Jeremiah McCall’s Historical Problem Space framework has largely been proposed to help educators and historians analyze games. Today, inspired by a conversation with fellow game scholar and friend Jeremiah McCall, I want to talk about the ‘Historical Problem Space’ (HPS) and our design of our upcoming prototype featuring Marina (also known as La Malinche) as a playable character. I’ve taken on the exciting task of sharing the inner workings of how our developers and historians are collaborating to create a super cool scholarship-informed game! I’m Tamika, a PhD candidate studying the representation of history in video games, and Community Lead and Historical Game Designer for the Dream of Darkness team. Hello everyone! This is the first of a series of blog posts about how the Dream of Darkness team are applying scholarly research and concepts in our game design. Tamika, OP: Can the Historical Problem Space framework help us make better history games? Purple text = Jeremiah’s second round of comments The parts of the post and the order they were drafted, for those interested in the archaeology of the text, work like this.īlue text = Jeremiah’s first comments on the original post

Both Tamika and I welcome further conversations on this, so please reach out to us with questions and comments So what we have is, we think, an interesting discussion of ideas and a continued exploration of how developers (in addition to those studying historical games) might use the Historical Problem Space framework ( McCall, 2020) as an analytical tool for historical game development. So with that in mind, and the pleasure of exploring this topic for any synergistic insights we or others might developed, I wrote some interlinear comments to Tamika’s post to continue the discussion, and Tamika wrote some additional comment to turn this into a dialogue. Friend and HGS colleague currently working with Dream of Darkness, Tamika Glouftsis, wrote an insightful blog in April Can the Historical Problem Space framework help us make better history games? I was excited to see her thoughts, not least of all because I’m considering a book project specifically on using the HPS framework to guide game design for students (in the form of interactive texts, and physical boardgame design) a guide that, hopefully, would have value for teacher-designers and historical game developers too.

Space game series discussion