Engines of Agency and Affect: A Model for Interactive Histories

This thesis presents a framework for interactive histories that presents an argument for using interactive media (principally, games) as a form of historical writing. It argues that when historical knowledge is embedded within an interactive structure, it is as a historical problem space consisting of game and narrative mechanics. It provides a library of historical and digital humanities methodologies that allows a historian to derive historical aesthetics and agencies from their historical research, then adapt their knowledge as game and narrative mechanics. In doing so, the historian also adopts the practices of a game designer; they become a “developer-historian”. When players engage their agency with game and narrative mechanics, they encounter the designer’s historical-rhetorical claims about the nature of historical reality. By interrogating these claims, they are brought “within the circle” of historical and ethnographic practice, and expand their historical imagination and understanding.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Master's

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor dc:publisher

Carleton University

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Chapman, Noah Ryan

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright © 2023 the author(s). Theses may be used for non-commercial research, educational, or related academic purposes only. Such uses include personal study, distribution to students, research and scholarship. Theses may only be shared by linking to the Carleton University Institutional Repository and no part may be copied without proper attribution to the author; no part may be used for commercial purposes directly or indirectly via a for-profit platform; no adaptation or derivative works are permitted without consent from the copyright owner.

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

10.22215/etd/2023-15725

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:carleton.scholaris.ca:20.500.14718/40982