HIST 3909C – History, historians and games
Winter 2025
Instructor: Professor Marc Saurette
From Hollywood blockbusters like Napoleon to the Assassin’s Creed video-game franchises, from Renaissance fairs (faires?) to Victorian bodice-rippers, modern cultural industries saturate the popular imagination with diverse representations of the past. Though meant to entertain and not to educate, these depictions nonetheless contain historical interpretations and shape how people view the past. With a focus on games (boardgames, videogames and more), this course introduces students to how the discipline of History and the work of contemporary historians take seriously how pop culture communicates the past.
This class will consider how games can be a form of Public History. By analyzing, playing and designing games about the past, students will learn to think critically like a historian. You will learn the terminology, methods and tools to understand what games are, how historic games help understand the past and the contemporary cultures that played them, and that games we play today have a long history. You will also learn to develop games of your own, individually and in groups, that are able to describe the past from a historian’s perspective.