This paper will combine insights of Game Studies and Nationalism Studies to illustrate how the elements that conform Civilization V incentivise and enable players to re‐enact a narrative that portrays essentialised nation‐states as the only relevant actors in the past, present, and future of humankind. Although globalization and nationalism are often framed as opposing forces, this is hardly the case here. This video game was marketed globally by an American company, but it evokes Spanish, Japanese, and English nationalist narratives and imagery. This article fills part of this gap by analysing the way in which the historical strategy game Civilization V represents the Past and what role it gives nations within historical processes. These findings indicate the importance of including perspectives from gaming communities to support other forms of analysis in order to make rigorous observations about the impact of digital games on popular history.Īlthough the last two decades have seen a vast increase in studies that analyse banal nationalism in media, there is one medium that has largely been ignored in these discussions: video games. These negotiations are made tangible through the production and sharing of paratexts that remix the official history of the games to include other perspectives developed through counterfactual imaginations. The shared paratexts demonstrate how positions are negotiated in relation to the ‘official’ version of history presented in the games. The relevant practices of players of history strategy games are illustrated with examples from the official and unofficial communities of the Paradox Interactive games Europa Universalis II and Victoria: Empire Under the Sun. It is in these counterfactual communities that players negotiate their individual experience with their knowledge of the history that is presented in the games that they play, indicating that the relationship between digital games, players and history is highly contextual. In contrast, this article examines these games from the perspective of the player’s experience of play in relation to a wider gaming community. Previous work has pointed to various affordances and constraints in the representation of history, based on the framing of the game interface, the alignment of goals with certain strategies and textual criticism of the contents of the games. The genre of history strategy games is a crucial area of study because of what is at stake in the representation of controversial aspects of history in popular culture. Developing Apperley's theory, the results show that gaming can be a very resilient activity, given the right circumstances. The results underline how an individual's gaming does not happen in isolation, but takes place in the confines of everyday life, shaped by factors outside the individual's control. The situation impacted individuals and families differently, being beneficial to some and detrimental to others, contingent on other aspects of respondents' lives. The results illuminate the ways in which gaming was situated in everyday life both during and before the COVID-19 restrictions, and how the pandemic and its associated restrictions disrupted, reinforced, and reconfigured the everyday rhythms of gaming. The study draws on a thematic analysis of qualitative data (N = 201) collected in April 2020, which is explored through the lens of Apperley's (2010) theory of gaming rhythms. This qualitative study examines how the spring 2020 COVID-19 restriction measures impacted adults' gaming in Finland.
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