History and more-than-human agency in videogames

This article highlights how digital games and digital game scholarship can contribute to ongoing theoretical debates about more-than-human agency in history. Inspired by ecological theory, the more-than-human is a level of analysis in which objects – and historical actors – are neither fully natural nor human-made, but rather assemblages of mutually influential human and non-human elements. Decentering human agency in this fashion is not easily accomplished by mainstream history. In this article, I will argue that digital games may help historians make sense of this expanded framework of perception. Game scholars have long highlighted the scholarly potential of such systems, be it by fostering agential flexibility in players, or acting as mesocosms with which to study real-world systems by proxy. In the first part of this paper, I will provide a literature overview showing some points of convergence between scholars of the Anthropocene and game experts. In the second part, I will discuss some examples of more-than-human historical agencies in games. Finally, I will introduce my upcoming game Galar, a historiography simulator which intends to discuss how written sources and scholarly history writing struggle with – and, ultimately, hinder – our appreciation of the more-than-human.