The book Historia Ludens,The Playing Historian aims at furthering a debate about aspects of “playing” and “gaming” in connection with history. Reaching out to academics, professionals and students alike, it pursues a dedicated interdisciplinary approach. Rather than only focusing on how professionals could learn from academics in history, the book also ponders the question of what academics can learn from gaming and playing for their own practice, such as gamification for teaching, or using “play” as a paradigm for novel approaches into historical scholarship. “Playing” and “gaming” are thus understood as a broad cultural phenomenon that cross-pollinates the theory and practice of history and gaming alike.
The first chapter has been witten in collaboration with Yannick Rochat, from UNIL and presents a dataset of 1,725 historical video games released between 1981 and 2015, with a particular focus on the distribution of these games across platforms, genres, and historical eras over time.
