It is a fact universally acknowledged that play is a great route to successful learning. Two influential textbooks by Alex Moseley and Nicola Whitton make the case persuasively. New Traditional Games ...

A free interactive discussion panel to explore and imagine historical video games

On 11th Septmber 2026, our Nations panel discussion event was hosted at the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Curious Festival, and streamed online via YouTube. It featured insights and perspectives from M...

Historical board games are often associated with the long-standing ‘hex and counters’ tradition based on maps, counters, charts, dice tables and dense scenario rules. These games remain an important p...

Is individual memory a reliable thing? What about collective memory? A nation’s history connects its people to their past, providing them with a sense of who they “ought to be” as citizens. But what h...

How is national identity encoded into video games played all around the world?

It is a simple enough question, and one I have been asked thousands of times. Growing up in Liverpool, my parents ran a corner shop. We were there everyday, serving the same neighbourhood, getting to ...

How is national identity encoded into video games played all around the world?

Games are a significant medium through which ideas of nationhood, identity, history, and cultural belonging are produced, circulated, and contested. Whether through historically themed simulations, mi...

Videogame genres have long served as the kindling on which game studies discourse fires rage. As long as there have been discussions around the categorisation of videogames, the specificities that cha...

If you take a look at famous combat-flying action game franchise Ace Combat (Namco, 1995-), at first glance it would seem an innocuous pastime. You pilot jets shooting at others, focused in its tightl...

Around two and a half years ago I set out to adapt The Mabinogion as a video game. The text itself is a collection of medieval Welsh tales, and one of the most significant works of Welsh literary heri...

Codice Lugo 1945 – Le Carte della Liberazione is an urban card game created by PopHistory ETS (an Italian association of various types of professionals operating in the field of public history) and co...

This book brings together a selection of papers delivered at the Video Game Cultures 2024 conference, held from 12 to 14 September 2024 at Birmingham City University, UK. The conference theme was ‘other’ in all its permutations: other, others, othered, othering, otherness, and beyond. The aim was to centre marginal practices, marginal identities, peripheral national traditions, and consider researcher positionality in/as other. Participants were asked to reflect on other spaces and sites of gaming, discuss other approaches and methods to studying games, players, and gaming cultures. Core questions were: What can we learn from (or about) other researcher practices, other…

On the 19th May 2026, we hosted our 14th HGN discussion panel for our Analogue theme, with guest speakers Izzy Bartley, Liz Davidson, and Andrew McKelvey (chaired by Nick Webber). You can now find a r...

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