This research seeks to analyze how the presence of historical elements in digital games affects how players operating under the Games as a Service (GaaS) paradigm evaluate and critique these games in online discourse. By examining two online sites associated with the Crusader Kings III community, this work addresses how community notions of historicity, historical accuracy, and culturally-situated rhetorical authority structure community critiques of the game. This research also has implications for broader analyses of digital game communities, where the historicizing discourse identified here may be introduced by players to serve political, ideological, and cultural aims.

This research attempts to extend established broad typologies of digital badging (and its comparable game design patterns such as achievements and trophies) into a domain-specific area of scholarly inquiry–specifically that of historical games. By examining an initial set of historical games and their achievements within the combined context of extant theory on historical game studies, this work builds a typology of historical engagement via coding game achievements; this approach aims to provide insights into how these extra-ludic systems are used to influence historical engagement during play, and the degree to which specific games and game developers are invested in guiding historical inquiry via play.

Historical game studies is a nascent field formed around the study of games which engage with discourses about history and the past. Beginning with a prominent object of study in wider games scholarship, Sid Meier's Civilization, historical game studies gradually cohered around several key discursive threads anchored by a small set of focal texts. Out of these core texts, historical game studies developed its own metalanguage, critical discourses, and taxonomic structures which enabled a broad cross-pollination across scholarship engaging with games and the past. As a distinct field closely associated with wider game studies scholarship, historical game studies affords games scholars numerous methodological and theoretical contributions which aid in studying digital games; it also represents a valuable interdisciplinary scholarly community connecting games scholars with research in history, education, heritage studies, and numerous other disciplinary spaces. As such, this historiographic review of historical game studies is intended to highlight the evolution of scholarship in the field, presenting key scholarly works, discursive shifts, objects of study, field sub-groupings, and theoretical contributions in order to facilitate further interdisciplinary scholarship oriented around history and digital games.