My Game History: Teaching Against Hegemonic Game History

My Game History: Teaching Against Hegemonic Game History

My Game History: Teaching Against Hegemonic Game History

Annakaisa Kultima, Jaakko Stenros

Abstract

"When we tell the history of our playing, we tell our life story. Yet the popular histories of games (e.g. Kent 2001, Kohler 2016, Donovan 2010, Schreier 2017; see also Suominen 2017) tend to foreground specific products, technologies, or designers. While everyone has different experiences with games, not all of those experiences are represented in the written histories or game heritage work (cf. Nylund 2020). Public narratives simplify or even disregard experiences that are not easily digestible or seem too unusual. Over time, these hegemonic histories (cf. Fron et al. 2007, Harrer et al. 2019) will impact the valuation of even private experiences. To challenge and diversify understandings of game and play histories, we conducted a pilot course My Game History, where 26 students of shared, discussed, and reflected on their personal play histories, and then developed these into a touring museum exhibition in two iterations between 2016 and 2018 (Kultima & Stenros 2018). The work emphasized how it feels to play games, what kind of actions are meaningful, social aspects of play, and how play affects our lives from childhood to adulthood. In this abstract, we reflect on this pilot project and invite peer scholars to battle against hegemonic game histories with us. We argue that our course format works in challenging the student’s views on the historical value of games and play. In addition, the reflective work done by the students strengthens their self-understanding of personal play – and its role in becoming game experts. We claim that this course format could be more widely adopted to challenge hegemonic understanding of game history in game education."

Reference

Kultima, A., & Stenros, J. (2023). My game history: Teaching against hegemonic game history. Digital Games Research Association. https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/download/2052/2051

Keywords

Game History, Hegemony of Play, Play History