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ABSTRACT
Sustained academic engagement with the colonial and imperial implications of videogames is a relatively recent phenomenon. This article employs the case study of Medieval II: Total War’s 2006 simulation of the battle of Otumba to interpret player interactivity with grand narrative formations dating back to the sixteenth century. The steady revitalization of imperial apologism, colonial violence, and commemorations of heroic action suggest the complexity of player reception of gamified history and the importance of games to not only popular culture, but also historical memory and constructions of identity.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The acknowledgement of biography as a valid form of historical writing was a new feature of the genre, arriving on the wings of Renaissance Humanism. Though undergoing structural changes during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, biography still carried implications of narration for the sake of moral instruction (Momigliano Citation1971, 2, 11, 55–7, 63).
2. Prince Phillip (later Phillip II) and the Council of the Indies orchestrated the ban. We do not know precisely why, but we can safely assume it involved the controversy of Gómara’s intervention. The ban’s effectiveness is suspect, given that the text continued to be printed in Castilla until 1555, on the bases of sustained intellectual responses, and that a raid to roundup the text occurred in 1566, a full 13 years after the ban (Roa-de-la-Carrera Citation2005, 56–60; Lewis Citation1983, 317–29). Cortés’s letters also circulated widely despite censorship (Restall Citation2003, 14).
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Notes on contributors
Diego Luis
Diego Luis’s research centers on early-modern trans-Pacific connections, specifically the movement of free and enslaved Asians from the Spanish Philippines to New Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries.