ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the ways in which historical games act as histories, the ways they represent the past. Whether one defines historical games more broadly or narrowly, all historical games present the past in the form of one or more historical problem spaces: a gameworld in which a player agent makes action-choices in a world full of elements and systems, attempting to achieve (if they choose) the goals of the designers. All usually contain more and less defensible models, analogies about how past systems worked. Four case studies illustrate this: Assassin’s Creed, Civilization, Age of Empires, and The Political Machine. All, when used critically, can be part of rich lessons about the past and how we investigate it.
