The specter of the virtual: historical video games as complex public history

Abstract This article explores historical video games as a system modeling medium, and how they provide space for a new form of historical agency that thrives on spatial navigations and intense interactions. The counterfactuals embedded in game designs offer alternative narrative structures for players to think and to imagine the past differently. Such shared immersion in the analog-digital remediation foster a diverse array of “collectives” and expand the traditional scope of collective memory thus historical consciousness. Drawing on a series of video games based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms as illustrative cases, this study argues that historical video games have emerged as complex public history in Asia.