Imersão, narrativas e representações históricas no videogame: reconstruindo uma cidade morta: a flânerie por Bagdá do século IX

Abstract

The proposal of our master's thesis is to think about, study, analyze, and communicate History through video games, investigating the specificities of the medium and interpreting its historical narratives and representations, as well as exploring the possibilities, potentials, impacts, challenges, and dilemmas related to the idea of knowing, learning, thinking, and debating History while playing video games. The theoretical foundation of the research follows the Game Studies field, also incorporating references from historians and communication theorists to examine games from an academic perspective and as a communicative medium for transmitting scientific knowledge through their multiple narrative forms. Therefore, one of the key themes to be explored throughout the thesis is immersion in open-world games and how the player engages with the simulated representation of a different historical period. In this way, we will discuss the role of video games in society and their potential cultural impacts, in the construction of language, and in the dissemination of historical narratives. After this theoretical approach, we conduct a case study of the game Assassin's Creed Mirage (Ubisoft, 2023), set in 9th-century Baghdad, then the capital of the Islamic empire, within a historically significant context for scientific methods and the social, cultural, political, and artistic developments across the world.