Swalwell, Swinburne University

Emma Vossen, University of Waterloo

Mark J.P. Wolf, Concordia University

Esther Wright, Cardiff University

Ylva Grufstedt investigates the role of counterfactuals in uses of history through game designers and through digital strategy games. It discusses the content, form and perspectives that define different types of counterfactuals in the context of game-making – an effort to outline and detail the values and frameworks that shape the past in this popular media.

About the Author
Ylva Grufstedt, University of Helsinki, Finland.

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