A Plague Tale: Autoethnography and Authenticity in Historical Games Research

This paper examines how autoethnography can rehabilitate the concept of authenticity in historical game studies, using the Plague Tale duology (A Plague Tale: Innocence and A Plague Tale: Requiem), both set in 14th-century France during the Black Death, as its case. The authors argue that authenticity has been widely invoked in discussions of historical games but is often entangled with accuracy and critiqued by historians for its emotional, interpretive, and subjective nature. Their central claim is that a method centring the player's affective experience can make authenticity a meaningful analytical category beyond strict historical accuracy.

The authors ground their approach in frameworks drawn from historical studies, tourism studies, and media studies, noting that tourism research has developed the concept of "authentic" experience more fully than game studies has. They adopt autoethnography, which uses thick description and evocative narrative to convey lived experience, and which Ellis et al. are cited as defining in terms of verisimilitude, the sense that a represented experience feels lifelike and possible. The paper situates this method within a growing body of reflexive autoethnographic work in game studies that addresses affect, desire, and ideological dissonance in play.

The methodology is specifically retrospective collaborative autoethnography. Both authors had previously completed the games to the end of the main story arc, and their memories, notes, and conversations form the primary data, supplemented by additional gameplay conducted explicitly for data collection. The authors argue that this approach yields insight into experiential authenticity that textual analysis or player interviews cannot readily provide. The study is limited in scope to two authors and two games, and its findings are presented as a methodological demonstration rather than a broad empirical survey of player populations.