Digitale Spiele mit historischem Hintergrund sind eine populärkulturelle Remedialisierungsform der Bezugnahme auf ‹Geschichte›, die in der Geschichtswissenschaft immer noch umstritten ist. Für die Frage, ob historisches Lernen anhand von Videospielen sinnvoll möglich sein kann, bedürfen zwei Punkte besonderer Aufmerksamkeit. Erstens müssen die Geschichtswissenschaften sich in der Auseinandersetzung mit digitalen Spielen vor pauschalen Urteilen hinsichtlich der Repräsentationslogiken ‹des Historischen› in diesem Medienformat hüten. Weder sind digitale Spiele hier prinzipiell andersartig als akademische Historiographie, noch können sie umstandslos an deren Massstäben gemessen werden. Zweitens muss eine präzise Definition sowohl des anzustrebenden didaktischen Nutzens eines Einsatzes von digitalen Spielen, als auch der Spielformate, die Möglichkeiten hierzu bieten können, erfolgen. Hierzu muss die Fokussierung der Debatte auf eine Dichotomie Blockbuster/Serious Games überwunden werden. Für einen Erfolg versprechenden didaktischen Einsatz von digitalen Spielen zur Geschichtsvermittlung müssen die Bezüge, die digitale Spiele auf den Referenzbereich ‹des Historischen› setzen, so gestaltet werden, dass sie über das Spiel hinausweisende Angebote machen, ohne ihre spielinterne Funktion zu destabilisieren.
This article focuses on how Jesuit missionaries to Japan during the sixteenth century recurred on notions of the devil as their primary enemy. They took these notions from contemporary late medieval and early modern Catholic demonology and configured them according to local circumstances, reconfiguring the concept of the devil to make sense of their environments. Similar developments as in Japan took place in the contemporary Jesuit mission fields of South America, but yielded slightly different results. As different ways to conceptually reframe the devil were directly connected to the question of his presence in the everyday world – was he a transcendent or an imminent force of evil, and how did he manifest himself and make use of his respective attributes? – this research is guided by the analytical concepts of transcendence and immanence.
Video games that feature historical content – what I term ‘historicizing’ video games – often come in series. Civilization (I – V), Age of Empires (I – IV), Anno (5 pts.), Monkey Island (5 pts.), Total War (7 pts.), Assassin’s Creed (I – IV), to name but a few, are heavily serialized in that they all, save for their respective first incarnations, point continuously to the other titles in their series’, be it on a structural level or with regard to content. That they do so has many reasons that are totally unconnected with everything they represent, economic ones foremost, but also the need to meet genre- and audience-imposed expectations as well as technical limitations. This aside, given that players who liked one in a bundle are likely to play the rest also, the mere factuality of the series carries implications for the content worth mentioning. First, semiotically such a set of game titles is aptly described in Deleuze/Guattari-terms as an instance of the paranoid-despotic regime of signs, where signs signify nothing but other signs, bound up in an endless virtual cycle. And second, philosophically this may be taken as a prime instance of the Nietzschean ‘eternal recurrence of all things’. Both readings converge in the implication that as these games’ series seemingly stage ‘history’, they unlink history and temporality, installing a chron-alogical framing. Thus, they effectively replave in themselves any factual history as the concept is traditionally understood in Western discourse since the middle of the 19th century with affective historicity. In this, they may reflect (as other media featuring historical content as literature, film, TV, radio, comics, re-enactment, ‘living history’, LARP etc.) popular demands not satisfied by academia, or foreshadow a conceptual transition as part of the digital revolution. Time will tell – if this will still be possible, then.
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