Playing with History's Otherness: A Framework for Exploring Historical Games

This paper by Manuel Alejandro Cruz Martínez offers a provisional framework for analysing historical video games through the lens of identity and alterity, drawing on the anthropological work of Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich. Its central argument is that deconstructing history through these concepts is a necessary step for understanding how games represent the past, and that the same approach can guide the design of subversive historical games that challenge dominant narratives and open space for marginalised or subaltern histories. The author positions this as a call to engage both with the epistemological foundations of historical representation and with the formal mechanics of game design.

The framework operates across three levels, each organised around a dichotomy: Us/Them, which examines how historical narratives construct protagonists and exclude groups, with games often reproducing ethnocentric or pejorative depictions; reality/fiction, which considers how games borrow the formal markers of historical authority, such as encyclopaedic texts, diaries, and quotations, to produce an illusion of historicity; and present/past, which treats the past as a mysterious "other" through the lens of Said's orientalism, as seen in exploration-focused titles and legend-driven narratives. The author stresses that these levels are illustrative rather than fixed, and that they interact in complex ways.

The paper also proposes ways the medium's distinctive properties could subvert these assumptions. Interactivity and the capacity to foster empathy may complicate conventional ideas about who makes history, while the rules-based nature of games can expose historical narratives as constructions rather than fixed facts. Explicitly acknowledged as preliminary, the framework is presented to stimulate debate on the applicability of critical historiographical approaches to game design, whether for educational, scholarly, or commercial purposes.