History and Games This Week
Welcome to the week in history and games, a short collection of links to stories and news that we hope you find interesting.
The VALUE Foundation, who we are always happy to big up around here, held a pretty cool online event a few days ago where Angus Mol and Aris Politopoulos tried their hand at creating a game on the fly, on a live feed. Specifically, they used Ink, the scripting language used by Inkle Studios (on games such as Heaven's Vault). Worth your time if you are interested in making historical games but do not have programming experience, or if like us you like to get students to make historical games! Another option of course is Twine, and if you want to more about that you are in luck too: Chride Lassheikki gave a talk on Twine just the other day.
Around here our interest has certainly been piqued by WW2 Rebuilder, a game focused on cleaning up a devastated European city after World War II. It is a fascinating concept, and Rock Paper Shotgun notes the game's heritage, with developers PlayWay having previously worked on Train Station Renovation and a number of browser games for younger audiences. I will be honest, I am not sure what to expect of this, but having spent much of my adult life occasionally rampaging through virtual wartorn Europe (not to mention Asia, or alien planets) I welcome a chance to reflect on other attempts to recreate the experience of war.
On to the written word! The Nebula Award nominees were announced last week, and the games category included Hades, a game we are rather fond of around here, as well as Spiritfarer, about which I hear fantastic things.
Medieval history expert Rob Houghton's edited volume Playing the Crusades launched this past week. It looks fascinating; there are a lot of ways to talk about the Crusades and video games (we have certainly tried) and we look forward to sitting down with this one.
Wrapping up, over at Vice Patrick Klepek has a great piece on progammer Near's ongoing obsession with localizing 1996 Japanese Super Famicom game Bahamut Lagoon.
Finally, we have a podcast out today! John got together with Dr. Andre Sorensen from the University of Toronto to discuss Cyberpunk 2077 a couple of weeks ago. You can find the video version here, but the podcast episode is available for your listening pleasure right now. Have a listen. We talk a lot about Night City and the game's representation of urbanism in a couple of different historical contexts.
