What History are we playing today? An analysis over 50 years of historical board games

Abstract

The past is a primary source of inspiration for the flourishing cultural industry of board games as game designers are inspired by a variety of periods and historical events to craft unique visions of the past. While previous works have explored the potential and biases of board games, there has been no work to date able to identify at a large scale what themes and biases are found in historical board games. A Digital Humanities framework has been applied to explore the corpus of historical board games recorded in the BoardGameGeek (BGG) portal. The analysis of of 8786 board games suggests that commercial board games allow players to experience a diverse past in novel and interactive ways while also reinforcing biases already present in the public perception of the past, including the dominance of Western History, the lack of interest on the 19th century, and the focus on violent conflict.

Keywords

• Historical Game Studies
• digital humanities
• public History
• informal learning
• data Science
• Adult Education and Lifelong Learning