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Available on May 14 2026
$31.45

Available for purchase via Bloomsbury etextbooks on publication date

This title is available for exam copy requests

Description

Writing Game Histories is a practical guide for students that looks at the different strategies employed by historians when studying the history of games. The book provides an overview of key historiographical and methodological issues, exploring the multifaceted nature of game history and representations of the past within historical games.

The book is written by historical experts and game scholars from a range of international backgrounds. It covers topics such as the political economy of video game production, the practices of game developers, and achieving equitable game histories. The collection also includes two dedicated chapters surveying the current state of the field, bringing together existing trends and approaches, and offering students a concise introduction to the different directions explored later in the volume.

Writing Game Histories offers accessible guidance on the complex histories of games and how we can research and write them, the representations of the past found in games, the way they construct historical arguments, and the theoretical background necessary to understand how they do so. It is the perfect guide to this rapidly growing and increasingly popular field of research, and is an invaluable resource when considering its future.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Introduction: Where and What is Historical Game Studies, Now? Esther Wright, Nick Webber, and Iain Donald
Part 1: Methods and Approaches

1. Inventory Full: Equipping the Interdisciplinary Toolbox, Corine Gerritsen, Keerthi Sridharan, and Angus Mol

2. Autoethnography as Historical Method: A Plague Tale and Authentic Experiences of the Past, Poppy Wilde and Nick Webber

3. Reading Paratexts and Writing Histories, Ed Vollans

4. Historical Analogues: Non-Digital Ludic Pedagogical Methods for History, Robert Houghton

Part 2: Frameworks and Lenses

5. On Being Colonised: Postcolonial Anxiety and Fantasy in the Historical Allegory of Anito: Defend a Land Enraged, Christoffer Mitch C. Cerda

6. Gender, Games, History, Tess Watterson

7. Playing with the Bubble: Showa nostalgia and Japan's economic collapse in Yakuza, Rachael Hutchinson

8. Mythology in Games: The Case of Inter-Mythological Storytelling, Alexander Vandewalle

Part 3: (Game) Histories in Practice

9. Board Games as Historical Rhetoric: Crisis: 1914, Maurice Suckling

10. Historical Theory and Game Design, Rüdiger Brandis

11. 'Research is a Creative Process': Writing Histories with Games, James Coltrain, Leyla Johnson, Nikhil Murthy and Holly Nielsen (with Esther Wright)

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published May 14 2026
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Extent 272
ISBN 9781350468276
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Series Writing History
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Esther Wright

Esther Wright is a Lecturer in Digital History at…

Anthology Editor

Iain Donald

Iain Donald is a Lecturer in Design & UX at Ed…

Anthology Editor

Nick Webber

Nick Webber is Associate Professor in Media at Bir…

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