History and Games This Week
Welcome to the week in history and games, a short collection of links to stories and news that we hope you find interesting.
Quite a lot to cover this week, but I want to start with the release of the Charles Engine FMV, a tool released by Charles Games, developers of Attentat 1942. You can see our episode on the game here. Attentat 1942 made exceptional use of video footage (hence the FMV in the engine title) and other neat visual tricks to create a game experience that really stands out among World War 2 themed games in particular.
The Charles Engine FMV brings a lot of potential to classrooms and creators who want to craft interactive experiences. Definitely worth a look. If you have no experience with Unity development, the Unity learning platform is very good and recently became free to all. Charles Games also did a kind of explainer/dev talk/hangout on Facebook that is worth a look, too.
Emma Kent wrote a fantastic piece in Eurogamer on Assassin's Creed: Valhalla's depiction of Gloucestershire, where she grew up. Emma does a great job bringing in photographs of present-day Gloucestershire and comparing it to the game's depictions without just making everything an accuracy comparison. It's a great piece and well worth a look. And I have to admit, this is the first time I've thought about Gloucestershire since Hot Fuzz.
Friend of the showJeremiah McCall published his piece - previously posted in two parts - on Through the Darkest of Times this week. Jeremiah discusses the game within the context of his Historical Problem Space framework, which among other things has the effect of breaking the game down into discrete components for analysis. The piece is quite technical, but it is very readable and a nice example of an accessible but scholarly study of a game.
If you don't already know who the Value Foundation are, you have to check them out. This past week their website Interactive Pasts published a nice piece on alternative history in games by Jochem "Guthixian" Scheelings. Value also does a weekly bulletin, the latest of which you can catch here.
Artist Matt Rhodes shared art work from Revolver, a never released spiritual sequel to Jade Empire. It is fascinating stuff, and it makes me wonder how we are planning to bring all these disparate strands of gaming history together as we move forward.
Some history not directly linked to games to bring us home this week. LeVar Burton shared a thread on twitter talking about his memories performing in Roots. If you are not familiar, Roots was a 1977 miniseries with an epic story arc beginning with the life of Kunta Kinte (Burton) in Gambia and his enslavement, and ending with his descendents' struggles during and after the American Civil War. This show was a BIG deal, and really helped shape discourse about historical slavery around the world. Burton's thread focuses on his own personal experiences as a young actor being part of the production, and is worth a quick look.
Finally, baseball legend Hank Aaron died. Aaron was one of the best players in the history of the sport, famously breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record to both popular acclamation and horrific racist opposition. Our friend Robert Greene II wrote an excellent piece that talks about Aaron's importance as an American hero.
