If you thought making a historical game was as simple as making a historical game, you— just the same as we once were — are wrong. For just as much time we spend on historical research, we spend reading up on how to make a video game effective. “Effectiveness” is not something most people think about when considering video games, but think about how frustrating it would be to continually lose a game with no hope of victory, or try and figure out an unintuitive control scheme with no feedback?

Texts like the ones below guided us through video game theory (who knew there was such a thing, right?), overcoming potential issues of “ineffectiveness” like the ones mentioned above and making sure that our game is not only one worth playing, but one worth enjoying.

Texts

• Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Video Games. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
• ——. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games. MIT Press, 2010.
• Coltraine, James and Stephen Ramsay. “Can Video Games Be Humanities Scholarship?” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. Edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
• Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. 2nd ed, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007.
• McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Penguin, 2011.