"Playing with the Past is a serious cultural contemplation on a media genre that forever changed the way a generations thinks. An engaging exploration into the way media engages and redefines history, Playing with the Past is a groundbreaking work in Media Studies and an essential text for the study of video games and the history of ideas." --C. Jason Smith, Professor of English, The City University of New York-LaGuardia, US

"Elliott and Kapell have gathered a remarkable collection of contributions-engaging deep issues about what history IS, and how one can present its issues in a vital contribution within contemporary studies. The scope is compendious, from Rome to Native America, from Japan to Colonial America; this book just might become the basis for up-to-the-minute narrative/historical/digital mediations, and should be of interest in the many fields of the superior college or university." --William G. Doty, Professor Emeritus, University of Alabama, US

"Playing with the Past is an innovative, lucid and engaging collection that strikes a number of carefully constructed and rewarding balances. The tone is both serious and playful. Its analysis and findings are simultaneously rigorous, illuminating and entertaining. Playing with the Past provides a neat summation of the previous work which has explored the relationship between digital games and their interaction with history as a foundation to establish, with great sophistication and clarity, the critical and conceptual terrain for the current and future debates." --Stephen McVeigh, Associate Professor, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University, UK

"Playing with the Past is a far-reaching volume, guiding readers through ancient civilizations, modern wars, and futures premised upon counterfactual pasts. In this reflexively-organized array of essays, game scholars will find both a primer on historiographic inquiry and a series of cogent analyses that are not simply conversant with issues driving the field but also bring new depth and insight to their examination." --Gerald Voorhees, Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Communication, University of Waterloo, Canada

"The individual contributors handle their parts in this ambitious program well. Each chapter involves a kind of ethnographic exploration of its particular game space, often with first-person reports (though not always) about the game, coupled with close readings of the code itself [...] the chapters fall easily within the narratology or ludology folds as understood from game studies." --Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Playing with the Past is accessible for general readers, especially since it provides a wide range of examples of games and how they simulate history. It is also a good choice as a textbook in introductory courses on games engaging with history and in courses in public history." --Jan Frode Hatlen, Department of Historical Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Journal of Design History

Matthew Wilhelm Kapell has graduate degrees in biological anthropology and history as well as a Ph.D. in American Studies. He has published on genetics, urban history, African colonial history, as well as four books in film and television studies and has taught extensively in the United States and Great Britain.

Andrew B.R. Elliott is a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lincoln, UK, where he teaches cultural studies, media studies, history, film, and television. He is the author of Remaking the Middle Ages (2010) which concerns itself with authenticity, violence, and a semiotic reconstruction of the medieval period.