New Perspectives on Old Pasts? Diversity in Popular Digital Games with Historical Settings

Abstract

With their increasing popularity, digital games have come to stage notions of history and the past for ever broader circles of recipients, thereby shaping what is understood, interpreted, and negotiated as history in popular contexts. Digital games with historical settings not only adopt already successfully popularized and widely mediated images of history. They also integrate current social debates into the historical worlds they construct and recreate. Using three highly popular representatives of the medium as examples, this article examines how the debates about diversity and the representation of People of Color, which have intensified in recent years, inscribe a particular social self-image into the mediated staging of history and thus offer new perspectives on the past.