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.

Let's start the round up with some Assassin's Creed news! Or rather, a review of Assassin's Creed. Liam McLeod over at Interactive Pasts has written a great review of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, the kind of hybrid approach focusing on the academic and historical implications of the game paired with good old fashioned love of video games that we are into around here. Definitely worth a look.

Speaking of which, John was lucky enough to be invited back to the Starting Point podcast to talk esports and history and host Brian... has played a lot of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. Have a listen if you want to hear John talk about developing a collegiate esports program and the development of academic viewpoints on games over the last several years.

Quick spoiler, John told Starting Point that the academic game world is more vibrant and fun than ever. Just check out this video from Andrew Reinhard finding a phantom star system in No Man's Sky.

In that vein, though not limited to the study of games and game culture, Twitter has opened up access to its full tweet archive for academic research. Time for me to finally build that twitter bot - now we can find out how many times people have decided to use social media to call out into the void for Half-Life 3 since the social media company's founding in 2006.

Heaven's Vault, a game that Bob quite liked - and talked to Andrew Reinhard about - is now available on the Nintendo Switch. It's also on Steam and Playstation 4, if you're tempted. We think you should be!

Finally, we have a podcast out today. Come for John's uninformed opinions about the Gamestop mess, his more informed - thanks to Jason Schreier's excellent piece - opinions on Amazon's attempts to become the new giant in video game development and publishing, and stay for Bob's initial reviews of the Playstation 5!