Should A Historian Analyze The Past, Medieval Or In A Videogame?

When it comes to the representation of the past, historians are faced with a clear absence of a proper methodology. How must one analyse the past, medieval or otherwise in a videogame? The main issue for historians lies between the diverse criteria used by a historian and a game designer. The historian’s task is the construction of the past using historical sources, from which he produces a factual historical narratives for his intended audience, while conforms to strict academic standards. For the game designer, a whole different set of criteria apply. He looks at the past as a source of inspiration. He does research, but his findings are translated to conform to demands of the medium. As Harrison Gish (2010) attests, the result is a negotiation

That a videogame can be read as a story is hardly surprising, as it shares many of the basic elements of a narrative: there are main characters, levels that correspond to chapters of a book and a linear trajectory from beginning to end. Indeed, videogame designers have turned to complex storytelling as a means to boost sales and engross players in fictional settings, a strategy notably employed in videogames from the role-playing-game genre. Furthermore, videogames allow players to generate their own stories, as each player experiences the narrative of a videogame in a unique way depending on his actions during play. These stories can be the direct actions taken by player inside the videogame, or a narrative created inside the player’s

Matt Sawrey (2013) reveals that the concept was coined in 2007 by Clint Hocking, a former creative director that worked for videogame developers Lucasarts and Ubisoft. Hocking observed the apparent dissonance between gameplay and narrative in the videogame Bioshock (2007), which is set in a dystopian underwater city that follows Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy. As a result, the gameplay heavily promoted self-interest on the part of the player, urging him to become stronger to progress more easily. This is a reflection of the objectivist philosophical themes of the videogame, but on the other hand, the narrative of the story seemed to promote cooperation and sacrifice as the best course of action, clashing with the self-interest promoted by the