Video Game Reviews: Introduction

Extract

In an ongoing effort to broaden the reviews section of the American Historical Review beyond the realm of the scholarly monograph, the journal’s editorial team solicits reviews of other kinds of material of potential interest to historians. The AHR now reviews films, historical fiction, memoirs, graphic histories, document collections, pedagogical materials, digital sites, role-playing games, cartographic histories, and more.

In this issue, we offer a cluster of three reviews of Ubisoft’s enormously popular historically based video games in their Assassin’s Creed franchise. For good or for ill, many young people receive their initial impression of historical epochs, characters, and events in this visually compelling ludic format, and historians should pay attention to these virtual renderings of the past. Assassin’s Creed is but one small slice of a very large universe of historical video games that cover a myriad of historical eras and themes, and we may consider others for review in the future. The reviews in this issue are accompanied by Andrew Denning’s History Unclassified essay describing his own experience playing games based on the history of World War II. Denning, a historian of Nazi Germany, asks how recent video games focused on National Socialism shape public understanding of the Third Reich.