Jeux vidéo, Pratiques plastiques contemporaines et Histoire(s)

Video Games, Contemporary Visual Arts and History(ies)

Sous la direction de / Edited by
Emmanuelle Jacques - Luciano Gallinari

This Special Issue concerning the representations of History within contemporary videoludic and artistic practices, originated from a research seminar held on 16 June 2023 at the RIRRA21 laboratory of Paul Valéry University, Montpellier, in partnership with the Institute for the History of Mediterranean Europe of the National Research Council in Cagliari, Italy. The call for papers sought to interrogate how and why History has become a central concern for the cultural industries, specifically the video game industry. Our point of departure was the observation that History—and military history in particular—has consistently been a favoured subject within the realm of board games.

In the contemporary landscape, History provides rich and diverse socio-societal panoramas through the iconic representations found in video game universes. Digital artistic media reproduce the dominant values of a neoliberal economy: fluid, limitless, and gamified. They constitute a space where all boundaries are deconstructed—those between the real and the virtual, truth and reality, the serious and the playful, and between Macro-History and Micro-history(ies).... Thanks to technology, anyone can now engage with history as it unfolds, rewrite it and, above all, shape it according to their imagination. Playing with history, disguising it, wandering through it and appropriating it for the sake of petty narcissistic pleasures seems to delight the postmodern mind, which uses alternate history to imagine itself as timeless