ABSTRACT
Human interaction with the physical environment has played an increasingly important role in the work of historians and other scholars dealing with the past. This chapter examines how well videogames deal with environmental issues while explaining how scholars have argued that the environment and human history are interconnected. Major topics include the Columbian Exchange, disease, climate change, and geological events. None of these topics receives much attention from most historical videogames. A major reason is that the capricious nature of ecological and environmental forces often frustrates players, making them feel powerless. Nevertheless, this chapter highlights the games that make the best attempts to take account of these forces and holds them up as examples that other games’ designers could emulate.
