by Jeremiah McCall & Eugen Pfister
This is the first in what will be a series of dialogues with game studies scholar Jeremiah McCall. It was first published on Jeremiahs Blog, here. I have recently been particularly interested in the text format of the dialog, also because it is so rarely used in an academic context, even though it is actually the foundation of research. I knew from Jeremiah that he had previously tried out a similar format with Adam Chapman, which I enjoyed reading. The following is a first part of our conversation that we had over six months in a Google Doc format. More are to follow.
Eugen : So let’s start like that: I am very excited that we are now trying this here. I’ve been waiting for a suitable occasion to do something together for years. (J: Me too!) So let’s talk about our “stuff”: History and Games. Now is in fact a particularly good time in my academic biography for this discussion. I’ve been researching digital games and history for I think about ten years now: history in digital games, the history of digital games and now increasingly also the philosophy of history and digital games. From my school education in a French Lycée as well as my university education in Austria, France, Germany and Italy, I was trained to look first for a “gain in knowledge” and to develop a pertinent research question in advance of an investigation. In other words, research is supposed to make sense, to help us better understand ourselves in contrast to just describing what we see. Never stop asking questions.
“Let’s talk about our ‘stuff’: History and Games.” A Gaming the Past dialog by Jeremiah McCall and Eugen Pfister (Part I) weiterlesen“The next step should be to ask myself why there is history in games at all.”
