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Record W7139135865 · doi:10.22024/unikent/01.02.113458

Examining Perspective in Historical Games

2025· article· en· W7139135865 on OpenAlex
Alastair Joseph Binns

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueKent Academic Repository (University of Kent) · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDigital Games and Media
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersMcGill UniversityRobin Hood Foundation
KeywordsPerspective (graphical)Video gameInterpretation (philosophy)Historical thinkingNarrativeRepresentation (politics)Context (archaeology)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

“Perspective” is a commonly used term in video game discourse, however its application to historical games encompasses multiple different interpretations – namely technical, historical and authorial – each with their own subtle influences upon how history may be explored and interpreted within the video game medium. In particular, the effects of contrasting authorial perspectives upon attendant technical or historical perspectives and issues of historical interpretation within video games has been underacknowledged, to the potential detriment of understanding historical video games within the wider context of the gaming medium. This thesis will explore perspective in historical video games within a widereaching discussion of historical representation within gaming, exploring issues of historical iconography, simplified narrative interpretations of historical actors as “heroes” or “villains”, the emphasis of historical conflict scenarios to suit gameplay interactions, incidents of political controversy surrounding the representation of marginalised demographic communities within historical contexts, and interactions between video games and the popular concept of “historical accuracy”. By examining these interactions between contrasting technical, historical and authorial perspectives, this thesis aims to illustrate fundamental limitations of the video game medium as a historical format, to facilitate greater understanding of the relationships between video games and historical subjects and identify opportunities for utilising video games as a means of historical interaction. Consequently, the capacity of video games to engage with historical phenomena should be reinterpreted to accommodate these inherent limitations of games as an historical medium. An alternative authorial perspective of historical games offered by this thesis is a comparison between historical games and historical re-enactment, illustrated by practical comparisons between the experiences of engaging with history via these two media. By drawing these comparisons, more nuanced examination of historical games can be undertaken within a wider context of participatory historical media, alongside existing comparisons to entertainment media such as film and television.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.642
Threshold uncertainty score0.458

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.261
Teacher spread0.238 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it