Shaping The Past Counterfactual History And Game Design Practice In Digital Strategy Games 7 Ylva Grufstedt by Ylva Grufstedt 9783110692259, 3110692252 instant download after payment.

As the title suggests, this book is about counterfactual history, digital strategy games and game design. In the context of historical game studies, these are important concepts used to discuss and explain the nature of history in games. While engaging with all three, the book also focuses on practices of game design and game development. It considers how developers navigate the opportunities and constraints of historical culture, and the pragmatics of design practice. It also explores the understandings and meanings of counterfactual history as uses of history.
As such, this book is an effort to examine the intersection and interplay of game design practice and the representation of the past for two specific purposes. Firstly, game design practices and principles impose themselves on the representation of the past. The details of how this happens is something that we so far know little about, though it deserves to be an integral part of historical game studies, and this book is a partial but optimistic contribution towards that. Secondly, this book proposes a theoretical framework for counterfactual history as a distinct use of history defined above all by its settings, framings and applications.
This book is not about the players or consumers of digital strategy games, other than where developer practices intersect with the perception of player expectations and behaviours. The study itself contains no new player data. Nor is this book about the pedagogical or didactic nature of games, or the logistics of how games teach or transfer knowledge about the past. This book does not cover games of other genres than digital strategy games, although I suspect that the findings are applicable in other contexts, and I would encourage anyone who wishes to explore this further. And when it comes to counterfactuals, this book avoids assessing the actual probability of the designed counterfactual scenarios in the games. It therefore only in passing overlaps with approaches such