Yes, a blog about video games! Wow!
Wait, why?
As a student of history and a fan of video games, I find myself buying and playing games set in the past. It's also been my experience that my friends and professors, even when not huge fans of video games, are always drawn to games like Civilization, the Total War series, and so on. And why not? Historians (and hell, just about everybody) love to put themselves in the shoes of people from different eras, something games can do like no other medium.
Bafflingly, though, there doesn't seem to be any sort of site dedicated to this kind of thing. The closest I can think of are sites that discuss historical strategy games, but even those are almost completely unconcerned with analyzing the history presented. So I decided to take the initiative.
So what's this blog for?
This is a place for people who really like history. Real history, not the stuff in The Da Vinci Code or even on The History Channel. I make the distinction because I love studying real history, but I'm often frustrated by misrepresentations of history in movies, TV, books, and video games.
More than the other mediums, though, video games are a very active, two-way conversation between designer and consumer. Developers of video games have to prepare the product to be enjoyed and experienced in multiple ways. Crafting an experience that's true to historical reality becomes extremely difficult when the audience can move the camera freely, inspect every detail of the world on display, and try all kinds of things in the game that either follow or go against the story the developer wants to tell.
This is a blog for the analysis and discussion of different historical video games, with focus on presentation and atmosphere. You won't find me writing too much about how fun or boring a game is; instead, I'm interested in picking apart things like music, plot, and visuals which are the building blocks of player immersion. Accurate details, mistakes, and everything in between ("problematic" things, as historians often say) will be discussed.
Important note: I'm not some spaz who only likes games/movies/whatever if it's completely historically accurate - I like all kinds of preposterously misleading forms of entertainment, and if I mention a game being egregiously inaccurate, it's not to say I didn't enjoy playing it or that the developers are lazy, bad, etc. Games are a huge and relatively new medium, and just like other kinds of entertainment, they can provide an excellent form of public history, teaching the curious player about the past.
Who the hell am I?
The good history students should consider this part long overdue. Well, I'm a history student, currently going into his final year as an undergraduate and preparing to go into a PhD program in history immediately afterward. I know the basics of American history and some Roman history, but my real background is in Medieval and Early Modern Europe as well as Latin America. I don't have any background in East Asian history, or African history, or Native American history, but it's (un)fortunately something of a non-issue, since most history games in the West are based on Western history anyway, so most games I play and discuss on here will be set in periods I know fairly well.
I won't claim to be anything of an expert on either game design or the history I discuss: I've studied it quite a bit but there's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone who know the subject mater better than I do. This is less a place for any reader to learn and more a place for me to write down what I'm typically thinking as I play video games. That said, if you have questions, comments, suggestions, criticisms, or if you want to contribute (it's a lot of fun to think about/write), please please please email me at david.bliff[at]gmail dot com. I love talking about history and to a lesser extent video games, even if it's learning how wrong I am about something, and I'll definitely respond to any emails I get.
Finally, some of my favorite history games I'll probably review at some point:
Total War series
Civilization 4 - especially Colonization
Company of Heroes
Mount and Blade
First on my list of games to review: Assassin's Creed 2, set to arrive in the mail today. If you've somehow found this blog and are somehow still reading, congratulations, thank you, and check back soon! Woo.
