Civilizing Civilization (and beyond)

Historical game studies is a nascent field formed around the study of games which engage with discourses about history and the past. Beginning with a prominent object of study in wider games scholarship, Sid Meier's Civilization, historical game studies gradually cohered around several key discursive threads anchored by a small set of focal texts. Out of these core texts, historical game studies developed its own metalanguage, critical discourses, and taxonomic structures which enabled a broad cross-pollination across scholarship engaging with games and the past. As a distinct field closely associated with wider game studies scholarship, historical game studies affords games scholars numerous methodological and theoretical contributions which aid in studying digital games; it also represents a valuable interdisciplinary scholarly community connecting games scholars with research in history, education, heritage studies, and numerous other disciplinary spaces. As such, this historiographic review of historical game studies is intended to highlight the evolution of scholarship in the field, presenting key scholarly works, discursive shifts, objects of study, field sub-groupings, and theoretical contributions in order to facilitate further interdisciplinary scholarship oriented around history and digital games.