Iterating the Past: Using Game Analytic Methods in Historical Game Studies

This pilot study, presented at DiGRA 2025, investigates how players engage with the past during play of historical videogames, framing this activity as "past-play" in which players reorient their relationships to history through interaction, discourse, and self-involvement. The authors argue that historical game studies has long relied on researcher-centric and developer-centric methods, and that a shift toward player-experience-focused, game-analytic, and mixed-methods approaches is needed. The study's dual aims are to examine past-play through an Open Science framework and to test whether these methods can be feasibly scaled, positioning the work as the first phase of a series of iterative "past-play labs."

The methodology combined player observation, eye-tracking, two questionnaires (one pre-session on demographics and play habits, one post-session on attention to story, immersion, and feelings about the past), and moderated focus groups of three to four participants each. Twelve participants aged 18 to 37, each with at least 30 hours of experience in the Assassin's Creed series, played Assassin's Creed Origins for two hours in either a controlled lab or their home gaming environment. The game was chosen for its open-world design, role-playing elements, and high-fidelity historical setting in Ancient Egypt, which make it suitable for studying immersion and self-involvement.

Data collection concluded in May 2025, and the resulting dataset comprises focus group transcripts, annotated eye-tracking recordings, questionnaire responses, and tagged play footage, processed with Tobii Pro Lab, Amberscript, and Qualtrics. Analysis followed an exploratory grounded theory approach to generate bottom-up observations and inform the design of future labs. The presentation was expected to connect interaction intensity, gaze behavior, and player investment in narrative and historical representation, while also reflecting on the limitations of game-analytic methods and naturalistic data collection for replicable research into historical play.