Unreal pasts, playful presents: history and fantasy in games and media

Dr Esther Wright is a Senior Lecturer in Digital History at Cardiff University. She researches historical video game promotion and branding, and the way that games interact with understandings of “historical authenticity”. Her first monograph, Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity, was published by De Gruyter in 2022. She is also co-editor of Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth and Violence in the Video Game West (with John Wills), published by Oklahoma University Press in 2023. Esther is co-founder and convenor of the Historical Games Network – a space for collaboration between researchers, game makers, and cultural heritage professionals.

Dr Chris Kempshall is a public historian specialising in transnational experiences of allied warfare and modern media representations of history. He is the author of several academic works, including The First World War in Computer Games (Palgrave, 2015) and British, French, and American Relations on the Western Front 1914–1918 (Palgrave, 2018). His book The History and Politics of Star Wars: Death Stars and Democracy was published by Routledge in 2022. He also co-authored the officially licensed Star Wars Battles that Changed the Galaxy (DK, 2021) and is the sole author of Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire (DK, 2024).

Fruzsina Pittner is a video game artist and independent scholar with a PhD in transmedia storytelling, creative practice and adaptations of historical narratives from the University of Dundee. Her research interests include creative practice for education, postcolonial theory, science fiction and fantasy, and historical games; while her practice focuses on comics, illustrations and (sometimes interactive) stories. She currently works as a UI artist in the games industry.

Mimi Markham is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, in partnership with the Imperial War Museums. Her research explores the role of the fantastic – from folklore and fairy tales to high fantasy – in soldier and civilian responses to the First and Second World Wars. She is particularly interested in how imaginative media, like video games, can make history more accessible by connecting audiences emotionally with the past. Mimi shares her passion for public history and historical storytelling online, where she explores how the past is reimagined across literature, games and popular culture. She is especially interested in how digital platforms can open conversations about history beyond academic spaces

Dr Tim Peacock is a Lecturer in History & War Studies, and Director/co-founder of Glasgow University’s Games and Gaming Lab (UofGGamesLab). He leads up to 35 researchers, interns and software programmers as Principal Investigator for funded research and educational cross-disciplinary gaming innovation projects. His research interests include nuclear history, space history and space security, games, AI and politics. Whether analysing ways that history is represented in games to running tabletop policy exercises on flooding crises or transforming heritage sites into video games, he seeks to help people make their

ideas fly like bicycles! He has worked with organisations from the United Nations to St Giles’ Cathedral.