ABSTRACT
History pervades popular culture so thoroughly that any comprehensive attempt to investigate ‘popular history’ would fill multiple books. Academic historians tend to think of their collective work as the ‘proper’ history against which all other accounts of the past are benchmarked. In one respect, the value of games lies in their capacity to counter teleological understandings of history by emphasising the contingency of sequences of events. Game developers have invested considerable resources in researching periods and settings so that their products satisfy audience expectations about authenticity. Players’ ability to affect what happens on screen separates games from film representations of the past, which – allowing for local variations in censorship – remain the same on every showing. Games are likely to be dismissed as unhistorical on the grounds that they put customer satisfaction before historical accuracy, prioritise spectacle over interpretation and disregard standards of scholarly seriousness.
