Historizing remediation: how games represent history through media

Abstract

ABSTRACT Historical game studies have been almost exclusively preoccupied with the topic of historical narration and simulation in games, often undermining the role of other media forms at play. The article refocuses the approach and explores how board and digital games use media from the past to distinguish themselves as trustworthy articulations of the past. I name the phenomenon in question as ‘historizing remediation’, basing my theory on discourses on media remediation and historical articulation. When talking about remediation, I am not interested in similarities and differences between media from the past and contemporary forms of entertainment, such as cinema or new media. The article draws attention to ‘media as historical facts’, a category that encompasses media from the past used by historical discourse as credible evidence of past events. This means that historizing remediation is concerned with such artefacts as archival photographs, letters, navigation devices, maps and others. I explain how graphical user interfaces remediate aesthetics that have become associated with the portrayal of history. I inspect simulations that allow players to reenact different functions of media from the past. Both of these processes attribute the games to historical articulation. Still, remediation itself is not a narrative practice; it represents and simulates media, but does not provide a causal explanation of historical events. That is why it is often accompanied by paratextual materials that contextualise the remediated media by referring players to scientific forms and institutions. I find that historizing remediation operates on two opposite but complementary levels. Remediated media function as historical facts (authentic artefacts from the past) and contemporary historical devices used in historical discourse for the representation of the past. Historizing remediation is as much about the experience of the past as it is about the experience of contemporary historical mediation.