Game Never Over: Replaying History in Interactive Digital Simulation

This article looks at a novel digital format for historical-literary research: executable rules for a computer-based interactive social simulation. This kind of historical writing imposes a different set of evaluative criteria on its intended outcomes, which share similar ambitions with the classical humanities essay but whose mode of consumption is closer to that of video games. In this context, play emerges as a humanities method rather than an object of study. Inasmuch as user performance determines the progression of the narrative, iterability becomes a crucial feature of 'reading' interactive simulations whose full expressivity can only be captured through replay.