"This book explores the representations of Central and Eastern European histories in digital games. Focusing on games that examine a range of national histories and heritages from across Central and Eastern Europe, the volume looks beyond the diversity of the local histories depicted in games, and the audience reception of these histories, to show a diversity of approaches which can be used in examining historical games - from postcolonialism to identity politics to heritage studies. The book includes chapters on Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia, Czechia, Finland, and (a Western guest with regional connections) Luxembourg. Through the lens of videogames, the authors address how nations struggle with the legacies of war, colonialism and religious strife that have been a part of nation-building - but also how victimized cultures can survive, resist, and sometimes prevail. Appealing primarily to scholars in the fields of game studies, heritage studies, postcolonial criticism, and media studies, this book will be particularly useful for the subfields of historical game studies and postcolonial game studies"--

This book explores the representations of Central and Eastern European histories in digital games. Focusing on games that examine a range of national histories and heritages from across Central and Eastern Europe, the volume looks beyond the diversity of the local histories depicted in games, and the audience reception of these histories, to show a diversity of approaches which can be used in examining historical games – from postcolonialism to identity politics to heritage studies. The book includes chapters on Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia, Czechia, Finland, and (a Western guest with regional connections) Luxembourg. Through the lens of video games, the authors address how nations struggle with the legacies of war, colonialism, and religious strife that have been a part of nation-building - but also how victimized cultures can survive, resist, and sometimes prevail. Appealing primarily to scholars in the fields of game studies, heritage studies, postcolonial criticism, and media studies, this book will be particularly useful for the subfields of historical game studies and postcolonial game studies.

"This book explores the representations of Central and Eastern European histories in digital games. Focusing on games that examine a range of national histories and heritages from across Central and Eastern Europe, the volume looks beyond the diversity of the local histories depicted in games, and the audience reception of these histories, to show a diversity of approaches which can be used in examining historical games - from postcolonialism to identity politics to heritage studies. The book includes chapters on Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia, Czechia, Finland, and (a Western guest with regional connections) Luxembourg. Through the lens of videogames, the authors address how nations struggle with the legacies of war, colonialism and religious strife that have been a part of nation-building - but also how victimized cultures can survive, resist, and sometimes prevail. Appealing primarily to scholars in the fields of game studies, heritage studies, postcolonial criticism, and media studies, this book will be particularly useful for the subfields of historical game studies and postcolonial game studies"--

This book brings together essays on game history and historiography that reflect on the significance of locality. Game history did not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter, yet most digital game and software histories are silent with respect to geography. Topics covered include: hyper-local games; temporal anomalies in platform arrival and obsolescence; national videogame workforces; player memories of the places of gameplay; comparative reception studies of a platform; the erasure of cultural markers; the localization of games; and perspectives on the future development of ‘local’ game history. Chapters 1 and 12 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book provides an introduction and overview of the rapidly evolving topic of game narratives, presenting the new perspectives employed by researchers and the industry, highlighting the recent empirical findings that illustrate the nature of it. The first section deals with narrative design and theory, the second section includes social and cultural studies on game narrative, the third section focuses on new technologies and approaches for the topic, the fourth section presents practices and case studies, and the final section provides industry cases from professionals.

Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) uses an ethnographic lens to explore the dissonances associated with the commodification of Chornobyl’s heritage. The book considers the role of the guides as experience brokers, focusing on the synergy between tourists and guides in the performance of heritage interpretation. Banaszkiewicz proposes to perceive tour guides as important actors in the bottom-up construction of heritage discourse contributing to more inclusive and participatory approach to heritage management. Demonstrating that the CEZ has been going through a dynamic transformation into a mass tourism attraction, the book offers a critical reflection on heritagisation as a meaning-making process in which the resources of the past are interpreted, negotiated, and recognised as a valuable legacy. Applying the concepts of dissonant heritage to describe the heterogeneous character of the CEZ, the book broadens the interpretative scope of dark tourism which takes on a new dimension in the context of the war in Ukraine. Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone argues that post-disaster sites such as Chornobyl can teach us a great deal about the importance of preserving cultural and natural heritage for future generations. The book will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of heritage, tourism, memory, disasters and Eastern Europe.

A general introduction to archeogaming describing the intersection of archaeology and video games and applying archaeological method and theory into understanding game-spaces. “[T]he author’s clarity of style makes it accessible to all readers, with or without an archaeological background. Moreover, his personal anecdotes and gameplay experiences with different game titles, from which his ideas often develop, make it very enjoyable reading.”—Antiquity Video games exemplify contemporary material objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture. Video games also serve as archaeological sites in the traditional sense as a place, in which evidence of past activity is preserved and has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology, and which represents a part of the archaeological record. From the introduction: Archaeogaming, broadly defined, is the archaeology both in and of digital games... As will be described in the following chapters, digital games are archaeological sites, landscapes, and artifacts, and the game-spaces held within those media can also be understood archaeologically as digital built environments containing their own material culture... Archaeogaming does not limit its study to those video games that are set in the past or that are treated as “historical games,” nor does it focus solely on the exploration and analysis of ruins or of other built environments that appear in the world of the game. Any video game—from Pac-Man to Super Meat Boy—can be studied archaeologically.